Robby: The branded podcast with Robbie Fowler, episode 100, conquer Your
Content Planning Six Key Challenges and How to Overcome Them Part Three.
Content creation can feel like a monster.
Planning it out, knowing what your content marketing should be and do.
The demand feels very high.
If you are a solopreneur, a coach, a consultant, you know you need
to be producing content to get your thoughts out in the world.
But most of us feel absolutely overwhelmed.
We're not sure where we're headed, and that leaves us stalled out or sometimes
paralyzed and we're not doing anything.
And then we'll have a season where we do a bunch of stuff and then
we get back to not doing anything.
All the while we just feel terrible, like we're sinking further and further away
from what we should be doing to promote our brand, our business, and to get our
ideas out in the world so that ultimately that brings us the kinds of clients and
customers that we want to work with.
That's what we're tackling in this series, and we're gonna move to our.
Next challenge.
I encourage you real quick, go back and listen to the first two episodes
in this series to get caught up today, we're gonna dive into part three,
and that is the content challenge.
The challenge is how do you come up with content for your content marketing?
All of us have felt this, and you may be feeling it right now.
How in the world am I supposed to come up with content for my content marketing?
Let's talk about why we start to feel that way.
That challenge of coming up with content often comes from the fact
that we feel overwhelmed by the number of choices, by the number of
topics that we could be talking about.
And addressing in our content marketing, and it's like going to a restaurant
where they have a really large menu.
My favorite example is where they don't actually have a menu when
you walk up and place your order.
So think of a restaurant that is the kind of restaurant where you place your order
at the counter, you look up at the menu.
A designer has not touched the menu, so everything is in the exact same font size.
You're not sure where you're supposed to look, and there's a
huge number of options up there.
My wife and I frequently talk about this experience when we have it and
we get so panicked or overwhelmed by the amount of information, we have
no idea where we're supposed to look.
There are just too many choices.
There are not prioritized choices for us, and so we just default
back to something that we're not sure if we actually wanted that.
But it was the safe, easy order, and so you fall back on something like I,
I guess I'll just take a hamburger.
I guess I'll just take chicken because of the number of choices.
That's how a lot of us feel when it comes to deciding on what kind of
content we should be creating and talking about in our content marketing.
So you feel overwhelmed by the number of choices.
Perhaps the challenge for you is well, I have an idea of my, of
what I would want to talk about.
I'm, but I'm not sure what to say.
Some of you may feel.
That you're not sure what you want to say about a particular topic or choice.
So when it comes to content marketing, you know what you could be talking
about as far as a topic, but you're not sure exactly what to say or, here's
another thing that gets in our way, we're not sure who're speaking to, and
when you're not sure of who the audience is, it's very challenging to figure
out what you want to say, because you are not sure who you're speaking to.
So we feel overwhelmed by the choices.
We're not sure exactly what we want to say, we're not sure who we're speaking to.
That causes significant problems and challenges when it comes to content.
And then lastly, we're not sure why someone else would want to
listen to us, and that begins to allow that doubt to creep in.
We say why would someone want to listen to me anyway?
However that content gets distributed, whether that's a podcast, a blog
article, social media, we get caught in the question or the fear
of who would wanna listen to me?
Or Why would someone want to listen to me?
So those are some reasons that stand, or obstacles that stand in
our way to coming up with content when it comes to content marketing.
Now I wanna give you a couple of tips and then I'm gonna give you an action item.
We're not gonna take a ton of time because I think this is
fairly easy to push through.
Now I wanna remind us what we talked about in the first episode.
I gave a brief pop quiz in the first episode of this series, two episodes ago,
and I asked the question, true or false?
Are there content planning resources available to us online?
In other words, are there resources online that are designed to
help you come up with content?
The answer's true.
There are tons of them.
There are articles, there are resources, there are courses, there
are products that you can buy to help you tackle this challenge.
So that gives me an indication that it's not quite as simple as if I
just knew what content to talk about in my content marketing, I could
plan that out and I could just crush it because, We have no shortage of
resources to help us push through that obstacle, overcome that challenge.
Here's some tips when it comes to coming up with content in light of
where you're headed this quarter of the year, and that was the previous
episode, so go check that out.
It's very short.
That's the first thing that helps us.
We have to know where we're headed, and then we have to
know what we're talking about.
What kind of content do we want to talk about in order to go accomplish
and get our business where we want to get it in the next quarter.
Coming up with content.
Here are some tips.
What do people who know you already ask you?
What questions are they asking you about?
What topics are they asking you in looking for your.
Input.
So anyone that already knows you already has framed you out as some
sort of an expert or someone who can help them with certain things.
And you'll hear that come through in their conversation, in
particular, in their questions.
So just think of some folks that know you.
They could know you personally, they could know you from a work context.
And just think through what sorts of questions do people
come to me for answers.
Write those down and now you've got a pretty good idea of these are things
that I have some sort of a track record that people want to, they
come to me for help on those areas.
A second tip, what did you need to learn 2, 3, 4, 5 years ago?
What did you need to learn over the past three or four years that got you
from where you were 2, 3, 4, 5 years ago to where you are in your business now?
Whatever you needed to learn, there's a whole group of people coming right
behind you, likely trying to do the same thing, or something very similar to you,
and they're just a little bit further back down the journey than you are.
So what did you need to learn 2, 3, 4, 5 years ago to get
your business where it is today?
Talk about that, that is a great source for content for you to decide
what sorts of things do I wanna be talking about in my content marketing.
Here's one final tip.
If you are pivoting from another, a career, maybe another work environment,
so you were in a corporate environment and you're moving to a solopreneur
business, an entrepreneur business.
You're stepping into consulting or coaching or some sort of creative
endeavor or a solopreneur adventure.
When you're pivoting it's similar.
You want to just ask yourself.
What are you already an expert at?
What do you, what areas do you already have expertise in that you used in that
previous role or position or even career?
And just write those down and don't worry about the specific details.
So if you worked as a technical writer, you wrote technical manuals for a
product or maybe a software product.
Or a technology product, and you're a tech writer, so you write the detailed
manuals that go along with the solution that your company sold, for example.
Then you just write down, I'm an expert.
At not, yes.
Technical writing.
Man.
I'm an expert at writing and I'm an expert at explaining difficult things in ways
that normal people can understand them.
You are a, an expert explainer.
You're likely an expert teacher, you're likely an expert writer.
So you wanna write down the things that you are already an expert at, or you have
skills in these areas if you're coming from something different and pivoting
into a new career as a solopreneur, entrepreneur, coach, consultant creative.
Maybe you're stepping into speaking, podcasting, anything like that.
Take what you are already an expert in.
Write those things down.
Where do you already have skills?
Write those down.
I talked about my own journey with that in a previous episode, and
I'll track that down and I'll put that episode in the show notes.
But I had to do that as I move, for example, from.
Church ministry back into full-time marketing and consulting
and marketing advisory work.
So hopefully those are some tips to help you begin to discern what sorts
of things do I want to be talking about when it comes to the kind
of content marketing I want to do?
So let's jump to action steps.
Let's keep this simple.
Let's keep the ball moving.
Here's your action step for this episode.
Determine your three to five content pillars.
Three to five content pillars.
These are the three to four to five subjects or big buckets that you
are going to regularly be talking about in your content marketing.
You're not gonna talk about a thousand different things, so that's gonna remove
that challenge we talked about at the top of this episode where you feel
overwhelmed by the number of choices.
We're gonna narrow those choices down and say, these are the three to four to five
things I regularly want to be speaking into, and I want to be talking about these
things, and these are areas where I would love to be known as a thought leader so
that when someone thinks about one of those subjects, topics, those big buckets,
over time, they might think about me.
So let me give you a few examples of what this might look like.
What would be three examples of content pillars that someone, for example,
like me might write down to help narrow down the content I wanna talk about?
So one of those might be marketing, I am a marketing advisor.
Marketing consultant.
So marketing is a fairly obvious content pillar that I would write down.
Another one would be brand strategy or brand positioning.
And then a third one might be leadership.
Those are three areas that I regularly am going to be talking about in my content
marketing, and that alleviates all of the other choices that might distract me and
say I could talk about this also, I could talk about that also, I could talk about.
Lots of things.
No, these are the three things I want to, I wanna be talking
about in my content marketing, brand, strategy, and leadership.
You can even go the next step.
And under each of those three content pillars, you could go one more level down.
And I could say in the area of marketing, when I'm talking about
that content pillar, what are some specific things I want to talk about?
I could talk about offers under the heading of marketing.
I could talk about launches, how you launch something under
the Heading and Marketing.
I could talk about email and email marketing and email list building.
All of that could be under that content pillar of marketing.
If it comes to brand strategy, I could be talking about positioning.
For example, I have one called the three Ps of positioning that
I've talked about on this podcast.
At least a couple of times I, under brand strategy, I could be
talking about the difference between branding and marketing and how to
leverage those in your business.
I could talk about personal branding as opposed to brand positioning as
a business and leadership, right?
I could go one level down under leadership and say, I wanna talk
about the idea of, do less better.
But my little sneaky trick is there, I put a comma after less, right?
Instead of do less better, which sounds like, wait, that's a bad
way in English of saying Do worse.
No, do less things, but do them better.
That's one thing I talk about a lot under the umbrella of leadership.
Rest and reflection.
When I'm talking about leadership and then a big part of my own brand and my
own journey, and what I want to bring to the table is under leadership, what
does it look like to be a life-giving leader, leading a life-giving business?
So that's an example of what it looks like to take that action step.
So I want you to determine your three to five content pillars.
Don't have seven or nine.
It's gonna be too challenging to keep up with those three to five, and then you can
take one step further and say, under each one of those content pillars, what are
a few specific areas I could talk about?
That's how you begin to push through the content challenge.
You narrow down the choices.
You make it very simple for you to say, what do I want to talk
about in my content marketing?
You then shape those content pillars and aim them at where
you're headed this quarter.
That's what we covered in the previous episode.
And that will start to help you conquer the challenge of content marketing and
planning that out, which for so many of us, Is just a massive challenge that
we start to feel like we're drowning under the weight of the demand.
I hope you enjoyed this episode.
If so, hit the share button on your phone or your podcast player.
Share this episode with someone else that maybe you've talked about this
challenge, the two of you about.
You know how you're trying to market yourself and create content and get
that content out into the world so that it helps you grow your business.
I'd love for you to do that.
Join me on the next episode where we talk about the channel challenge.
If you've ever said, I'm not a writer.
I'm not great on video.
I don't sound great on a audio.
Join me on the next episode where we'll talk about the channel challenge.
Until next time go and build a life- giving brand