SPI 762: How to Create More Content with David Ziembicki

SPI 762: How to Create More Content with David Ziembicki

David Ziembicki: To create revenue generating content, your content needs to be aligned to your business goals. Followers don’t generate revenue. Clients and customers do. All of your content should align to one or more of these goals: attracting an audience of your ideal customers, next is converting your audience into leads and entry level customers, the final step is ascending your leads and customers to your highest level programs. Lead magnets and low ticket products aren’t the ultimate solution to their challenges. You want to ascend everybody to this level if you can. So all of your content should focus on either attract, convert, or ascend.

Pat Flynn: Hey, hey, it’s Pat here. You’re about to listen to something a little different on the show today. It’s not our usual Friday format where I follow up on Wednesday’s episode. Don’t worry, those aren’t going away forever. Just a little break to bring in something even more special, in my opinion. And this episode and the next few are a part of our Teaching Friday series, which we do with our SPI Pro members.

We have an incredibly talented pool of people within SPI. Why not give our pros, the spotlight and teach you here on the podcast every once in a while. it’s just one of the perks of being a part of Pro in fact. With each episode, you get to hear a different pro, teach you something special from their area of expertise.

Without further ado, I’ll let them take it away. Oh, and if you want to find out more about SPI Pro and be a part of it, you can go ahead and apply at SPIPro.com.

Announcer: You’re listening to the Smart Passive Income Podcast, a proud member of the Entrepreneur Podcast Network, a show that’s all about working hard now, so you can sit back and reap the benefits later. And now today’s guest host. At conferences and events, when he’s not speaking or teaching, he’s such an extreme introvert that he hides in his hotel room and add orders room service cheeseburgers. David Ziembicki.

David Ziembicki: Thank you, Pat, and hello, Team SPI. In this episode, I’m gonna take you behind the scenes of the influencers and creators that publish hundreds of pieces of content every week. I’m going to show you exactly how they do it and how you can too without the big budget teams they have or even without any team at all.

Hi. My name is David Ziembicki. I’m the founder of the Expert Business agency, host of the Build Your Expert Business podcast and author of the Be The Expert newsletter.

Now when it comes to content, you know the folks I’m talking about. Gary Vee, Alex Hormozi, Amy Porterfield, Jasmine Star, and others. How do they create everything, everywhere, all at once?

Here’s how. They established a content engine in their business. Learning from them, in the last year, I’ve published over 3800 pieces of content after establishing a content engine in my own business. Before I get into what that is and how it works, let me explain how I discovered these secrets. Like many of you, I was inspired to my online business journey by Pat way back in 2013.

I was working full time at Microsoft, a pretty demanding job with a lot of travel and not the fun kind, and I wanted to plant the seeds for something different. I was all in. I woke up at 4:30 every day, bought tons of courses and programs, lots of tools. I built many of the pieces and parts of an online business. I started a podcast and a blog, built some courses.

But after several years of effort, I hadn’t generated any profit. In fact, I had generated big losses. I decided to give it one more try before giving up. With everything that I’d learned in an entire career of technology to call upon, I decided that my focus would be teaching everyone in this space the tools and tech they needed for their online business and how to set it up. Like Pat teaches in Will It Fly, I figured I’d better validate the idea.

I decided to go to London and attend the first Youpreneur Summit hosted by Pat’s buddy, Chris Ducker, in 2017. I wanted to network with both successful and aspiring online business owners and validate my awesome idea and approach. Did it fly? Um, no. It landed with a thud.

Probably heard all the way back in the states. Everyone, both the successful and the aspiring, told me they didn’t wanna learn technology. If they were established, they’d already outsourced it. If they were aspiring, they wanted to outsource it as quickly as possible. I realized that I was missing something fundamental, so I decided to study, interview, and reverse engineer the successful 6, 7, and 8 figure online entrepreneurs to see how their businesses work.

I did deep dives with people like Chris Ducker, John Lee Dumas, Sean Cannell, and others during the early to middle phases of their journeys, and they explained to me their processes and systems for creating the content that was fueling their businesses. I discovered that all of them had established tools, systems, and teams to amplify their efforts. At the time and through to today, the most extreme example is Gary Vaynerchuk. He publishes hundreds of times a week. How does he do it?

He established a content engine. He creates long form content. In his case, his keynote addresses and podcasts. Then he has the tools, systems, and a team that turn his content into dozens of assets and hundreds of posts for him. More recently, Alex Hormozi has blown up on social media and used that exact same approach.

He publishes several hundred times a month and has said that he invests over 70000 dollars a month on his content team. So how do we as solopreneurs or smaller online business owners do anything close to that. I’m going to show you exactly how. The first step is assessing where you are and where you want to be with your content strategy. I use a simple maturity model with 5 levels.

Level one is random content publishing. That means publishing what you can, when you can with no real rhyme or reason because you’re busy doing other things. Level 2 is consistently publishing to one channel. If you have a blog, that means publishing a blog weekly or daily. If you have a podcast, that means publishing an episode weekly or daily.

Level 3 is repurposing one content piece to all channels. That means taking the content piece you create each week and publishing that piece of content across all of your different social media channels. So as an example, if you blog weekly, that means you’re going to go onto each of your social media channels and create a post that points back to the blog post that you published that week. Level 4 is repurposing one content piece and customizing it for all of the different social media channels. So instead of publishing one piece and type of content everywhere, you turn your content into multiple pieces and posts optimized for each social network.

Level 5, the final level, is creating dedicated content for each social media channel. This could mean specific content and videos for YouTube, a different interview format for a podcast, dedicated articles and posts for blogs and original short form videos. Each channel has a dedicated strategy, content types, and topics that align with the audiences in each social network. For most solopreneurs and creators, we all should aim to reach level 3 or 4. I don’t recommend level 5 because it requires significantly more time from you, which can’t really be delegated.

Trying to create dedicated and differentiated video, audio, text, and short form content every week would just require too much of your time. In this majority model, the hardest step is consistency on one channel or going from 0 or random content to stage 2. After that, reaching stage 3 or 4 can be easier Because everything required can be delegated. For example, in our content engine service, you only need to create raw content once a week, then our team will edit it, repurpose it, and customize it for all the different social media channels basically getting you to stage 4. If you have to DIY, that’s okay too.

The incremental investment is your time. Reaching stage 4, though, means you have the highest odds for discovery and generating organic traffic with a modest amount of time and budget required. Why? Because you’re constantly creating one piece of content a week with tailored versions and highlights going to every channel for discoverability. So how do we get to stage 4 in numbers like Gary Vee and Hormozi without spending 80 hours a week and tons of money?

What does a content engine really look like for a solopreneur, coach, or course creator? Let’s break it down step by step. Our goal is to create one piece of content and turn it into at least 20 assets and a hundred posts every week. First, we need to start with creating long form content, ideally in video, since it has the most options for repurposing. We may not be keynote speakers 50 times a year like Gary Vee, but all of us can create a 20 to 30 minute video or interview each week.

Long form has two key benefits. First is you can get dozens of short form assets and micro content from it. And second, over time, you build up a content database with SEO benefits for your blog and YouTube channel. Second, we’ll turn the long form video into four assets, an edited video, a podcast episode, a blog post, and an email newsletter issue. Third, we’ll pull 10 short video highlights from the long form video and turn them into reels or TikTok style videos.

Then we’ll pull 10 quotes or text passages and turn them into quote images. We now have 4 long form and 20 short form assets from the original video. Next, we’re gonna create and schedule social media posts for each of the 24 assets across 5 or more social networks. The end result, one video becomes 20 of 4 assets, which results in a hundred and 20 social posts every week. The key to doing this efficiently is systemizing the process, batching, and using the right tools.

Next, I’m going to show you exactly how to do that. Then later, we’ll talk about delegating most of it if you can. The first step, planning, is the most important. We need to plan a revenue generating content strategy. To create revenue generating content, your content needs to be aligned to your business goals.

Followers don’t generate revenue. Clients and customers do. All of your content should align to one or more of these goals. Attracting an audience of your ideal customers, that is content that shows you understand their problems better than your ideal customers do. Diagnosing the mistakes they’re making, the things they’re trying that don’t work, and any outdated industry norms or common beliefs.

Next is converting your audience into leads and entry level customers. This is where you take your audience from being passive followers to opting into or purchasing something from you that helps them solve a small part of their challenge. The final step is ascending your leads and customers to your highest level programs. Lead magnets and low ticket products aren’t the ultimate solution to their challenges. This is what your signature system is, the end to end solution that helps your customers or clients reach their goals.

You wanna ascend everybody to this level if you can. So all of your content should focus on either attract, convert, or ascend. Next, you also want to align your content strategy with your business cadence. Are you primarily launch based or evergreen? If you launch twice a year, you have a 6 month cycle to attract new customers, convert them to entry level offers, and then ascend them to your flagship program during your launch window.

You may have 2 months where you focus your content on attracting new audience members, 2 months on converting them to entry level offers, and 2 months on the launch. In the evergreen model, the cycle time is shorter, so you will need attract, convert, and ascend content running quarterly or even monthly. In the evergreen model in a given month, there may be 2 weeks focused on attract content, one week focused on convert, and one week focused on ascend. The right mix of those aligned to your business goals and cadence is what should drive your content strategy. A big mistake content creators make is they try to have each piece of content Address all 3 of those stages.

In reality, different topics and content types work better in certain stages than others. As an example, if you’re a health coach, a content piece like the best diet for longevity might be great for attracting your audience, but it would not work well for sending someone into your flagship program. For that, a case study of one of your best clients would work better. Hopefully, you see the benefit of aligning to your goals and cadence and how much most are leaving on the table by publishing random content not aligned with their marketing goals. So how do we put a revenue generating content plan together?

We work backwards from your business objective. Let’s say your goal is to relaunch your course at the end of the quarter. In month 1, you’ll focus on attract content, so we’ll pick topics and formats that work best for attracting new audience members, like myth busting, lists, and tips. Your calls to action will be focused on lead magnets or your free Facebook group. In month 2, you’ll focus on convert content.

So we’ll pick topics and formats that best convert leads into customers. Examples would be discussing problems or pain points your audience has that your entry level products help solve. Your calls to action will be to the sales page for your entry level products. In month 3, you’ll focus on ascend content, so we’ll pick topics formats that work best for sending people into your flagship or high ticket programs. Examples would be case studies of successful clients, interviews with them, and so on.

Your calls to action will be to book a call with you or whatever your sales process is. In our content planner, which we’ll include in the show notes, You can capture all of this so that you know exactly what topic and format to create and the call to action to use every week. Notice the alignment there. Every piece of content each week aligns to the month’s objective and the month’s lead to the quarterly objective. This is the key to going from random to revenue generating content.

With our plan in place, next up is creating the content. Now here you’ll be tempted to use AI, but I strongly recommend not using AI to create your long form content. Here’s why. AI produces average content by design. Since it’s taking into account all content ever written about any given topic, you’re basically getting the average.

Real experts and guides become more valuable in a world of AI information overload, so you wanna be that expert. Creating original knowledge and content will separate you from the crowd and from AI generated content. If you create and capture over the long term, you build a highly valuable asset, your own knowledge base. You can then make an AI copy of your brain and use it to amplify and accelerate your efforts. But first, we need to create that original content.

To make it as efficient as possible, try to batch produce your content. Try to dedicate 2 days a month to content. one day to plan and one day to record. The goal is 4 20 to 30 minute videos, your long form content. From your content plan, pick the next 4 videos you need to create.

On your planning day, write out the outlines or scripts for this. Absolutely use AI to help generate ideas, structure, etcetera, but make sure to focus on your unique ideas. For recording, you don’t need to overthink it. In your pocket, you have a video camera better than the ones used to shoot the feature films of just 10 years ago. Add a wireless lapel mic and you’ve got your recording gear.

Then pick your recording location and see what the lighting looks like. In most cases, you’ll want to get a ring light or 2 or similar LED lights. Then turn off all the lights in your room and just use the ring lights. There are a ton of videos on YouTube about how to make a simple lighting setup. Finally, record your content.

As soon as you’re done, make copies and upload them to cloud storage like Google Drive or whatever you use for a safe backup. The next step is editing your video. This is another barrier for a lot of people since it is tech heavy. If you have to DIY your editing, then I strongly recommend Descript. This is a toolpad as talked about before, which lets you edit video like a word document.

Novices can pick it up pretty quickly. And then as needed, you can do some more advanced things like adding in intros, titles, captions, b roll, and so on. Descript also has a feature called Studio Sound which enhances your audio with one click. It can also remove filler words like umms and ahs and long pauses. Use Descript to make the initial edit of the video, taking out mistakes and adding any of the elements mentioned that you want included.

Then from within Descript, you can export the video first, then export the audio as an mp3 file for your podcast, then you can export the transcript for your blog post and email newsletter. The next step is publishing your long form assets. Typically, this means publishing the long form video to YouTube, publishing the audio as a podcast episode, and then publishing the transcript as a blog post and an email newsletter. Publish also means creating the thumbnail or cover for the content, caption, show notes, etcetera. In our case, we have templates for all of these, so each week it’s just a matter of editing Canva templates and outlines.

This is also a great area for AI. With ChatGPT, you can upload your transcript and have it generate and summarize show notes, captions, and so on. When all the supporting assets are ready, you can schedule the long form content to publish across those channels. After the initial publishing, repurposing is next, this is where your content engine really gets revved up. For this step, you can head back into Descript and identify 7 to 10 highlights or segments from the video.

If you keep the highlights under 60 seconds, they can be used across YouTube Shorts, Reels, and TikTok. Descript makes this easy because all you need to do to pull a highlight out is select that section of the transcript. As you select the text, it’ll tell you how long the selection is so you can stay under 60 seconds. Then you just right click and select duplicate into a new composition. That means it’ll take that clip and open it in a new window so you can work on just that part.

You’ll make a new composition for each video highlight you want to pull. Then in each highlight, it just takes one click to change the format to vertical video known as 9 by 16 format for TikTok and Reels. You can then zoom the video in until it fills the frame. Then you just need to apply the elements you want to the short form video, like a text title or most importantly the dynamic or fancy captions that people like now. Descript also makes this easy and you can change the color and style of the captions to suit your brand.

Once you have your choices made, you can save them as a template, which makes it a one click exercise to apply to other highlights. Once you’ve done that, now you have 10 more assets, the short form video highlights. Next, go back to the original video and read through the transcript to highlight text passages or quotes to pull out. Aim for one to 2 sentences at most for each. For these, you’ll use Canva.

Pick some templates that you like and apply your branding, then paste in the highlights. Once that’s done, now you have 10 more assets to quote images. There are lots of other formats you can also decide to use, like carousels or audiograms and others. But with just the ones mentioned here, you’re now up to 24 content assets from your original video recording. The next step is posting all of the repurposed assets.

For this volume, a scheduling tool is critical. There are many, but in my agency, we use ContentStudio. To create and schedule posts, we upload each video and quote and create a social media post for each. You can add captions or use AI to generate the captions from your content, Add hashtags and all the other things you typically do for your social posts. We generally post all of the assets to all of our social media channels.

Usually, we’ll post one video highlight and one quote image each day to each channel. 2 assets a day across 6 social networks means we have 12 posts going out daily. You can better tailor your posts and schedule for each network as you get more systemized. For example, in ContentStudio and some of the other scheduling tools, You can make different versions of the same post tailored to each social network. A shorter caption on Twitter or no hashtags on Facebook and so on.

When creating your post, a critical step is putting the right calls to action in them. Refer back to your content plan where you defined a call to action for each piece of content that was aligned to your business goals and cadence. Now you don’t always want to put links off of the social channel inside of your posts because the social channels don’t like you sending traffic off their networks, you can use the link in bio approach or also add a pinned comment under your post with your links. Okay. Let’s pause and take a breath.

To recap, we’ve now created one video, turned it into 24 assets, and scheduled posts for those assets across at least 5 social networks. You’ve now got a hundred and 20 pieces of content scheduled for next week in your social media calendar. Watch out, Hormozi, we’re coming for you. There are just 2 more steps to go, and these are easier but super important.

And the next one is promoting your content. If you don’t already have followers on social networks, just posting alone, even at the volume you can achieve with a content engine, isn’t enough. You also need to promote your content. There’s several ways to do this, including by commenting and engaging on other people’s content, which tends to pull traffic to your own, by reaching out to other creators related to your niche and collaborating, doing podcast interviews, and adding value to groups you’re in where your ideal customers congregate. Now this doesn’t mean spamming and dropping your links everywhere.

This very episode is a prime example. I’ve been in Pat’s programs and communities since their inception. The same is true for other influencers in this space. I’ve answered or contributed to thousands of posts and people across many groups and never dropped a link once, yet I’ve attracted clients and generated multiple 6 figures of revenue from those groups by adding value and getting invited to speak in them. While this episode is primarily about organic traffic, one final step you can do to accelerate your results is take your best organic content and amplify it with paid traffic like Facebook ads.

We generally run video view campaigns for ourselves and clients, meaning we take all their videos and put them into an ad set. Then even with just 10 dollars a day, we’ve run paid traffic to all of them to see which resonates and gets the cheapest views and clicks. The dual benefit is more people see the content, and we quickly learn which topics and formats get the best results. And that’s where the final step of the content engine comes in, measuring and tracking. Once you’ve posted like this for weeks or months, you can gain insight by looking at your analytics.

Each social network has some free tools to see how posts are performing, and your social scheduling tool probably does as well. You wanna look at views, but more importantly, engagement. Did people like and comment? Did people click through to your calls to action? What you’re looking for are the hooks, topics, and formats that resonate with your audience.

Why? Because you create more of what’s working and less of what’s not. Review all the data at the end of each quarter. And then as you plan the next quarter, use those results to improve your content plan. Okay.

Let’s pause and take another deep breath. We’ve just gone through the entire process of putting a content engine in place in your business, so you can post hundreds of pieces of content every month. Is it a lot of work? Yes. Especially in the beginning.

Is it worth it? Absolutely. You can see that folks like Gary Vee, Alex Hormozi, and so on, with their millions of dollars, could choose any form of marketing they want, but each of them invest their time and money in a content engine. Also note that they delegate large portions of that work, and you should too as soon as possible. As the creator or founder of your business, out of everything we’ve talked about, the only parts you have to do are the planning and original content creation.

Everything else can be delegated to virtual assistants, freelancers, or specialized agencies. So how can you get started establishing a content engine in your business? I’ve put together 2 free resources for the SPI community to help you establish your own content engine. First is the revenue generating content planner, and second is the content engine guide and 7 day email course. These can be found at ExpertBusiness.com/spi.

The Content Planner will help you create, document, and track your content strategy and plan. Everything mentioned in this episode, like quarterly goals, topic types, and calls to action, are all captured in the planner. You’ll know exactly what topic and content type to create each week. The Content Engine Guide and Email Course take each step outlined in this episode and breaks it down into actionable steps with supporting information and instructions. With these resources, you can establish a content engine within your business in just a few weeks, even if you have to DIY everything.

So with that, I want to thank you for listening today. I want to thank Pat and the SPI team for the opportunity to host today’s episode. And I hope everyone listening goes out and starts your own content engine and and starts creating revenue generating content for your business.

Pat Flynn: Thanks for listening to the Smart Passive Income Podcast at SmartPassiveIncome.com. I’m your host, Pat Flynn. Our senior producer is David Grabowski. Our series producer is Paul Grigoras, and our executive producer is Matt Gartland. Sound editing by Duncan Brown. The Smart Passive Income Podcast is a production of SPI Media. We’ll catch you in the next session.