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Welcome to Amplify Your Authority, the podcast where innovative marketing meets heart-centered entrepreneurship. Join Marissa Shadrick, an award-winning international speaker, Ray Edwards certified copywriter, and personal brand expert. You'll gain insights into the external strategies for business growth and how to navigate the internal journey of entrepreneurship. Now get ready to amplify your authority in a competitive digital world. And now is your host, Marissa Shadrick.

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Hello, hello. Welcome everyone to this live recording on LinkedIn. I'm Marissa Shadrick. I'm an online marketing strategist and a certified copywriter. And every week I record Amplify Your Authority podcast on LinkedIn. And then the replay is then produced. And for those of you that are signed up, you'll get the show notes and you'll get the links. Any tools, anything that I recommend will be there also. So let me set a few things up here because I'm getting a little bit of an echo, but I think we're good to go. Today we have a very interesting podcast. It's all about content creation. Yes, I know. That is something that really causes a lot of people stress about looking at a blank screen screen and trying to figure out what should I produce? What should I create? Does it really matter? Are people going to my website reading it? Are they reading the social posts? And it could be very, very difficult to get through week to week with content creation. I really love to simplify everything. I love to simplify and use strategies. So the time that you sit down to do work is going to be very strategic, and you're going to get the most for the time you invest. And so that is my goal with each podcast episode, blog post is to help you think out of the box. And sometimes we have to be a little bit of a disruptor, go against the grain, so to speak, not follow necessarily trends, but think about your audience and your business and what fits best for you. Sometimes the status quo is not the best thing for you. So I'm a bit of a disruptor simply because I've done it the way people have told me to do it. And it simply didn't work for my audience. And so I've learned the hard way. And as I break through and think out of the box and think strategically about my audience and the message I want to put out, everything started falling into place. And it was a lot more fun to create content. So today we're going to look at this. And one of the things that I want to share right off the cuff is a couple of things that I feel I go kind of against the grain. So I want to give you some examples of this. But here's my promise to you today. I want you to have unparalleled clarity after you listen to this podcast. I want you to be able to improve your content creation plan. I don't want you to be stressed about it. I want you to be able to produce it. And it's going to be so targeted and it's going to be so aligned to your audience that it's going to captivate, it's going to resonate, and it's going to inspire your community. And so that's going to mean more clicks, more people that'll want to join your community and be part of your email subscriber list. And those people will become warm prospects. So some of the things that are unconventional that I do is I just decided, first of all, to forget the content calendar. That would drive me crazy. Write a content calendar for 90 days and think of everything you can think of and put it on the content calendar and just produce it and like clockwork, see what's there, and produce it. And it was almost like, well, remove the thinking part and just create these topics and these posts according to this calendar. That felt very restrictive to me. And there's some benefits to creating a calendar or let's say scheduling posts. But I like the organic way of being inspired and letting that take you on a rabbit trail to more posts that you can schedule. And here's what happens when you do that. The spontaneity can inject some freshness to your posts when you give yourself some margin to be spontaneous, maybe around current events that are going on. You can't do that if you have a content calendar telling you what to post, and you want to produce something that maybe is relevant for the time today. And so you're going to there's going to be a disconnect because other people will be posting about relevant topics that are happening or circumstances that are happening in the world, and you're going to be posting according to your content calendar. So there's some benefit to scheduling, but to try to push out and line up exactly what you're going to say for 90 days or even six months, it's hard to know what's going to be top of mind in four months or in five months or even in six months. Spawn Naty can inject some freshness and authenticity to your posts. So that's one of the things that I don't follow rigidly. I like to schedule posts, and I think that's a great plan. But once you schedule some posting, you have some posts already scheduled ahead, that gives you the flexibility to be able to sit down and think of some creative things. Think out of the box, be spontaneous in what you want to share. The second thing is don't avoid controversy. Look at something that's being said. And if you don't agree with it, and you have maybe good logic behind it, or maybe you have some experience or some stats behind it, bring another point of view. It's not that necessarily you're saying that those people are wrong or that statistic is wrong, but you're saying, on the other hand, this can happen too, because not everything is an absolute for every business. It's just not. You have to really figure out who the business is because what works for one is not going to necessarily work for the other. And I work for independent ventures, solopreneurs that have maybe three to less on their team and are in the beginning stages, maybe the first three years. Now I have another vertical for larger businesses that need a copywriter, but that's totally different. And those usually come through referrals. But the messaging and the approach that I have is different for both of those. So when I say don't avoid controversy, just because you see something and you think, well, I have an opinion on that, it's okay to post that. It's okay to share your opinion. In fact, it's great for people to have two sides of a story so they can make a more informed decision. So don't avoid that. And that could be very interesting to hear a different side rather than the same old, same old, same old that we hear everybody regurgitate. The third point that I like to be a disruptor in is write longer pieces of content. Everybody says, write short, write short, make the videos super short, make them under a minute. And I've done those. I've done those videos under a minute for promoting podcasts, but they tell us that everyone has the attention span of a fish. I don't know, but I don't have the attention span of a fish, right? If the content isn't aligned, then maybe they're not interested and their attention span is not there. But to tell people that you have the attention span of a fish, I don't know, that's kind of insulting, right? And I think people appreciate longer pieces of content. There's some people that love video, and if you try to write a blog post that's longer, they're not going to be interested because they like to consume content in video form. There's others that like to consume content in podcasts, in audio form. They'll listen to audiobooks. But there's definitely people who love to read, and they love to read articles. So when you look at the different demographics, you have to figure out what my audience really want to see. And if they want to see articles, then by all means, go ahead and write a long article, regardless of what everybody else is saying. I know my husband, that's all he does is read articles on the internet. He doesn't like these short things. He likes meaty articles where he can get some value out of a post. So longer pieces of content is not taboo. So consider these three of my disruptors. Forget the content calendar and don't put yourself in a corner. Leave room for some spontaneity, some flexibility. Second, don't avoid controversy. If you have another side to a story, share it. Thirdly, write longer pieces of content if your audience enjoys that. Again, we're right back to the audience. What does the audience want? There aren't really any absolutes. When we start saying this is an absolute for everyone, I think that we do a disservice to people because it really does depend on the business and it really does depend on the audience. So where do you start? Okay, I shared a little bit of my disruptive nature, right? Where do you start for content creation? Well, if you want to really leverage organic traffic, if you want the content to resonate with your audience, it does not hurt to do a keyword search. Now, I'm not one of these that just hangs on keyword searches and is just constantly trying to, you know, make sure that the numbers and the analytics and everything dials in. I will do some research in the beginning and I will look for keywords and I will work with those, but I don't get like crazy with it. I use it as a launch pad, so to speak. So finding keywords. Now it's interesting because keywords, and by the word of it, keyword sounds like it's one word, right? But if you have a keyword that is just one word, the reach, it's going to be very broad. And they have long tail keywords that are two or more words, two to three words. So those those specific keywords that are put together in in like three words or more, long tail keywords are more specific. Let me give you an example. Short tail keyword, one or two words, would be something like AI. That would be a keyword. And people would think, well, that's a great keyword, AI. However, if you begin to put more words to it, say you put two words to it, it's still short, and you say AI tools, there's more specificity. And so it helps the reach for those people that are looking for AI tools. A long tail keyword would have even more specificity to it. Instead of AI, and instead of AI tools, if you say something best free AI tools, that's a long tail keyword. That's very specific. And you're not going to be competing with everybody else because it's so specific. So even with keywords, we want to make sure that we have some long tail keywords so that we really can see what is it that people are interested in. And there's many tools that'll help you do this and it'll help you. Some of them are for ads, but you can get a lot of insight. And so it'll show you if there's a lot of competition for those keywords, and it'll rank it, and it gives you kind of an idea if somebody was going to put an ad into it. But we're looking for content creation so we can take whatever information we can find and we can begin to have a list of keywords around our industry that would resonate. So why is this important? Because when you write it and you put some of these keywords in your header ones on a blog post or in your headline, it will get indexed. And even on LinkedIn, a lot of the newsletters get indexed on LinkedIn on Google. And so this will help organic reach. And so that's why it matters to start with some keywords. And the keywords are usually related to some pain point or some struggle that someone has or a problem that they have, and they're trying to find an answer. So we're trying to figure out what they are typing in the search bar. And these tools, there's Moss keywords, there's some free ones. You can go to Google Keyword Planner. Um, that is for people that are trying to create ads, but it gives you a good idea of it. And it doesn't hurt to go to two or three different keyword search tools to be able to see a variety. And there's semi-rush. Some of these, um, even though they're free, they give you a limit per day. If you're an entrepreneur or solopreneur, that's not really a problem because you're not going to probably be searching more than 10 searches, you know, a day. But they probably do that for agencies and others that are handling other clients, and so they limit how many searches you can do per day. But there's a lot of them, there's like many of them, and I'll put a list of them in the show notes for you. But just off the cuff, Moss Keyword Explorer is one, Google Keyword Planner is another, and Semi-Rush is another, and those are all free keyword search tools, so that can help. So, what do we do now? We have some keywords, so this is going to be really the plumb line for our content because we want to be able to leverage that keyword search. So the step-by-step process, now I want you to listen carefully because you can get kind of lost in this, but it's simple, it's super simple. It's just take it one step at a time. Once you have the keywords, and I would put it on a document, I would have a running document of keywords so that when you look back at the analytics and you see that wow, this post really did well, you can go back and see what keywords you used. So that helps you. So I would just track everything for the in, especially in the beginning. Make a list of the keywords you're using when you're creating content. And so, and you can even put like a the link of where you posted it, whether it's a blog post or if it was on a social media, you could put the link and the keywords that you put in there. And that way you can track a little bit and see, you know, what really moved the needle for you. So here's a step-by-step process. You can take those that keyword and say you want to write some posts around this specific keyword. That's when you can use AI tools. Now notice you've manually done a lot of work first to just tell AI to write something for your audience and you know you're you tell it what you do, what industry you're in, it's not really going to produce something that necessarily will resonate with your audience. But now that you've done a little bit of work and you're looking to maybe, maybe you're looking to bring a different perspective. Maybe you want the contrarian approach, or maybe you want to inspire someone or show a how-to. Give the AI tool some parameters and tell it using this keyword search tool, this keywords, I want you to list five possible posts for social media or for a blog post, and give me some titles and snippets with just three bullets with each one, what it would contain. So give it some parameters as far as posts, potential posts that you could do, short posts like a hook, opening paragraph, three short bullets, and an inspiring close. And then what it'll do, it'll take that keyword that you put in there, and the best thing to do is to tell it to write it in your own voice. Hopefully, you have done this with your AI tool, whatever AI tool you're using, is take a piece of content that you wrote, have the AI tool analyze it so it understands your voice and your tone and your personality, and then tell it to write five posts, short posts, not long yet, five short posts using the keywords that you gave it, and do one at a time, right? And so you give it to the AI tool and it will produce some content. Now, here's why I say ask for five, because chances are three of them you're gonna throw away. They're not gonna be something you'll want to produce, or it'll be repetitive, but there'll be one or two that look pretty interesting, and so you take the best one that AI has provided for you, and then what you do, and here's where the magic is you take that one post that you liked out of the five that it produced, and take that and tell it to tell the AI tool to write five different posts with these five different perspectives. So you're taking that one and you're telling it, let's go deeper with that one, and here are the five. You're gonna tell it to write a post with the best one you liked, right? It produced five and you picked one. You say, out of this one, this particular topic, the post that you wrote, write another that is, and use each one of these to see a variation of that topic. Number one would be actionable, something that inspires action. Number two would be motivational, number three would be contrarian, because I love contrarian, usually get great great output with that. Number four would be an observation, and number five could be a prediction based on a current fact. You can also change this up and put write a how-to, right? Or write best practices, or write common mistakes, whatever you want to do, but it's a different perspective, and so you decide which five you want to tell it to write some variations with that one that you chose, and now all of a sudden it's producing five different short posts with these various perspectives. Then what you do is you pick the best one and then you expand on it and you write your post. If you do need to expand on it, maybe you just want it for social media, and maybe this exercise has produced maybe 10 posts, or it could have at least it's going to produce four or five, which would be enough content for a month if you post once a week. So by doing this, you're going deeper and deeper and deeper. You're starting from a keyword to a long tail keyword to putting it into an AI tool to giving you five ideas to taking a one idea and expanding it using these different five different perspectives. So you're going deeper and it's getting meatier and it's getting better. And the beautiful thing is that when you do this, then you're not writing with a blank screen. Then you can go ahead and introject some of your experiences and some storytelling in there if you're writing a blog post. Like I said, if you're just creating a post for social, you might not need to do much more. But if you want to expand on that, you can do that as well. So you end up with lots of content through the process. You won't end up with just one, guaranteed. You will not end up with just one. There'll be so many ideas you'll think, oh, I never even thought of that. That's great. That's another idea. And so you'll be excited because your work is already done for the day and you've got other ideas and you're anxious to start diving into those other ideas, you could do that tomorrow. So the thing is, each time you're going to sit down for content creation, it's not it's no longer a drudgery because now you're excited and you're looking forward to continuing where you left off. And so these posts can easily be short social posts. You can use it for your email newsletter, you can take it and expand a little bit more on it and give a little bit more meat to it, like an article, and you can write a blog post, and then you can expand even more with diagrams or illustrations, and add maybe um additional content. Maybe you have another podcast, maybe you have another blog post that speaks on a similar topic-related topic, and you can put all that on a LinkedIn newsletter. Because a LinkedIn newsletter allows you to put lots of links, images, subtitle, table of contents, your bio, anything you want. So now you've taken that one and you produced content for various scenarios just by doing this exercise. And the keyword search, you've only have to do it once. Once you have a number of keywords, you're off and running. Then you're just creating the content. So the end result this is where the magic comes in. You will not only have simplicity in creating content, but you will be consistent because it's simpler. You will have more targeted content based on the keyword search, right? That's what people are searching for, so it's more targeted. It's going to resonate. With people. It's going to improve your rank because if they find it, they will go to it organically without even paying for ads. So it's going to improve your ranking. And so if you're getting organic traffic to your website, just make sure heads up that you have some kind of call to action on that website so that you can invite them to join your email list. It's going to improve your ranking and the material can be repurposed in various forms for email newsletter, for a LinkedIn newsletter, for other social media posts. If you have more than one that you want to post to, you can push it out to those. You have a lot of places where you can put this content. And each time you can expand it or you can condense it, like an accordion. You know, do you want it a little bit more? Add a little bit more for a post, a blog post or a newsletter. And you have no more overwhelm. The simplicity has taken that off. On the front end, it's a little bit of research of figuring out those keywords. But then once you get going, you're going to have lots of ideas. And it's better ideas than just going into Chat GBT and say, write a post. It's not going to, even with the steps I've given you, the reason why I say give me five suggestions when you're talking to AI or giving it a prompt is because usually there's only like two out of five that you can work with. The others aren't that great and sometimes are repetitive. Now it's getting better, but that would be a way that I would use AI if I'm creating content. And I think the relief that it gives us, not to necessarily produce more, produce more, and produce mediocre content just for the sake of producing, but being more strategic and making sure we're producing something that at least has a good chance of ranking well, bringing in an organic traffic, really serving our community based on the keyword search you've done. And it's gonna make life a lot easier because we got other things to do, right? And uh life is not just work. We've got we've got our personal lives too that we want to work to have a chance to uh do our work and have more margin so we can enjoy life, right? So um that's what I have for you today. I think content creation is something that really is difficult for many people because it's an ongoing thing that never goes away. And so we're always trying to figure out what to do. And when AI came about, people just thought, well, I'll just have it write, but it doesn't always produce the best content when you just leave it up to AI to figure out what to write. And we're seeing that more and more in posts. Um, a lot of the repetitive words, a lot of the AI lingo is there, and you can you can tell. And so it's best to do the best you can originally with all the tools that you need, like keyword search, and maybe you have your own ideas, or maybe you got insight from your own clients, pain points that they have, and you can use that as well. I'm just saying start with keywords if you don't even know where to start. Eddie, if you have no clue whatsoever, what even to put in for a keyword search, and you're absolutely clueless, you're just getting started, then you can go to AI and say, based on you know, the information that it has access to, and based on keywords and based on history, you know, what are some struggles and and some of the pain points and some of the problems these particular people have in this industry. But even in that, you have to be very, very specific so it could give you that. And then you take that and you look for keywords. So it's a blend of things, but I'll tell you, once you have your topics and your keywords, then giving it to AI to be able to create those different perspectives, like I mentioned before, how-to, contrarian, whatever you want to list that. I gave you some examples, that's when it really starts producing some great stuff because it's taking it from different angles, different perspectives, and you can find something that really resonates with you and will resonate with your audience. So if you would like to receive the show notes, I usually record these a month in advance, so it'll take a little bit to get it. But if you want to receive the show notes, find out how you can submit copy for critique, because once a month on the podcast, we do a copy critique of your lead magnet opt-in page. We do a copy critique of that or your home page. And if you want to submit copy for critique, you just sign up for the podcast community and you can go to MarissaShattert.com forward slash listen. And you'll not only join and get the show notes every time I release a podcast, but you'll also get instructions on how you could submit copy, or if you want to be a guest on the podcast, I'll also push out information on how you could apply to be a guest on the podcast as well. So that's what I have for you today. I hope it was helpful. I know content creation is something we just can't get away from, but we can do it in a way that's strategic, easier, so we don't have the headaches of having to face a blank screen. So until next time, take care and thanks so much for listening. Bye bye.