 the bright lights. Okay, well, welcome and good morning. You can all hear me okay? Okay, I have four, so I'm used to yelling. So if I get a little bit too loud, that's why. My name is Anthony Miyazaki, and I don't have a clicker, so I'll have to keep on walking back and forth over here to the other side. But before I start talking about the topic here, a couple of years ago, I actually started out with a series of five questions that I asked the audience. And so I want to go back and kind of revisit those five questions. And then we'll talk about the topic, which is how to build content that's going to help your brand, your personal brand, your professional brand, your business brand. These five questions are, who am I? Who are you? Why are you here? Why am I here? And then what are we going to do about it? So let's start at the beginning, who am I? And really, and this is as I kind of was alluded to at the beginning, who cares? Honestly, this whole point about people talking about their titles and their positions and all these kind of things, and I live in an academic world where people love to talk about their PhDs and all this. And honestly, it doesn't really matter. In fact, this is kind of my mantra, and that is that titles of experience are not important. What matters really is our ability to help other people achieve their goals and whether or not we're actually going to do that. All that really matters today is whether over the next 25 minutes or so, I'm able to give you something that helps you. And at that point, you really wouldn't even care who I was. All that matters is what can I do to deliver to you? So with that said, let's move on to the more important question, and that is who are you? So I'm going to ask you a couple of questions here by a show of hands. Please put your hands up if this describes you. Who here is an entrepreneur? Okay, so entrepreneurs in the audience, that's good. Who here's a media person? A couple of them, why not? Yeah, I heard that on the front. Who here's a marketer? Okay, some there. Okay, well, here's a deal. If you didn't put your hand up for all three of those questions, then you're either lying or it's too early on the Miami Saturday morning that you aren't actually thinking clearly. So first of all, let me go back here. If you do anything to create anything that somehow helps you in any way make money, then you're an entrepreneur. So one more time, who here is an entrepreneur? Because you're all entrepreneurs. And if you have one of these things, a cell phone or maybe a laptop or a desktop or an iPad or a tablet or something like that, that means and you've ever communicated using those devices, then you actually are a media person in here. Who here is a media person? That's right, you're all media people. And you know where this is leading, right? If you've ever tried to convince anybody of anything, tried to change their attitude or their behavior, tried to make sure that they understood about your expertise and how they should hire you or how they should make sure they pay you for something or even tried to change their minds about a particular topic, then that means then that you are a marketer. So who here is a marketer? We should see it because you're all marketers. And it works. Thank you so much. You're awesome. All right, now if I just figure out which button to push, there we go. So the next question then is why are you here? Now, it's a beautiful day out there. And there's a beach not very far away. And you're inside here, listening to me of all things, right? Which means that you're kind of strange people to start with. But the real question is why are you here and you're you are here, you're here at WordCamp for a reason. And you're here because you want to learn, you want to grow, you want to develop, you want to be able to inform other people and teach other people about what your expertise and what you do, you want to try to create, and you want to share and what is it you want to share? You want to share not the news and EWS, but you want to share the cues, KEWS, and that's your knowledge, your expertise, your wisdom, and even your story. That's why we create content. And that's what we use content for is to share all that with other people and somehow start to develop a communication, start to develop some type of communication stream and a dialogue. So why am I here? It's a really good question. I'm here because of the massive paycheck that David gives me. Exactly, right. So right, we don't get any paychecks for that. Why am I here? I'm here because I want to be here because I want to help you achieve your goals. It's what I do. I'm here because I do really want to help you to share and to teach and express and inform other people. I want to help you do this. And how do I help you do that? I help you do that by helping you to create the content, the brand building content that's both meaningful and memorable. So the last question here then is what are we going to do about it? What we'll do is we'll talk first about the different problems or difficulties or obstacles or whatever it is that comes to building content. We'll go through five of those. Then we'll talk about the ideas, solutions and all that. And then finally, we'll have a little bit of time for some Q&A. I'll make sure I talk a little bit faster so that we can get through this. And so people always ask me if I've had my coffee in the morning. The answer is no, because imagine what would happen if I did. So first, though, before we talk about content, building content, let's define what we mean by content. And so first of all, anything that you write or you say or that you post or you tweet, etc., that we can count as content. And it does take some time and effort to develop that and some creativity. Also, whether it's in a video format, audio format, written format, it doesn't really matter. I mean, hugs could be content, I guess. And so the idea here is that you've got all these options out here that you can do with content. Well, what type of content you should develop is brand building content. And so that's content that will somehow help to communicate what I call the four E's. So the four E's are right here, we'll start off. So it's expertise, it's ethics, it's effectiveness, and it's efficiency. So by expertise, what I mean is that you have to communicate that you can do the job and probably that you can do more than just the job because it may be, your clients know this, it may be that the job actually starts to morph into something else. And it's always nice to know that the person you hired to build the house can now actually do more than what you asked because now later on you decide you have something else you have to ask. That means I have five minutes left? Seriously? I thought we started at 9.40 is the next one after. Oh, okay, all right. Okay, we'll be fine then. I may go into Q&A just a little bit. Ethics, we want to make sure that there's no bad surprises. You don't want to sit there and say you're going to do SEO for someone and do some kind of funky black hat stuff and all of a sudden they're banned from Google for a while. They may need to make sure that you're ethical. You have to be effective. Not only can you do the stuff, but will you do the stuff? Do you actually get the job done? And then finally, efficiency. Not just the speed and cost you've worked, but there's the elegance of it as well. You know if you're a coder that you can code something and even if you can do it quickly, you can type quickly or speak quickly. The idea is that you have to make sure that what you've done is elegant, like a mathematical problem that it's not using as many lines of code that you might necessarily need if you're not very elegant in what you do. So this idea of defining content then means you have to build that brand content. Okay, I'll flip through these things. It's just a matter of demonstrating those four E's, the expertise, the ethics, the effectiveness and the efficiency. Bless you. So the top five challenges then. Number one challenge is that the idea here is that we're concerned about is knowing what content you're going to actually build to deliver to your various audiences because you need to know what they want. Number two is being creative. It's difficult sometimes to be creative. When you're doing everything else, it's hard to be creative to build content. Number three, content takes time to develop. Number four, that perfecting content takes even more time. And then finally, the last part of that is that you, oops, let me go back there, is getting people to see and to share your content. So these are like the big five that I've noticed that people are concerned about when it comes to developing content, especially those people that are in smaller businesses. But the big businesses struggle with this as well, I promise you. So let's go through the solutions for these top five. The first one, knowing what content your audiences want. There's kind of two steps to this. The first step in this is an important, all important step, and that is you have to know your audiences. You have to know their goals, their desires. You have to understand their needs and wants. You have to understand the people that they care about, the people they follow, the people that they admire. And by doing that, start to get an idea of what they would want to hear and to see and to listen to so that then you're developing content that they care about. The number two step, this is a really weird one. You have to ask them. Okay, all you have to do is ask. You say, what kind of content do you want? I love watching Roberto Blake's videos, if you've ever seen him online, because he's always asking people, hey, in the comment box below, let me know what you want to hear, and then he'll go out and he'll make one video for one person. Because usually what happens is if one person asks, there's other people out there who want to know as well, right? It's like in a classroom. One person raises their hand and asks the question, but there's many other people who have that same question. So ask them, what is it you want to know? No, if you only have an audience of three people, ask them what those three, those things that are that you do. And I am going to go into my time for the questions and answers, okay, just you know. Okay, so just he doesn't grab the hook and pull me off. The next thing is, is having creative to create new ideas. How do you do that? How are you creative? Well, first of all, you're already creating content every day. Every time you send an email, you send a tweet, you respond to somebody, you talk to somebody in the hallway out there, you're creating content. And so you're doing it all the time. And so really it's not as, it doesn't take as much creative work as you really think. The other thing is that ideas are everywhere. You just have to capture them. Two years ago at a, when I was talking here at WordCamp Miami, at, during the Q&A, someone had asked some question about, you know, hey, you know, I get a lot of traffic on my website, but a lot of traffic in my social media, but I don't get as much traffic at my website. And as I was walking through the aisles, I said something like, well, you know, you have to think of, not think of yourself as a website, you have to think of yourself as a web presence. And then I thought, wow, I liked what I said. In fact, I said so much, I decided to make a video about it. And I thought, you know what, I'll make a short little one minute video, I call it the marketing minute, and I'll do that. And that was two years ago. And now, two years later, I've done a marketing minute video every single week, just by listening to what people say, responding to them and thinking, hey, I could do that. I walk around with three by five cards in my pocket all the time, and I write down the ideas once I hear them, even if they come out of my own mouth. Because I know I'll forget. Well, two years later, yeah, my YouTube channel is not huge or anything. It's got, but it's got about 6,200 followers now or subscribers. That's good. And it's got about 3 million views now. And that's good. And all because I listened to this someone, and I talked to someone back and forth, I got an idea and I wrote it down. That's all we have to do. Another thing, steal. Steal, steal, steal, steal, steal. There's a book called Steal Like an Artist by Austin Cleon. And the idea here is he's not saying you steal it word for word, everything that they have out there. What he's saying is that you get the ideas out there, that all artists really in the essence are stealing from someone else. They've got an idea, they take it, they formulate it in their own way. You can do that all the time. Go out there and see what someone else does and say, you know what, I think I can do better. Or, you know what, I think I can do worse. It's okay because only a few people are going to see your stuff and they may not have ever seen the other stuff. If you want to, give credit where it's due. Say, you know what, I heard this thing three years ago at WordCamp, Syed Balki had said something to me in a hallway one time and just recently in an Ask Me a Zaki video, I answered it and I referenced what he had said three years ago. So give credit where it's due. Finally, create dialogues with other people. You can go out there and find other people who are talking and about different things. Go ahead, reference them, talk to them, encourage them to have a debate back and forth, whether it's on Twitter or Instagram or on Facebook or whatever it is. Or even on your blog. Go out there, talk to them, maybe even get them to kind of have a little dialogue with you back and forth. Do kind of an interview online or an interview over email. There's all these things that you can do. Finally, focus all of that content on being both meaningful and memorable. Meaningful to your audiences because you know what they want and memorable because you do want them to actually remember what you do. In all my marketing minute videos, I always make sure at the very end that I have a little thing at the end, a little blurb, a little quote where I say that. And my hope is that maybe someone somewhere might take a little screen shot of that and say, hey, you know what? That's important to me. I'll keep that one little thing that kind of summarized what he said in the past 60 seconds. Content development, it does take time. We know that. But you can build effective or excuse me, efficient processes to take care of this. First of all, batch your content development. You hear this all the time. When I do my marketing minute videos, you might think, wow, that guy's awesome. He wakes up early in the morning on a Monday, gets dressed, puts on a nice shirt, sits in front of the camera, and he does this video. And then the next Monday, he does the same thing. No, I don't. What I do is I write several scripts at a time. And then at some point when I've got time, I sit down in front of the camera. I do the video, I stand up, I walk behind the camera, I change my shirt, I sit back down, mess my hair up a little bit, maybe move a book in the background. And that's what I do. And then the next video is there. And so I might do only two at a time or three at a time. I haven't gotten to the point where I'm good enough to do five at a time. But at some point I should do that because it saves me time to batch process. And I can batch process the filming, I can batch process the editing, and it works a lot better. You don't have to do everything different. And what I mean by this is you don't have to think, well last time I used the white background, I have to use the blue background, last time I used my chair and next time I'll stand up, you don't have to do that. In fact, I've used the same pretty much boring background for the same, for the past two years almost with the marking minute videos. And much that this may have my friends were like, please change that. And I said, well, I moved the book once on the bookshelf. And so that's not enough. But it doesn't matter. As long as you're creating content that somebody out there wants, then you're okay. Double, triple and quadruple. If you go back two years, that's what I talked about here at WordCamp. And the idea there is we're not talking about repurposing. Repurposing is when you take your content, you develop for one thing, and you twist it and wrangle it and try to squeeze it into another format. You don't want to do that. What you want to do is you want to think ahead and think, well, I know when I write a script for the marketing minute that I can take that same script and I can change it just ever so slightly. Instead of saying gonna, I'll say going to, and I'll take that whole script and I'll put it onto LinkedIn. And then I'll take the same thing maybe and I'll put it over there at Facebook. And the idea is taking maybe little pieces of it and using it for something else. Or writing a series of three videos and then realizing that those three can be combined together for a bigger video later on with minor adjustments. The idea is to always plan ahead and how you can kind of multi-purpose those types of things that you're doing. Use technology. I have friends that use Lightroom now for photographers that are saying, man, I can't believe how much I can do when I batch edit all that I do. And there's so many technological tools out there to help you with scheduling posts, scheduling tweets and all that kind of stuff, go out there and try to find the technology. And the last thing is get some help, which is probably what you're telling me I need to do. But when I say get some help, what I mean is is ask other people for their help. Maybe you're really good at writing, but someone else is really good at editing. And you say, you know what, can I write a few things for you and you edit a few things for me? Or teach me how to do it. Go out there and do that. Maybe you go out and you pay someone to help you do it. It's okay to do that and it's okay to admit that you don't know all the things that you're supposed to be doing. Number four, perfecting content. It takes even more time. I only have two things to say here on this. And number one is, don't be perfect. All right? There's a marking minute video out there where after we shot it, and I was all excited because it seemed like everything was good. The color was good. The voice was good. I felt like the script was good. I felt like the performance was good. And as I was looking at it, as we blew it up on the big screen on the Mac, all of a sudden I looked at it and there's a spot in the middle where a little bit of spittle comes out of my mouth and shoots across the screen. And I was like, no. No, I can't do it. I can't do it. I'll become a meme. You know, I don't want this. And after a while, it's like, you know what? Who cares? Who cares? Who's really going to notice it? Right? Well, now I know what you're going to do. You're going to be searching desperately for it. But I challenge you, go ahead. Find it. Find it somewhere. Take a little, take a little, make a little gift out of it, right? And then tweet it to me because I really don't care. It's not that big of a deal. Honestly, sometimes the lighting is not good, whatever else. I know I'm not Brad Pitt. I hate being in front of the camera, but the truth is it's okay. And why? Because we have anti-perfect infections. Let them show. Okay? It doesn't matter. There's so many people out there creating stuff that's just not that amazing. Finally, it doesn't do you any good to have all this expertise and be great at something if no one else knows what you do. So you have to make sure you let other people know about what you do and you have to make sure that they're not just going to see your content, but that they'll share it. Paid, orchestrated, and organic. Well, you know what? Organic, it's just, it's a beautiful fantasy. But it usually doesn't happen. You have to orchestrate things. You have to help make things happen out there. And maybe, just maybe, you might have to pay to get a little bit of your content out there in front of people so that they'll see it and then they'll like it so much now that they'll go ahead and they'll give it to other people. Co-brand your expertise. Find someone else who actually has a big following or who is doing well or who is starting to kind of increase their following out there and say, you know what? Can I do something with you? Can I do a video with you? Can I do a blog post with you? Can I do something where I can co-brand with you? And there's all sorts of ways you can do that and afterwards you can kind of talk to me. We can talk about ideas of how you can go out and find people. And most people are willing to do this with you. Cross-promote and all your channels but don't over-promote. Don't be one of those people that all you do is say, hey, go to my other channel and watch my stuff. No one wants to see that all the time. They want content at the moment where they are but every now and then it's OK to say, hey, you know what? Here's the other type of content that I have on this other channel. Create something shareable. The idea here with using social, the beauty of our world we have now is that we can actually go out there and create this concept that we've got something shareable that other people can see. If we have something that they can share, they'll share it and they'll build our audience for us. This is my share in YouTube. I just did this last night to show you. And it shows over time. And now it's like, I mean, 2,500 is probably not that much for two years. But for me, whatever, I'm happy about it. And the first but the first the beautiful part is for the first year, this is like a 30 day totals smoothing. But for the first year, it was only 800 or 700 or 800 shares. And then for the second year, it was about 1,800. And so I feel like, well, that's good. So whatever's happening, at least it's growing. And people are sharing it. So I feel good and positive that something's happening where people are sharing my content. And it makes me good. It makes me happy. And then finally, let's just kind of do a quick summary here. To build brand building content, you have to number one, you have to know your audiences. You have to capture the content that you're already creating on a daily basis. You're doing it all the time. You're doing it today. Build some efficient processes. I just saw some little spills go out of my mouth. You capture that. That's a gem. Be meaningful, memorable, and be shareable. Invest in promoting what you have out there. You truly have to invest not just with time and effort, but maybe even with money. And then don't take yourself too seriously and we'll just kind of end on this little note that when it comes to building content, production is more important than perfection. Okay, so I'm not going to move from one question or two questions, right? Two, two questions I've heard. Maybe I talk quickly. It can be three, some questions. I'll make sure that they're available. Yes, so that we can have those out there. Orchestrate, what I mean by that is that sometimes there's things you can do to, you know, most of the time we can just post something and see it out there and it's there. I think on the web right now, you can go out and find little gems of things. If you find some video that's actually pretty incredible and it's only got 12 views and you think what's happened there and I think what has to happen is you have to go out and try to share. You have to try to do things that will help you build a following and it's work. And some people feel like, well, that's not really right. I should just go ahead and just let it happen. Well, it doesn't just happen. Usually if you see people with a lot of subscribers, a lot of followers, a lot of views, it's because they've done something to try to make it happen. I try to separate orchestrated from the things I do out there to try to get my people to come follow me or to view my stuff, but it's not paid. So that's the difference that I do there. And there's different ways from different channels that I can do it. Another question real quick. Yes. Video at the top of the Build The Brand. I think it depends on your audience. It depends on you. If you're good at video, I don't know why I ended up choosing video. Honestly, I think I'm a better writer than I am a video actor or whatever. But I think the key really is to figure out what it is that you do and to try to kind of find the right element and the right audience. It might be Instagram. If you're a visual person or Pinterest, it might, you know, so I think it really depends on what you are. But I think it's good to experiment a little bit and find what really works for you. And then sometimes I think it's good to branch out into the areas where you're not necessarily thinking that you're good because you might be better than you thought you were. All right. And I think it's individual. Yes. So what's interesting is, so when we were growing the Masters of Marketing program, we actually did that without any advertising whatsoever. Everybody else wanted us to advertise. We wouldn't advertise. We used our own social, mostly our LinkedIn and our Twitter and a little bit of Facebook. And what we did was we decided to connect with people first. And after we connected with a lot of people without selling to them, then after a period of couple of years, we said, you know what? Let's launch this program. We went back out to them and said, hey, we've got something that we think is really good. We made sure it was a good product to start with. And then ever since then we've built it up. And right now we build this program. It's $3.5 million a year. And we do it only mostly out of word of mouth. And a little bit of search, but even the search honestly isn't even optimized search because I haven't built the content yet for the website. So it's like it's just a matter of that. So I think he's gonna kick me off the screen, but I will be available afterwards. Oh, yes, back here quick. Oh, absolutely. I think that in fact, that's one of the things that I'm really bad at is I feel like I neglect the website all the time. My website's a couple of years old, but I will say that I think every time you do something in one place, you should consider that always put it back on your WordPress site. Why? Because your own property is much more important to build than your rented property that you're using in other platforms. Always come back to your website if at all possible. I gotta go. He's gonna cut me off. I appreciate it. Appreciate all of you.