 Nurtures relationships and helps with SEO. All this talk about SEO, behind SEO are humans and people tend to forget that. Do the search engines like this? Do the search engines like that? It's people, it's people connecting with you and that's what your content does. Create useful information that your market wants and needs to build a relationship with them. The reason why we build a website is so people can find out about our products and services. And I would just like to take a show of hands. How many people here are consultants? And how many people here sell a product or some product or program on the internet? Okay, we've got a mix of both. But what content am I going to write? Like how many of you felt like this? Like I got to write a content, I got to do a blog post and what am I going to write? You run out of ideas, you think you've written everything and you think people have read everything that you've written and actually they haven't. But what I'm going to do is give you some content ideas. But first let's talk about content creation challenges. I don't have time to write. I have writer's block. I don't know how to do research. I'm stressed out about constantly having to create fresh content or I don't have enough resources. Some people think they don't have enough budget or they don't have enough team. And really all of that is in your head. And if you just change your attitude about creating content it's going to be a lot easier. So I want you to think of building a website this way. Creating a website is like painting a picture. You want to block your site out like an artist. That's the way I like to teach my students is take in the whole totality of building your site. So you first block things out and I have an example to show you. And as the artist is working on the painting each part of the painting is getting more filled in. As this artist is painting you always have a sense of what the picture is. And I think that's the same way you should build a site. And it's getting all filled in and there's the finished picture. So when I teach people to build websites I say touch on a lot of different things. Don't just focus on one little thing. If you stay I mean learning CSS is great but make sure you just don't get stuck there and you're not filling in your content because that's why people come to your site is it's for your content. And to get over writer's block use dummy Latin text. Now how many people know what Latin text is? Okay, most of the room. So Latin text, Lorm Ipsum a lot of web developers if you're having them build you a site will put in this Latin text. But this Latin text gets kind of boring so I like to use something more fun like Bacon. Bacon Ipsum. So you can go to BaconIpsum.com and type in how many paragraphs you want and it gives you Bacon. Bacon, meat, all kinds of stuff. If you're not into meat, if you're vegetarian there's Veggie Ipsum which also makes it fun. So as you're creating your site you know have fun with it this is my favorite cupcake Ipsum and you can check that little box and it adds love into it too. What this does by using this Latin text is it gets you over your writer's block. So you know you want to have an about us or a my bio and that tends to be the one site that trips people up as people will start writing their bio and they'll go, oh man I should have done this in my career and I should have done that and I know all this head trash comes in. So by using one of these Ipsums and there's a site called Meet the Ipsums which has all different kinds. So there's beer, there's coffee, there's cat there's TV, there's all zombie Ipsum that one's pretty fun. Getting over writer's block which is important. The other thing this does is when you're building your site and you know you want an about us page here's the 2016 theme. If you look at that it doesn't really have any meaning to how your site's going to be balanced. You know that's why here I put the veggie Ipsum it gives you a feel for how the site's going to look. I'll have people say can you help me with my page design and there's nothing there. So your eye is looking way too much at other elements and you're not having a really good sense of what your site's going to look like. So this is what I mean by the painter painting the picture. So here's a case study of one of my students Veronica Marquesi. She's a licensed psychotherapist. So she's not a web designer, not a web developer. She just wanted to be able to build her site herself. So she started out with this 2010 theme which is a pretty old theme but it's a very simple theme and that's why I like it. So out of the box, hello world. Then she started to block in some content and put a picture on the side. Now she's adding some colors trying to get a sense of the color she wants to have for her site. So as you can see she's sort of working on the whole thing at the same time. She's picking more specific colors and some pictures and then here was her new site. So really always just keep working on your whole site at the same time. But now I want to dive into 10 content ideas to help you create content for your website. Idea number one is survey your audience. So many people don't do this. You use surveys, blog posts, social media, etc. Ask people and here you can see at the bottom I just asked a question to my community what questions do you have about integrating email marketing to your website. So if you don't want to buy survey tools you can ask on social media what people want. And here is some resources and in the on Matt's page there's going to be a list of these resources so you don't have to write everything down. Survey monkey. I believe they still have a free version of survey monkey. And the thing with surveys you have to be careful is you have to be mindful of how you phrase the question because it's going to affect the answers you get. So just keep that in mind. Quiz and survey master plugin, WP polls, YOP poll plugin, Facebook poll plugin, poll daddy. There's lots of different ways to take polls. Polling your audience will give you content ideas. YouTube. I love using YouTube as a resource for blog posts ideas. And actually I wrote a great post from Matt had on social media posted this YouTube video that was hysterical and I saw that and I was like what a great idea. It was about remembering your passwords. And so I took that YouTube video, put it on my site, wrote a blog post about the video and voila I had my blog post for the week and it wasn't my video. You see you can put other people's videos on your site. The copyright is such that if you're using someone else's video as long as it's publicly searchable on YouTube the whole copyright issue is whoever created and uploaded the video. It's not on you. But you can go to TED. There's TED talks about every industry. Find an awesome TED talk. Embed it in your site. Make an article about it and there you don't have to come up with ideas on your own. You do want to watch for if they've got ads or so you want to make sure you watch the whole video but I love using YouTube as a resource. Now you can always have your own YouTube account and upload videos but this is an easy way for you to create content valuable to your market and you don't have to create the video. Embedding a YouTube video is really easy and that might be a little small but when you find a video you like you just click on embed. It gives you the code boom copy and paste and you put it into your site. Alright number three is news headlines and current events. News headlines are often written by high priced copywriters. So if you just read especially tabloids 7 foods to make in your coffee pot 17 bizarre preschool rules you won't believe exist. I mean you can take that kind of formula and rewrite it for your own industry and now you've got a headline which will spark ideas to write your content about. Grilled cheese 25 ways. People like numbers a lot so you know top 10 etc. News headlines are also great eye catching subject line examples so how to stand up to a bad boss going once going twice going to be confused and there's a resource in the resources and there's an emotional marketing value headline analyzer that you can look at but really you know go look at tabloids people magazines and help that spark ideas for you and your business. Number four interview industry leaders. You can all probably think of an industry leader in your area of expertise that's not you and you can contact them and say hey I'd like to interview you on this I concept and what that does is for that expert they're now getting more exposure and for you you're now getting content that you can put up on your site. Hungry Dog blog does interviews with top chefs so he is just coming up with these interviews with these top chefs chefs are wanting to get their name out it's a great way that you don't have to think of something new to put on your site. Images and graphics for inspiration. Sometimes I'll find an image and I'll say hey that's a neat idea for a blog post and they make great content and they make your site more appealing. I mean just think of magazines how often they've got a picture breaking up the text and we get so busy that we're writing our content we forget hey let's put imagery in there and you can add images to your text as well. And here are some no or low cost image resources. How many people have heard of Canva? Almost everybody that's great. What Canva is canva.com for those of you who don't know about it it's an online image creation tool that designers have already designed the images for you and all you have to do is replace their words with your words and you're totally allowed to use it and it's a great way to create graphics. Pixabay, morgue file, unsplash, stocks, snap that's hard to say. Are other low or no cost resources? I love, Pixabay happens to be my favorite because they make the terms of usage really easy to understand and they're free so you can go to Pixabay if you don't want to pay for an image go to Pixabay find an image bring it into Canva add some words to it boom you've got more content. The number six use the top X formula so top five plugins you should have for your WordPress site top ten reasons why you should consider eliminating carbs people love top ten lists I mean remember David Letterman how many of you remember David Letterman I would always stay up for his top ten lists and I might not watch the whole show but I always wanted to hear what his top ten was people just love that that's why you see it in magazines newspapers as headlines and if you could come up with you know top ten reasons why you should hire a business coach or top seven things to avoid when hiring a mortgage broker you know think of your industry come up with that and that'll spark ideas and like it really easy to write this little link at the bottom at HubSpot blog dash topic dash generator go there it's in the resources that'll help you you put in some keywords and it will write headlines for you start a podcast how many people here have a podcast okay not that many podcasting is not that hard to do and if you are a talker instead of a writer talk your content and put it on a podcast and get it into iTunes it's not hard to do at all this is Kim Doyle's the WordPress chick and I don't know how often she comes out with a podcast podcasting shouldn't be that long the average commutes about twenty to thirty minutes so you want to keep your podcast within that time because that's when people are going to listen to you when they're commuting number eight and this is one that I always forget repurpose your other paid content so you're always I'm constantly thinking okay what am I going to write and then I think you know I could just go into my paid course and pull out parts of it so if you've written a book you know pull out part of your book and put that on your site if you've got CDs, courses, lectures membership content you know that's good stuff and it doesn't hurt to take part of your paid content and put it out there as free content number nine is PLR articles how many people have heard of private label rights oh not that many just a few private label rights are people who create content and then they sell it and you can reuse it so it's like buying someone else's articles or buying somebody else's content the key with buying PLR articles is you generally don't want to use it verbatim because other people are buying the same article but what you can do with it is think of it as a first draft so if you find a PLR private label rights article they also have graphics there's all kinds of different PLR but let's talk about words if you find someone else's PLR article and you buy it and it's generally pretty cheap like under 100 bucks, 50 bucks, 10 bucks it's all over the map that's your first draft and then just rewrite it sometimes for me starting with a blank page is really hard but if I start with a first draft that kind of gets me going and then I change words and I move things around and now all of a sudden it's your own so it's a great way to kind of get over that writer's block and get help from others ghostwriter, copywriter, editor, virtual assistant I will often come up with an idea and talk to my virtual assistant and say I've got this idea research these things and then she'll write a first draft for me and then I go in and edit it and change it around and maybe replace pictures or whatever and that really helps get me going because we're all pretty busy and you don't always have time to do it and by having someone else start it for you makes it a lot easier and then number ten is leverage public domain content so this is a little bit different than PLR PLR somebody is writing it with the intention to sell it public domain is works in the public domain that are those whose intellectual property rights have expired, have been forfeited or are inapplicable no longer restricted by copyright so anything created before 1923 is copyright free but you always want to check the copyright status of any image before using it like I'll find images on Wikipedia but you have to check they'll say if you can use it or not use it so public domain works are also a great idea so let me recap ten content ideas surveys, YouTube videos news headlines, current events interviewing experts images, sparking ideas for you top, X formula, podcasts repurposing paid content to free and outsourcing your content or using public domain materials but I want to remind you to keep it simple think people magazine people magazine is really easy to read like you can buy it, you can read it and you kind of feel good about yourself because you got through it if you write content that's why I love people magazines you're like oh I've accomplished something I've read this magazine if you write, now depends upon your audience if you're writing for a highly technical or scientific then you might need to write at a higher grade level but if you write at a lower grade level people are going to be able to read it understand it so you want to make sure your words aren't too difficult and in one of the resources there is a link for you to put your words in and it will tell you what grade level it's at and how readable it is but the main thing is to have fun this is why I love WordPress WordPress is fun because you can change it if you make a mistake like Matt showed us like how you can make a mistake and you can recover WordPress is very forgiving so if something gets messed up you can just fix it and if you have fun while you're doing it and not get stressed out you're going to be way more successful my name is Christina Hills you can find me online or Christina at WebsiteCreationWorkshop.com do you have any questions about content creation? Thanks for the HubSpot.com it is in the resources from HubSpot so I don't let me see if I can try to back it up okay where did it go HubSpot.com blog-topic-generator you go there you put in keywords for your area of expertise and it will come up with headlines and then from the headlines you can write articles from there and I finished way early so we have lots of time to talk about or take more questions okay great questions so the question was about copyrights for images and I want to make a point don't go to Google Images and download images it's a bad idea the only reason why you might want to go to Google Images is it will give you ideas but you know oh gee I could use an elephant image but don't take the image from Google Images like purchase it or get it from one of these other sites so what I was talking about is when you go to these stock sites to get images you have to look at the license like are you allowed to use it for personal or can you use it for business or you have to attribute it meaning you have to put who the photographer was so you need to check what the licensing is for that image the rights for the image so Wikipedia you have to make sure you're very clear on there's images in there that you have to put attribution and then there's images you can use as you wish part of why I like Pixabay.com is they just make it really easy to understand so your brain doesn't have to like go through all the different versions of licensing and what it means it basically says most of the images on Pixabay and the way they make money is the top images are from paid sites but generally the images on Pixabay are free to use on commercial or personal use and then morgue file most of that licensing is you just have to change the image so I might crop it and that's change the image what these sites don't want you to do is collect them and start your own image you know I stock photo type business so they don't want you to do that but yeah you don't and sometimes you can't find the image you want on these free sites so then I go to I stock or deposit photos or getty images YouTube is like its own category so the way the rights work with YouTube is the person who's uploading whatever they're uploading the legality stuff is on them like you can't upload something and I once took a video of my daughter dancing in some little school play and there was music in the background and I didn't think anything of it you know it was from a CD that they're playing on stage and YouTube blocked that video because they recognized that that was a song and I had no clue so they just they blocked it and I'm like okay no big deal I'll take it down but if you find his video and it's public like you can search and his video shows up you are allowed to embed it and the copyright issues are on him not on you you can't use his photo no if he put the photo up in YouTube and added music to it that's on him so with YouTube that's how it is but yeah you don't want to take other people's photos yeah yes who will go to Getty Images and say I will troll the metadata of graphics where somebody stupidly just did a drag and drop and upload it into their happy little blog making quilts right and they will troll the back end and they will then attack that person and say you've already violated it you owe us $800 and then slip them on you with Getty so it used to be like you could sort of gray area it there's no more gray area because if all these photos have metadata behind it that we can't see right literally unless you buy it yeah there's lots of stories in these Facebook groups I'm in of web designers being hit with fines and sometimes it's the client that gave the image to the designer so if you're working with a client you want to ask them where did you get this picture because lots of clients don't know they're like oh I just found this image so yeah you have to be really careful oh wow I haven't heard of that I've heard of them shutting down a video but I haven't heard of people getting fined so can take and embed that video great point so let me just repeat that so it gets onto the recording if you have a YouTube channel you can limit other people's ability to embed or not but if you are creating your own videos and putting them on YouTube you kind of want your videos getting out there so that's you want to have that mindset if you've got your own YouTube channel the point of my I brought up YouTube was to make you relax like hey I don't have to come up with my own videos and I've done that it's like boy I'd like a video on explaining this internet concept hey and I found other videos and that just saved me a ton of time any other questions yes no not with YouTube you don't have to I would not take a video off of somebody's website at all I just wouldn't do it YouTube the may I don't use the mail a lot so somebody else knows the answer but I'm guessing the mail you know YouTube is the biggest one so I focus on that but the mail you can probably also do the same thing yeah that's taking this idea so if you had raw video dot mp4 then you'll need to get a plugin like a wordpress plugin a video embedder to put that on your site and then figure out the controls so that it won't play automatically some people like videos playing automatically some people don't like videos playing automatically yeah that's right that's right that's a relatively recent addition to wordpress relatively recent I don't remember I'm so used to using a plugin that I just keep using plugins try it with a plugin there is access to a plugin that you can download with a plugin there is access to a metacode if you just use it you can get off of YouTube oh it's not a YouTube okay that's a good one you could take that open your own YouTube account and upload that video into YouTube and see if that works for you alright okay thank you everyone