Photo by jtyerse on Flickr at http://www.flickr.com/photos/jtyerse/
Do yourself a favor.
Don’t write one more e-newsletter, blog post or article until you know how you’re going to turn that content into cash.
Now, there are a lot of good reasons to create high value content for your peeps other than the need to make a buck. Your content, whether it comes in the form of a blog post, article, video or teleclass, is the primary vehicle through which people can get to know you, like you and hopefully trust you. It’s also how you can attract, engage and connect with those you are meant to serve.
So, yes, you need to always be creating good stuff for your tribe. But if you’re going to pour your creative energy and precious time into creating that good stuff, why not get paid for your work?
How?
By organizing and repurposing that content into a product or program you can sell!
For instance, let’s say you send out an e-newsletter every week. That’s 52 newsletters a year which means you need to write 52 high-value, content-rich articles a year, right?
So, what are you going to write about?
You know you need to write something… but there are weeks where you can’t think of a thing! Every idea you come up with sounds trite, dull or so overdone. You sit there at the computer with your head in your hands, trying to come up with something brilliant. After another 30 minutes go by, you say “Screw it!” and go mess around on Facebook.
What you need is a content creation plan that will allow you to:
- always know what you’re going to write about each week.
- leverage every article or blog post you write into a product or program you can sell!
Otherwise, you’re not making the best use of your time and creativity. Sure, it’s great to write articles for your newsletter just to stay connected with your clients and serve them well. But if you can do that AND create a new product or program, you can turn that content into cash!
There are two ways to go about this. The first one is:
The Quick & Dirty Method for Turning Content Into Cash
- Think about your ideal clients or prospective clients. What kind of problems do they have? What do they need help with? What mistakes are they making? What could they change to improve their situation? What’s getting in their way? The answers to these questions are the subject of your articles or posts.For instance, let’s say your clients are musicians who want to grow their fan-base and sell out their shows. What mistakes are they making? Maybe they don’t have an email list or any way to stay in touch with their fans. Maybe they are doing a really poor job of describing their music in their marketing materials. So, a possible article topic could be about how to create a great pitch or tag line that describes their music to their potential fan. Or how to start and grow a huge email list of potential fans.
- Sit down and write a list of 52 possible article or blog post topics based on the issues, problems, mistakes, challenges experienced by the people you serve.
- Now, look at your long list of 52 article topics and see if some of them could be lumped together and organized to create an ebook or workshop or online training. How can you leverage that same material into a product or offering you can sell?
- Take the selected topics that you’ve chosen as leverage-worthy and put them on a separate list (see example below). Look over this new list and evaluate whether there any “holes,” any areas where you may need to create more information to create a finished product. For example, you may have 19 topics from your list of 52 that would contribute nicely to an eBook. But those 19 aren’t enough. If that eBook is going make sense, you may need to add another 3-4 chapters to fill it out and make it complete.
- Figure out which topics you would need to add for your product to be complete and add those to your list. You now have a content creation plan for your product! You now know what you’re going write about every week and how it will contribute to your soon-to-be released, highly profitable product or program.
Or, You Can Start With the End in Mind
Rather than start by making a random list of possible articles, you can start with an idea for a finished product or program. Maybe you’ve already been thinking about writing a book or creating a new program or series of webinars. If that’s the case, this method of content creation will suit you just fine.
But even if you don’t have a definite idea for a product or program, you can start to think about what it might be. Ask yourself:
- What product or program would give your peeps the solutions and answers they need?
- What types of questions have your clients been asking you?
- What kind of information do they seem to need right now?
Do you see them struggling with the same issues, questions and problems? What are they?
Use your answers to these questions to help you design your new product or program.
- Once you have the idea for your product and you’re pretty clear on what you want it to be, create an outline of all its parts! For instance, if you want to write an eBook, outline all the chapters that will be in the book. If you want to create a webinar series, outline the subject matter for each session.
- Then, take each chapter or section and chunk it down into the main points you want to cover in that chapter or section. For instance, let’s say you want to write an eBook for musicians that teaches them how to use social media to create a huge fan-base. One chapter might be “How to Use Facebook to Build Your Fanbase.” You would then chunk down that huge chapter into littler, bite-sized bits, like:
- How to create your Page in Facebook.
- How to design your TimeLine cover photo.
- How to invite people to “like” your page.
- The 10 Secrets for engaging with more potential fans.
- Facebook etiquette and best practices
3. Each one of those little chunks is the topic for one of your newsletter articles or blog posts! Now you have a list of what to write about each week and you can repurpose each article by using it to create your new product or program! Chunk by chunk!
Congratulations!
You’re just leveraged your time and creative juice, and you have a content creation plan for the year!
How to Keep Track
Now, once you start writing articles and blog posts based on these suggestions, you’ll want a way to keep track of what you’ve written so you know what still needs to be created in order to finish your product.
To do this, I use a simple Excel spreadsheet (see below) but you can just use a piece of paper to write down your list of articles and check them off as you complete and publish them.
Here’s an example of what the spreadsheet might look like if you were writing that eBook for musicians:
Can you see how this approach will not only help you know what to write about every week but leverage your great content into something you can sell? If you have questions about how to do this, be sure to leave a comment here and I’ll be sure to reply!