Creating Content

Now, when I was just getting started with my online business, creating content was the furthest thing from my mind.

I thought that creating content meant creating a digital product to sell and I planned to be an Affiliate Marketer. So, I could simply promote other people’s products without creating content.

Boy was I wrong. You still need a lot of content when you’re an affiliate marketer.

Here’s a short list, a really short list:

Product Reviews (Written or Video)
Blog Articles
InfoGraphics
Lead Magnets
Bonuses
Email Followups

So, now that we agree that you need to produce content, both as a product creator and as an affiliate, let’s move on to actually creating content for your business.

Get Clear About Your Purpose

Before you even think about writing one word of any piece of content, do the following:

Define the purpose of the content. (Lead magnet? Paid product? Drive traffic? Build relationships with existing leads? Convert prospects to customers? Sell products on the backend? Etc.)
Determine exactly what you want readers/viewers to do when they finish consuming the content. (Buy a product? Join your mailing list? Join your social media networks? Share your content? Pick up the phone and call you? Etc.)
Decide what sort of content will best serve your purpose. (Text, audio, video, or even a live event like a webinar? Article, report, eBook, eCourse, membership site, home study course, physical product, etc.?)
Develop a detailed outline. Be sure to research to find out what subtopics to include in your content.

Creating Content For All Occasions

Make a plan for all the content you need to create and how you intend to use this content to grow your business. Specific pieces include:

Content to drive traffic. This includes social media posts, blog posts, guest posts, content optimized for the search engines, and more.
Content to attract or convert leads. This includes lead magnets, webinars, videos posted on YouTube.com and more.
Content to build relationships or build your brand. This includes autoresponder emails, blog posts, social media posts, and more. It also includes joining discussions on other peoples’ platforms (such as their Facebook groups).
Content to sell. This includes tripwire products, core offers, upsells, cross-sells, backend products and bonus products. This may come in a variety of formats, including digital (downloadable) products, physical products, and hybrid products (which are part downloadable and part physical products). This includes text products, videos, audios, live events (webinar, coaching, consulting, etc.)
Content to help your customers. This includes customer service FAQs, knowledge base documents, troubleshooting documents, installation instructions, copy and paste content for your customer service team to use to answer common inquiries, explainer videos, website tours, and more.

In other words, develop a plan to fill your sales funnel with products and content to help attract and convert leads.

TIP: Don’t plan a single product at a time. Instead, develop your entire funnel and supporting content at once so that every piece works together to cross-sell and promote every other piece in your funnel.

Create, Acquire or Outsource Content

There are multiple ways to create or acquire content, including:

Create the content yourself. This includes writing text content, creating videos, doing webinars, creating podcasts, etc.
Recruit joint venture partners to “crowdsource” the content. You can interview people on a webinar or have them write answers to a question via text. You can also have them share articles or tips that you compile into one product.
Hire a freelance writer to create the content. A great option which frees up your time to focus on marketing your business.
Purchase the private label rights license to high quality content. Another great option, as it saves you both time and money. (See www.LicensingVault.com for an example of what high quality content looks like.)
Use ChatGPT or another bot to create an outline and maybe even a draft for you.

You may use any or all of these methods when creating content for your business.

Convert Existing Content

You don’t need to create content from scratch. Instead, you can reuse, repurpose and recycle your existing content to create new content. This includes:

Breaking down larger products (such as ebooks) into articles.
Compiling articles to create reports (lead magnets, products, etc.)
Converting a report into an ecourse.
Splintering a product to create a lead magnet or even a tripwire product.
Turning text into multimedia content (videos, audios, infographics, slide share presentations, etc).
Turning multimedia content into text (transcripts).
Converting digital content to create physical products, or vice versa.
Using an ecourse to create a fixed-term membership site.
Turning a tips article into a series of Twitter posts.

And so on. These are just a few ideas to get you started thinking about how to reuse your existing content.

Crafting Engaging Content

Whether you’re creating new content or repurposing existing content, you need to ensure that it’s engaging and will keep your readers hooked. This includes:

Crafting an attention-getting, benefit-driven headline.
Writing using a conversational, friendly tone.
Injecting humor into the content (“edutaining” readers – educate while you entertain them).
Arousing curiosity in the title and/or the content itself to keep people reading.
Telling stories, which push emotional buttons and make the content more memorable.
Using emotionally laden words or imagery to draw people into the content.
Keeping the content centered on the reader. (Use words like “you” far more often than words like “I.”)
Tell readers what’s in it for them if they keep reading (the benefits).
Create multi-part content and build anticipation for upcoming segments.
Insert graphics into the content to make it more visually appealing.
Add value to the content by inserting tools such as templates, worksheets, action plans and similar items.
Increase the value of the content by aiming it at expert users, converting it to video, or even turning it into a physical product.
Using short sentences and paragraphs, along with plenty of white space, to make the content easy to read.

Writing Faster, Easier, Better

Create effective content even faster and easier with these tips:

Create outlines. The more detailed your outline, the easier it will be to write (since the “thinking” will be all done).
Research using credible sources. Double check all facts with multiple credible sources (such as scholarly articles).
Write first, edit later. This will make the writing go faster.
Build swipe files. This will inspire you when you get stuck while creating titles, stories, openers, benefits, video scripts and more.
Use templates. This is another good way to write faster. (See www.UnfairAdvantageCheatSheets.com)
Block out distractions. Make your phone, internet, TV and other distractions inaccessible, if need be.
Engage some sort of time management to increase your focus. You can see my recommendations here.

Conclusion

You can’t get around the fact that you need a lot of content to grow your business. But you can make content creation faster, easier and more profitable using the tips you just learned!