My content engine

Content is everything to anyone selling anything. It's how we earn our potential customers' interest and provide reason to convert.

I have produced more content for my brands in the last 30 days than ever before. The totals are:

• 32 Quora answers
• 10 podcast episodes
• 10 video tutorials
• 25 articles

All of this has equated to over 18,000 views/listens, a dozen or so inquiries for services and a few new client partners.

Below are the steps I take to generate content and the tools I use to get all done.

My process

Step 1 - Topic generation

I am B2B, so I use Quora. The way I decide what to write is by first searching the keywords I need to brand myself under and find the most active topic (discussion) under that keyword. The other reason I look to Quora is because most of my savvy colleagues and prospects post and read Quora questions. So this is the ideal place to find out what pain points they have.

When I have found a discussion, I then scrape the questions for URL, topic tags, views and followers. This is a custom script so I don't have a tool to recommend. But I do offer it to my clients for a small fee.

Step 2 - Organization

Now I have my topics, it's time to plan which to answer and how. Prioritization is easy - I just sort my new CSV of Quora question URLs by most-viewed. Next, I see if I know anyone who has answered the question and/or if I know anyone who I'd consider an expert on any of the topics, and see if they would be interested in recording an episode to answer it. The rest I will start to answer myself.

At this stage, I also schedule out my answers. I do one on Sunday night, and one on Wednesday night. This is because I found Monday and Thursday to be great days to publish.

Step 3 - Creating the content

I have gotten very good at the process of quickly-producing a lot of quality content (I use the word "quality" not to mean it is well-produced/designed, but to mean it is highly-valuable). My main goal with any content is to provide the reader/viewer/listener with actionable next steps to take. This actually makes creating content easier because when I focus on the 'how to' of it, I simply unload what I do already.

I always attempt to compile a list of 2 or 3 related Quora questions to form the outline for the article. The reason for this is not only to make the ideation simple, but also to be able to create two or three links with one session of writing.

If it's an interview, I do this via Zencaster and Loom for screencasting. If it's just a tutorial (answering a question with an actionable solution), then I do this via Loom and I have a Blue USB microphone to record audio in either case.

Step 4 - Editing

After the audio is recorded, I use Descript (below) to transcribe it. Then, I edit the audio/video in Camtasia (below). The transcript gets handed off to an editor to remove all the 'um's' or 'ah's', add transitions and put it into a few different formats - a third person blog article and a first-person Quora answer. Then it comes back to me to finalize.

Step 5 - Publishing

The most important part of this process is where/how to publish. Here are the steps to publishing:

1. Upload the video and audio to YouTube and Anchor.
2. Publish to the newsletter subscribers first. Give them first take of new content.
3. Then, publish on your blog with embedded video/audio links.
4. Next, submit the article link to google in your webmaster tools. This will ensure google indexes the content on your site before anywhere else.
5. Now, publish the edited Quora answers with video and audio links.
6. Finally, publish the article to LinkedIn.

I have a pod so my actual final step is sharing it with my pod. But most people do not.

Here's more on the tools I use:

Camtasia

Camtasia is a video-editing tool which is both inexpensive and comprehensive. It's also easy to use.

Desript

I have only used this platform for a short time now, but so far it has been unreal. Descript is the world's first audio word processor, letting you view and edit audio as text. It was co-founded by one of the former founders of Groupon who discovered the man who wrote the software working out of Berkley and hired him to build it full time.

Anchor

My favorite content-creation tool allows me to record podcasts, find people to interview in their marketplace of listeners/podcasters, and syndicate my content to the largest 8 podcast directories.

If you are interested in having this program run on your behalf, my team is trained and able to execute for select clients monthly. Here's how that program works >>>