 Well, who here has a responsibility for creating any kind of content? Okay. Who loves that responsibility? Okay. Well, we've got a few freaks in the room. Thank you for joining us today. No, just kidding. I love writing. I just don't necessarily love writing about somebody else's thing on a deadline that may or may not be convenient to me, right? So having a content calendar can really help you kind of overcome some of the burnout that can happen from having to have content on a regular basis. I think content burnout is probably one of the key factors that contributes to failure when it comes to engaging your visitors, SEO, conversions. I don't know about you, but I get worn out of having to be creative on a dime all the time. So let's think about all the different types of content that we have to create. What kind of content do you have to create? Social media posts. What else? Blogs. LinkedIn. E-mails. Videos. Podcasts. Newsletters. Pages. What else? Photos. Oh, how about meta-description? Like content, content, content. But one of the most wonderful things about content is everything it can do for us if it's made easy. Speaking of easy, SiteGround makes it easy for me to travel. I'm a SiteGround community ambassador, and they help sponsor my travel to come and help participate at WordCamp, so I just want to thank them. Content is king. We hear this all the time. We don't hear SEO is king, video is king. We hear content is king because content drives everything else, right? If we don't have good content, we can't be effective in these other avenues. So we just talked a little bit about all the different types of content we produce, and it can be a little overwhelming if you don't have a framework. So one of the things I want to talk about is the framework of content on our websites to start off with. So has anyone ever heard of content clusters? Yeah, okay. So I first kind of, I mean, I vaguely had an idea about how content structure on a website should work. But I went to Soundboard a couple of years ago. It's this conference in Athens, digital marketing conference. And there was a guy from HubSpot there, and they explained or this guy explained about how the optimal site architecture for a website should work. Okay, and they did a lot of hard lifting on white papers and studies and all to see what's the optimal site structure for bringing in the most amount of traffic. And this is what they came up with. So site content clusters are a way of organizing your information to have your most important ideas on one authoritative post or page, one content piece, and then having smaller pieces that support that linking to it. So this would be your large content piece, and this would be the smaller pieces that link to it. And maybe it's a blog post or a video or, you know, the different types of content that you could have that would link to that. So that would be your ideal structure. And, you know, how you break those up and categorize those might be your categories, right? So let's say for myself, I'm a web designer, digital marketer. So, but I have a bunch of different services. We do SEO, we do web design, we do social media. So maybe the way that I organize my content might be, you know, one of these would be web design and then all of these would be the pieces of content that support web design, right? So how do you create all these pieces of content that you need to support a system like that? Every one of those little pieces would be a piece of content. That's a lot of content, right? And it can seem really overwhelming. So how I like to do this is by themes. So I like to do, I kind of like to hold on to this, these monthly themes that are through WP elevation. So I'm in WP elevation and one of the things that they do is they pump out a ton of content and they break their content into themes. So monthly themes, one month that might be growth and the next month's elevate, then profit, sprint and then they kind of, everything kind of goes on that theme. Well, I don't want to just copy what they do. I want to kind of season it to taste. So I also want it to be personally relevant to me because if I'm going to do the writing or if I'm going to be managing this content, I want it to kind of be interesting to me. So I kind of made a list of all the things that I was kind of working on personally. And I'm more of a list of flaws than an actual person. So here's all the things that I'm working on in myself. So you can see I'm a little bit of a hot mess, but I'm working on it. So to make things interesting for me, I paired what the month was that WP elevation was doing because then what I'm writing about is also relevant to what they're writing about and what my other peers who are in there who are also following this framework are also writing about. And then we can share each other's content and it's kind of similar, right? So I'm going to pair the sprint month with and sprints kind of like catching up, tying up loose ends with what I chose to work on, which is emotional management, right? Because I'm a little bit of a roller coaster. I need to manage that. So I'm just kind of putting that in my pot and simmering it. So the theme for the month for this would be for me, the middle miles. And so I don't know if you've ever heard of the middle miles. Middle miles are kind of like when you first start out on a big project and you've got a lot of excitement and you've got a lot of lift and you're just really gung-ho and you keep going. And then eventually you kind of lose a little bit of enthusiasm and, you know, start to plateau a little bit. Things start to get a little bit boring, a bit more of a grind. Those are the middle miles. OK, so that's kind of what I wanted this theme to be. So how are we going to talk about that? How are we going to create a content plan around the middle miles? OK. So these are my content starters. This is kind of how I when I'm plotting out like a month's content on like, let's just say, a weekly basis. And I do want to put a disclaimer here. I'm really, although I'm standing in front of you, I'm talking to myself because one of the things that I try to do is where I'm lacking. I need to really learn to teach that. So I don't want to say I'm a paragraph virtue in this area, but I am figuring it out. So I start off with what is the theme? So what are the startup middle miles? Let's talk about it. What does it look like? What is it? What causes it? How like, what are the things that precede it? What come after it? What is it? And that may be one topic. Then we have why. Let's talk about why are these middle miles so tricky? OK, so then we just kind of that we plot that out. Then we have maybe a how to. So there's different ways you can have how tos. They could be a webinar. It could be an infographic. I really like infographics. So let's go back and look at our content starters again. So we just have this list and we just go down the list. Spend about 10 minutes. So what, why, how to, who not how, who not how would be if I, if my clients were going to come to me and they weren't going to figure this out themselves. How could I help them? Or if I wanted help with this, who would I go to? Engage, maybe interview a strategic partner, maybe talk to my clients and do some really some fact finding a personal insight or an opposite view. That's really great for like being provocative. Right, and listicles and roundups. So we've got the what, we have the why, we have how to, right? So maybe we have a whole infographic. It's just another little cartoons of how they're surviving the middle miles, engaging your community. So SiteGround's really good about this. They periodically will pull their ambassadors about something and get us providing content for them. So they're kind of taking us and, you know, having us build those content holes for them. So maybe if I'm talking about the middle miles, maybe the question is I'm polling my friends or polling, you know, maybe some of my clients. And how did you survive the emotional drain that comes in the middle miles, right? And have them create this content for you. But also it's doing double duty because now you're getting to know your clients a little bit better. Or maybe you're getting to know your strategic partners a little bit better. And everybody loves to be included. Personal rants. So this is where you wanna be a little bit provocative, right? Maybe the middle miles are the time when you should be giving up. That's not what you're expecting to hear, right? You're saying never give up, never surrender. Well, maybe it is time to give up. Maybe you're struggling through the middle miles of something that's not really your calling, okay? But this would be something to be great for like an email list to send out, you know, send out an email, bless it. That's gonna be a subject line. If somebody send me an email, it's like, is it time for you to give up? I'd be like, oh, how'd you know? But I might open it, right? And another way to start engaging your community is to maybe get a listicle. So 10 founders share their tips for surviving the middle miles. So here's something that's really fun and really easy. So everybody loves to see their own face and to see their own name, right? Well, what if you pulled 10 clients of yours, you got their picture, you took their quote and their picture and you put them on social media and tag them, who do you think is gonna share that? You think they're gonna, yeah, they're gonna, not, cause you kind of made them look like a big shot, right? So you're going to put them a position to look really good that you can now take advantage of that. So now you've done that 10 times. Not only do you have a blog post, but you've got 10 social media posts that you can use and link back to that blog post to start promoted. And then that piece of content links to your main piece of content. So now that we have all these pieces of content to emphasize my point, can I get some lightning now? Okay, so we talked about your content clusters, right? So that main piece of content, that's what we're calling a pillar post because it's your authoritative piece of content talking about that subject, right? So we're gonna take all those pieces and we're gonna combine them into one long piece of content. Okay, so most people, when they start to attack this, they do the pillar post first and then they create little pieces of content to link to it. But to me, that seems very overwhelming and just exhausting to think about it, right? I don't know that I have the exhaustive take on anything, but if I take all of those pieces of content that we just created, so the what, the why, the who not how, the list, if we combine it, we could rip back our way back into a really great piece of content. So we just did one piece at a time and now we're gonna take all of those and put them all together into one piece of content. And now we're linking back, but we still have that one piece of content to start ranking. No, you've already, yeah, yep. So maybe week one, you did what? What is web design? What is email marketing, right? Then the second week was, so let's just say take email marketing. Second week is why is email marketing important, okay? Third week, let's just say that is how to 15 ways to create a great email marketing campaign, right? So we're making each week, we're gonna make this nice little piece of content and then we're done, we're gonna assemble all of those pieces into a really authoritative, nice long piece of content, right? So maybe in that piece of content, we've got lists, we've got images, we have an infographic, we have quotes, we have, and if you had to start off and make this really great piece of content, that would be incredibly overwhelming. But if you take it a little bit at a time and then assemble it all together, you could actually just hand all that content off to probably a content writer or Vian just say, hey, can you create me a nice piece of content out of this, right? Okay, exactly, so the idea. Yes, so the idea, and I'm a little hamstrung here because I don't have my spreadsheet out, I can show you here, but the idea is to do this every month, right? So have a theme every single month and then go through these content starters, get your, spend like 10 minutes. I mean, it really, in fact, we'll do this here in just a minute, but it doesn't take that long to get all your topics done, right? And then have it planned out. And maybe, maybe you don't even write them yourself, maybe you hire somebody else to do that, right? But you gotta at least create the plan because you can't hire out the planning unless you really have a good idea of where you're going. So, all right, so let's review that. So who is, does anybody have a burning desire to create some content? Come on. All right. So, what's your name? Adam. Adam, I'm April, nice to meet you. Nice for a handshake. Okay, so what kind of business are you in? Content writer. Content writer, fantastic. How many different services do you offer? Many of the ones that we spoke of. Okay, so let's do. All posts, email letters. Okay. I also do some project management and I assist people in getting manuscript started. Oh, fantastic. Okay, which one's the most profitable for you? Right now, actually starting manuscripts, helping people get their feet wet. Okay, so let's start with that because that might be interesting. Okay, so what is the benefit that service provides people? Getting out of their own way, giving them an opportunity to get started on something that they've been dreaming about doing. Okay, so you're helping them achieve a goal. So let's just say they've got a manuscript, they've published the book. What does that do for them? A lot of times it takes their business and puts it to another plateau. Okay. It gives them an opportunity to begin selling their content from their own perspective. Okay. From a text, from a book point of view. It's building their authority. Building authority. Right, it's probably, what we've heard that is the best business card you can have is a book. Yep. Okay, so let's start there. So we guys, what? So our theme, let's just say we have a micro theme but we're gonna kind of skip that just to jump to these content stars. Okay, so what would be manuscript writing? Okay. Right? Is that the sort of how you would say? Sure. Okay, so what is that service? Can you kind of explain what that service looks like? A lot of it's interview based where we're talking through outline creation either through literally an outline or infographics and creating web design for not web as in web but mind mapping and doing a lot of brainstorming and then exploring character. It's a novel exploring plot, exploring theme, exploring the different components that they're gonna be using to end up with a final product. Okay. So all those things right there, that's a lot of information you could turn into a blog post. Yes. Okay, so why is that important? Why would hiring somebody to do this? Why would that be important to you? To be the one hired or the one? To be the one, so if I needed to hire somebody, why would that be important to me to actually hire somebody to get it done? Like why shouldn't I do it myself? Oftentimes people who are at that spot where they're trying to produce a book, they have a life that they're living and this is above and beyond that and so they're managing time issues is kind of a thing. Oftentimes it's because there's a fear of that white page where there's nothing on it and they think consumers or customers can't get the words out. Right. So it's time management and the incapacitating fear of writing. Okay, so that's a great piece of content, right? Okay, so could you think of a way to break that process down? Absolutely. Okay, so could you create an infographic that can walk people through that process? Yeah. Right, okay. Who not, how do you specifically help people with this? What is your process of getting people started for that? First thing I do is I give them a choice of a three by five card pack of 100 cards or 100 cards of four by six. So choose which one you want and they usually choose four by six and then we just start laying out actual physical pieces rather than we get off the technology and we're sitting at a big table and we're just starting plotting. I don't know about you guys but I'd love to see that video. Wouldn't you? Right? Yes, I would. Yeah, right, right? So yeah, I mean that could just be, huh? That's a great idea. It is a great idea. Okay, so now we're going. We're gonna engage somebody. Maybe, who could you interview? Maybe a former client who you've done this for to talk about how it impacted their life? Sure, absolutely. And every testimonial piece do it. Testimonial, it could be a video that you can transcribe and you got a podcast. I mean, there's just, you can just take it and break it apart, yeah. That's great. Okay, so let's talk about a personal inside or a rant. Let's do an opposite view, okay? So why would you not want to write a book? Who should not be doing that? Who shouldn't be writing a book? People have nothing to say. People who have boring thoughts. Okay. People who have opposing views. People who are. Maybe they don't have a clear message. Yeah, don't have a clear message. They don't know what they're gonna say. They haven't put any time into thinking about what they're trying to achieve. Yeah, procrastinator. Maybe you shouldn't be writing a book. Maybe that's the line. And then you go down and list out all the reasons why you shouldn't be writing a book and how you can change those and how you can help them change that. That's a very good way. What's that? Oh, yeah. Boom. Oh, really? So how about a listicle or a roundup? So maybe of the last year, what are the top 10 most impactful business books that came out? And can you pull a quote out of there? Oh, absolutely. I'm sure. The bad ass books. Yeah. Have you seen those? Mm-mm. She's got a lot of following from when I understand people are trying to get their business started. Interesting. I could get her to name that. The woman who does the bad ass books. You might know. Nope. There you go. Anyway, a lot of people read those to get motivated and to get going. Okay, so what if you did a profile or a spotlight on her as an author and the different, the impacts that she's had and maybe people talking about like what they got out of that book? Okay. And that would be a great social media post. A little, I mean, you could link back. And then let's take, let's look at this. So now all these pieces of content, look at all the different varied pieces that you've now had. Have you written these all out? Now you could compile these into one giant pillar authoritative page, right? The ultimate guide to or, you know, everything you need to know about why you need a manuscript, right? So you've got a video, you've got lists, you've got bullet points, you've got an infographic, you've got a definitive statement about why you need that, what it is, why you need it and how you can help them with that. That's pretty cool, isn't it? That is pretty cool, right? Thank you, Adam. Thank you. So, that's it. It's the end of the day. Let's not dawdle around. We've got an after party to get to. So I would like you to just take a picture of this and I've got a spreadsheet that has this where you can go on that has all the questions broken down by months so you can answer these questions for yourself, create a content calendar, get out there, start chipping away at these little pieces of content that you can then put together and create these really epic content pieces. All right, thank you. All right, any questions? Bobby? Okay. So, I think you should, if you don't know what keywords to target, maybe you need to take a step back and really start thinking about who your audience is and what they are asking from you. What are they searching for that you are providing, right? What are, and here's another question. What's the one thing that you want people to do when they come to your site? Okay, the thing that I want people to do when they come to my site is pick up the phone and call. Right, I want a phone call because I love selling on the phone, okay? Some people really want a contact form and that's, but you need to know what's the thing you want because then you can start crafting your content for that call to action. So, your pillar content, if you don't want people to call you, you should be really massaging those words to lead people to fill out a form or make a download or get on your list, whatever it is that that call to action is for you. Anybody else? All right, well, I will see you guys at the party. All right.