Your Digital Marketing Coach with Neal Schaffer

Content Creation Should be a TEAM Effort

August 06, 2021 Neal Schaffer Episode 219
Your Digital Marketing Coach with Neal Schaffer
Content Creation Should be a TEAM Effort
Show Notes Transcript

Stop trying to do everything yourself when it comes to content creation. You can still be 100% authentic with your content while involving others in your production. Let me explain the why and how.

It should go without saying that uou have a greater chance of succeeding faster with all aspects of your digital marketing, including content creation, when you involve a team. Working together builds success in its own unique way. The same concept applies in creating and leveraging content to build a successful business. 

In today’s episode, I share with you how you can take advantage of the opportunities available and maximize your ROI by having a team help you with your content creation efforts. Whether you’re seeking to create content for your websites, social media, or YouTube, this episode explores why having a team can really be crucial in maximizing your potential.

 Notable Quotes

●      I believe that there’s not enough good content in the top search results. If you can create great content that represents the product or service you’re selling, I believe you can rank high.

●      Content creation is all about teamwork. Nobody can do it all alone with expertise.

●      Hire the team and get it done. If you really want to ramp up your content creation, this is going to be the shortcut. 

●      The more you work with team members, the greater the quality will be and the quicker and more efficient you will be with turnaround.

“You can go to as many conferences as you want. Listen to as many podcasts as you want. Read as many blog posts as you want. But if you don’t have the team,  IT’S NOT GOING TO HAPPEN.”

Mentioned Resources

Websites to hire freelancers for your team

Audio  creation and Editing Tools

Learn More:

Neal Schaffer:

Are you struggling to keep up with the content creation needs that your business might have? If that's you, I have the solution. In this week's episode of The maximize your social influence podcast. Welcome to the maximize your social influence podcast with Neal Schaffer, where I help marketers, entrepreneurs and business owners grow their businesses using innovative marketing techniques, leveraging the concept of digital influence throughout digital and social media. Hey, everybody, my name is Neal Schaffer. I am a fractional cmo and founder of the digital first group coaching membership community, I help you grow your business through a uniquely innovative, data driven and digital first approach to marketing. And welcome to my podcast. Today, we're gonna be talking about content creation, and some things that I have learned over my many years as being a what Joe pulizzi. The Godfather of content marketing is more and more these days calling a content entrepreneur, or a content creator, or leveraging content to build a business in the digital first age of today. And when I talk about content, I'm not just talking about social media content, which began with just status updates and links. And it's gotten quite complex when we think of tic tocs, and Instagram reels, and stories, what have you. I also talked about blog content for blogging and SEO. I talk about video content for YouTube and Video SEO. And since you're listening to a podcast, I'm talking about podcasting content as well, in the audio format, the original form of the new buzzword of today, social audio content is the currency of digital and social media marketing, you must have content. And I think we're seeing two very, very different approaches to content creation out there. So there's some of you who think you have to do it all yourself. And there are others who are like, well, Gary Vaynerchuk can do it all because he has a 20 person staff, which is true. But I want to give you a third approach. Now I was actually influenced by a gentleman named Roger Wakefield. I'd love for you to go over and go to my sister podcast, the school of influence podcast with the lovely fellow influencer marketing author, Amanda Russell, Episode Number 28, how to build a YouTube following for your business at any age in any industry. Roger Wakefield is a plumber that has hundreds of 1000s of subscribers on YouTube. And it has completely transformed his business. And he only started two or three years ago, when I flat out said, Man, and he was consistently publishing three videos a week from the get go. I'm like, you know, we all can't be like Gary Vaynerchuk. And he goes, you know, Neil, and you can listen to the episode I said, Neil, once you realize the potential, and the ROI, I couldn't invest enough in the effort. And he has like a staff of about six that are dedicated to his YouTube channel. Now, I've noticed similar things, and I'm going to be talking more about this in future podcasting episodes. I believe that blogging is the Field of Dreams. And I say this, because if you do keyword searches for keywords that are really, really important for your industry, and you see the top 10 to 20 search results, you're going to find either a lot of bad, old or irrelevant content out there, I believe that there is not enough good content in the top search results. So if you can create great content that represents your industry, your thought leadership, or whatever product or service you're selling, or whatever related keywords to those products or services, I believe you can rank high, you can get top 10 page, you can get number one ranking, I have done this, that's going to be the subject of a future episode where I'm just gonna focus on the blogging part of this. But it goes the same for video, it goes the same for audio. We don't have to do this ourselves. And if we can't afford to hire someone full time to do this, there are loads of people out there that can help us achieve this once we understand the potential and the ROI. Now it's really interesting. I have some RSS applications that I use for content curation. And I noticed that all the sudden there are some companies that start blogging like 510 times a day. And you might think that they're crazy, but they're real. lising that they want to rank for certain keywords, they have the opportunity to rank for certain keywords, and therefore they're accelerating content creation efforts. Okay. Roger Wakefield, the plumber accelerated his content creation efforts on YouTube from zero to three times a week by hiring a staff by hiring a consultant to help them understand how to do it, and then doing it and reaping the benefits. That is the potential for all of you whether it's blogging, whether it's YouTube, and I'll say the same thing with YouTube. Not all of the content that is ranking is new, or relevant or good. It's up to you to rank your content there. And podcasting, man, there's less than 2 million podcasts. I mean, what are you waiting for? As I record this, I am actually on my way tomorrow. So you'll, you'll know when I recorded this on my way to podcast movement, which is the largest podcasting conference and yes, it's post Coronavirus. We have the Delta very, it's going to be really, really interesting. I plan a mascot But anyway, I'll be there. And I'm excited about it. But there are so many panels and speeches on branded podcasting of companies doing podcasts, right, because they understand the potential they understand the value, and they want to outrank you, whether you're a person, right or your company. So the opportunities are there for every type of content medium. You know, if you're a b2c brand, you want to go wild on tik tok Instagram reels, the opportunities are there, it is still a new medium that is evolving. But if you can't do it on your own, if you need some guidance as to how to do it, or you need that video editor, or whatever it might be, don't let that stop you from doing it is the message and really, as the title of this episode hints, content creation today is all about teamwork. Nobody can do it all. Especially when we talk about distinct mediums. A writer of content for a blog is very different than an audio editor for a podcast, which is very different than a video editor for YouTube. These are all distinct skill sets that also require distinct experience and distinct technical know how you are not going to hire one person that does all three of these things. And you may not be able to measure the ROI or or have enough ROI, or invest in hiring three different people. So at some point, you're going to need to hire the reason I want you to do that. Now, if you want to do more blogs, the writers are out there. If you want to do more YouTube videos, people out there that can help if you want to do more podcasting, it is doable. All this is doable. What are you waiting for? I am currently blogging. And once again, I'm going to go into more details on this. But I see so much ROI. And I see so much growth in search traffic, which has led to a lot of benefits for my business. I am currently blogging four times a week, and I have enough blog posts in my pipeline for three months. And did I do it all myself? Well, the strategy is all mine. The keyword research is all mine, in terms of what I'm going to cover in every single blog post is all mine. Is all of the writing online. Not necessarily. I have a team that works with me. And that's okay. big brands have teams that work with them. You know, the hub spots of the world have a team of writers, you own the strategy, you own the thoughts. And you hire people to help implement that. And it's the same with video or with audio. Hey, it's me, Is this me speaking. But I have an audio editor. In fact, I have someone else that I just hired, that's going to just work on show notes for me. And when it comes to video, there might be a few different people I work with one for video editing and one for repurposing that video for social media. But that is the sort of team. Now if you have one person that can do it all awesome. I think it's very, very difficult, especially for a lot of entrepreneurs, solopreneurs small business owners, hire the team, get it done. If you really want to go and ramp up your content creation, that is going to be the shortcut. You can go to as many conferences as you want. Listen to as many podcasts as you want, read as many blog posts as you want. But if you don't have the team, it is not going to happen. Now I've covered this, maybe not in depth in earlier podcast episodes, there is an art to finding these team players. There is unknown worlds out there. If you're a bigger company, you may be doing this to an agency. And there are some high end talent service companies out there. I'm thinking for blogging, there's a company like writer access, who have the content marketing conference that can help you find very, very qualified writers that are very, very experienced on that platform. There are a number of blogging and You know, blog, writing blog, writing service companies out there, I have a blog post on that, which I'll make sure is in the show notes, there are resources out there that can help you. And believe me, I'm telling you this, because companies have been doing this for many years. So if you think I am in x industry, and there's no way I can hire a writer who understands my industry, you're going to be really surprised. I believe that writers out there and I've worked with some really, really niche b2b companies, and they've been able to find writers. There's also a whole other world of engaging with freelancers, places like Upwork, places like Fiverr, I've actually had both bad and really, really good luck. There are some people some freelancers that I work with, that are part of my team. And they've been part of my team for years. They're like family, right? They're like full time employees. So don't think that you're going to get low quality are the people aren't out there? Yes, there is a vetting process. And yes, you only want to work with the right talent. But, you know, in this age of authenticity, I know that we're all challenged. And we all think that, you know, I have to do everything myself, like I said, You own the thoughts. When it comes to audio video, it's pretty clear, it's going to be you. The writing is where there are, you know, I, I went to an author's conference once, and they said, like, two thirds of the best selling books were ghostwritten. Okay. Now, think about it. If you were to work with a ghostwriter for a blog post, you need to teach them what they need to blog about, you need to make sure represents you, you are still owning that piece. It is part of your brand, especially if you are publishing it under your name. But working with a writer, working with a developmental editor can make it much more efficient, can actually make your content better by having a team. So some of this might be really, really obvious to you. And if it is, I'll ask you, why aren't you doing more? If you're doing keyword research, and you still have 100 keywords that you don't have content for what's stopping you from accelerating your blog, writing from once a week to twice a week, three times a week, a part of this episode was really influenced by my getting deeper and deeper into the YouTube world. those that know me know that I began with blogging and podcasting. YouTube, for me is like the final frontier, which I hope to really make progress on in the not so distant future, where successful YouTubers are uploading videos like three to five times a week, those are the successful ones. And there's a reason why that cadence works well on YouTube. Whereas once a week, for a blog is not that bad, you can still make progress. But obviously, if you can maintain the quality, and you can accelerate the cadence, it can really, really help your cause podcast the same, a lot of podcasts are start going from once a week to twice a week, or they start multiple podcasts like I've done with Amanda Russell and the school of influence podcast. But in order to scale that, you need to have the team in place. And the great thing is, the more you do this, and the more you work with team members, the greater their quantity is going to be and the quicker and more efficient, you're going to have turned around on this. And you're going to be able to scale that production. Now, just because you publish more blogs, more podcasts, more YouTube videos, it doesn't mean that you're necessarily going to rank higher or get more traffic. We all know that. But clearly, it is one way to be seen more, and at a minimum, have more content to repurpose for social media. And in fact, especially when we talk about video, more video content to repurpose for social media. And we know right now that social media is really all about video if you do not have a video first strategy for social media, and I'm just not talking about Instagram or Tiktok. Yes, I'm talking about LinkedIn. I'm talking about Twitter, I'm talking about Facebook, if we don't have that today, man, you know, the days of generating organic traffic from from social. I mean, I still get some primarily from Twitter and Pinterest, which are more search engine and social network but LinkedIn Facebook man, that's that's really hard to do now, unless you're doing video, and you're developing relationships, and you're commenting and you're engaging in groups, and we can go on and on. I think it requires a very, very different strategy today than it did in 2013 when I began this podcast, but really the message for today is it requires a team start building a team, don't do it all yourself. Your time is much more valuable. I will gladly pay someone to edit this rather than me going into GarageBand or what or audacity whatever audio editor it might take me an hour. That hour Time is worth way more than what I am paying an audio editor for. And that's their specialty. That's what they do. Right? So how much is your time worth. And this is where we all know about outsourcing, we all know about delegating. But when it comes to our content creation, for some reason, we're not doing the delegating, we're not doing the outsource, and I'm telling you, you need to start doing it. And if you're are doing it, you may not be doing it enough, unless you're at that cadence that I told you about, I really want to work together with you, to help you get to that cadence, where you're gonna see better results faster. This is something that I do in my digital first group coaching membership community, I hold my members accountable. And we talk about all the strategies and tactics and techniques in which we can do this. But in lieu of being in my community, that is my message for you today. If you are having trouble, scaling, finding the right team members don't even know where to start, join my community. Or you can reach out to me, but I'll probably tell you in order to respond, you'll you know, and give you really targeted advice one on one advice, you'll need to join the community for that. But this is a big need that I see. And I see so many people that are being held back. Now there are some that say, hey, just press the damn record button. That doesn't really help. Right? But having the team in place that say, hey, Neil, once you press the record button, I'm going to be able to upload an optimized for SEO, and have your YouTube video live within 24 hours, then it's a little bit different. And then once you do that a few times, and you begin to see the results faster, because you have the right team in place. That's when you begin to see the business results, the business growth, that when done right. digital and social media marketing can provide you. All right, I hope you enjoyed that episode of The maximize your social influence podcast. As always, if you have any feedback, or if there's a topic that you want me to cover or someone that you want me to interview, feel free to reach out to me. You can go to Neal Schaffer Comm. You can tag me anywhere in social or DM me at Neal Schaffer. You can even email me old school I know or as my kids would say, Boomer mode at Neil at Neal schaffer.com. Hopefully you know how to spell my name by now. But hey, that's it. Hope you enjoyed it. We'd love your feedback. Any reviews, ratings on the podcast apps is always appreciated. And until next time, wherever you are in the world, make it a great social day. Bye bye everybody and SEO nada