Growth Hacking for Startups 101- Part Six- Generating Content

Before you dive too deep into this post, you might want to read part 5 so that you already understand curated versus self-generated content, personas and channels.

In this post, I'm focusing on some simple, mostly cheap and effective ways of generating the 20% of your content that should be generated by you.

Once again, as a reminder, please don't use anyone's content without attribution.  Stealing sucks and Karma is a bitch. 

For written content, such as blog posts, white papers, etc., I'm not a big fan of going cheap.  This is definitely a place where you'll often get what you pay for.  You need GOOD content, not word count.  Spend the money and get the content you should have, even if this means delaying your launch so you can pile up some content because you are bootstrapping.

At the risk of repeating myself- YOUR CONTENT SHOULD NOT BE ALL ABOUT YOU.  If you only want to hear how great you are, buy a talking bird and teach them to repeat it over and over again.

Your content should be compelling to each prospect persona you have forecast.  The subject, style, etc. should all mirror the group you are specifically speaking to.

My rule is to always have at least 30 days of all content in-hand.  This means I don't have to worry about illness, vacation or any other disruption to my content streams.

Posting content consistently is almost as important as the quality.  You want people to depend on your content, to even look forward to it.

I also mentioned this in an earlier post, but well-written blog or white paper content can easily be repurposed into infographics, memes and videos.

In my experience, I find better writers with a clearly defined ad on Craigslist than I do on iWriter, UpWork or other sites.  I can't really tell you why this happens, but the result is consistent.

For infographics, I typically head to Fiverr.com.  Although the site was built on gigs done for $5, don't expect a decent infographic for $5.  Since it's highly unlikely that you need urgent work, focus instead on buyer ratings and also look at samples.

One important tip I can give you whenever you use Fiverr is to be VERY specific in what exactly you want.  You won't often find amazing creativity for $5, but you will find a lot of talented designers who can build infographics to your exact spec.  So, have a good visualization of what you want.  Spend some time on Google images searching for infographics from your industry to help your brainstorming.

If you are REALLY bootstrapping, consider combining Yay Images with Canva.  Canva is an awesome tool with a lot of preset templates, so building an infographic for Pinterest is a snap.  But, I find Canva's image selection to be pretty limited and Yay fills in the gap.  For about $20 a month for the two, you can create great visuals.

This is also a place where I'll speak about art versus marketing.  Artists are amazing and the world needs them.  But, art is also subjective.  This means that agonizing for 5 hours over which image to use for your latest blog post is truly wasteful.

Marketing for your startup is, as I like to call it, factory work.  It's rarely art and much more science.  Pick an image that ties into what you're doing and go with it.

I've also seen this over and over again with paid ads.  Founders think they need the perfect image for their latest Facebook ads campaign, yet the images that don't get much thought almost always trend to better results.

Finally, we get to video.  This is another place where you need to surrender art, surrender taking yourself and your startup too seriously and just go for it.

Consider this- the most highly viewed YouTube videos, year in and year out, rarely involve expensive production or even advanced editing.

Shoot your video, using a simple cordless or corded microphone and in front of a single color (I like green screen) back wall with a GoPro.  Then, you can head back to Fiverr and hire someone to insert slides or screenshares or provide other simple edits.

You can also find pre-built video opening/closing sequences on Fiverr.  There are a ton of great blogs with tips for helping your videos turn out well.  The two biggest I always remember are to show your title slide for at least 4 seconds (so YouTube chooses it as the image (cover) to your video and to clap out loud for 5 seconds at the beginning of each recorded segment.  This gives your editor a clear starting point.

If you're that really tight bootstrap, you can also edit your own videos using free software that's most likely already on your laptop.

There are also alternative video options, such as white board, chalkboard, puppets, Claymation and more available on Fiverr.  Keep your videos short, simple and to the point.

I also want to talk about scheduling content.  With a Wordpress website, it's easy to load and schedule blog content for future release.  There are also tons of tools available for scheduling social content, including the combination of the content that you curated alongside the content you are creating.

Talk advantage of scheduling tools so that your content isn't dependent on your availability, since you are hopefully working on building your actual offering.

Finally, a couple of warnings on content.  First, I suggest you avoid auto-content offerings for your social accounts.  It might seem awesome that you are gaining followers, but the reality is that most of these are zombie accounts or worse.  Once you grow to a size where you need someone like me, one of my early tasks will be to scrub all of that crap out of your social accounts, so save us both a step and skip auto-follow, auto-post or anything other than auto-schedule.

Second, scheduling content doesn't mean set it and forget it.  You still need to monitor your accounts and reply to comments, thank people for likes, etc.

In the end, you can automate 75% of your content publishing, but not all of it.

Next up: Not doing what one founder did and dumping over a million dollars into a startup with ZERO chance of ever being successful, a.k.a.- simple tricks for truly vetting your startup idea.