Winning the Content Game

Why is Content Creation Important?

CEX (Content Economy Expo) is an annual event that brings together industry leaders, content creators, and technology providers to explore the latest trends and innovations in the content creation industry. The event features keynote speeches, panel discussions, and workshops on topics such as content strategy, distribution, monetization, and measurement.

I attended CEX last week and have information to share with you!

Content creation plays a crucial role in website ranking as it is one of the key factors that search engines like Google use to determine the relevance and quality of a website. Creating high-quality, engaging, and informative content not only attracts visitors to your website but also helps establish your website as an authoritative source of information in your niche.?Content can be an article, podcast, video, or any combination.

Search engines also prioritize websites with fresh and relevant content, so regularly publishing new content can help improve your website’s search engine ranking. Additionally, when you create optimized content for specific keywords and phrases, you can improve your website’s visibility in search engine results pages (SERPs) for those keywords and phrases. To learn how to optimize an article, take the?Blogging Made Easy!?Course.

Overall, content creation is essential to building and maintaining a successful website. By creating high-quality content that engages and informs your audience, you can attract more traffic to your site, establish your website as an authoritative source of information in your niche, and improve your search engine ranking.

What I Learned at CEX2023

AI Generated Content

There was much discussion about Artificial Intelligence (AI) generated content. AI is growing exponentially, and as business owners, we must adapt to grow with it. AI will not replace our businesses – if we are outstanding service providers.

What can AI be used for?

There are many uses for AI, and this list is not exhaustive:

• Creating an article outline and summary: One of the hardest things to do when writing is looking at a blank page or screen. Use AI to create the outline or overview of what you want to write about. Then add your experience, observations, or tips to the article.
• Brainstorming: AI is great for creating lists of topics related to a category. Ask it to brainstorm for you! You will be surprised at what it will come up with and will likely get many different article or content ideas from one brainstorming session.
• Video scripts: AI can write you an entire script for a video. You can then adjust the script to fit your personality and add it to a video prompter (or wing it). This will give you a start for what to say on a video.
• Social Media posts:?Ask AI to give you ideas for social media posts on a specific topic. You can add your personality or humor to the post before uploading it to social platforms. You can even ask AI to give you ideas for what type of image to use (if you want an image post).
• Summarizing: Ask AI to summarize a video or lengthy article. I have taken YouTube transcripts and asked AI to generate a YouTube description for the video. This saves tremendous amounts of time. You can even ask AI to correctly punctuate the transcription and paste it back into the YouTube closed captions area. This will give your video captions proper punctuation, making you look more professional.
• Research: It is way faster to ask AI to look through the Internet for information on a specific topic and summarize it for you. Then you can use that research to write your piece of content.
• Get a style guide: Ask ChatGPT to “Please, analyze the content I’ve included above. Analyze my writing style and provide me with a style guide for my team. Thank you”

This is a short list. But is contains AI uses that all business owners can implement to save time and work more efficiently. AI is a helper, not a creator. YOU are the creator!

Newsletters are Still Encouraged

Using a weekly newsletter as part of your marketing strategy is not only encouraged but one path to success. You need to “market” your newsletter as one of your products or services. The newsletter needs to be niche specific and informational for the audience. There needs to be something in it for them! This is not a self-promotional newsletter.

Grow your list via your marketing funnels and your newsletter. Mention it on social media and your email signature, and encourage your subscribers to forward it to the people they know. Cross-promote with other newsletters.

There are subscription platforms designed to grow your newsletter audience. I have not checked these out yet, but the ones mentioned were:

• Upscribe
• Beehive
• Substack

Once your newsletter is big enough to sell sponsor ads, these might be great options.

Think of your newsletter as another income-producing piece of your business. Listen to your subscribers for ideas on new products they would like to see you produce. Get your subscribers to engage and become raving fans of your brand.

Create Connection instead of Content

The audience needs to resonate with you. Infuse your personality and humor to attract people that think like you do. These are the people that will love your brand. Do not worry about other people – look for people who love you for who you are.

Reach?is how many people see your newsletter.?Resonance?is how people?CARE?about what you are doing and saying. Do not worry about reach; aim for resonance.

This is accomplished by storytelling instead of marketing. Compelling storytelling asks people how they feel instead of telling people how you feel. It needs to be about your audience.

Create connection. Inspire reflection.

If all you do is focus on topics, you are a commodity. If you add your vision and bring meaning, you will stand out.

Podcasting

There were several speakers on the topic of Podcasting.

Podcasting is a way to grow your community and brand. You can reach people who would have never found you without your podcast. This happens from people searching the podcast networks for what they are interested in. With this in mind, name your podcast using keywords.

You can grow your podcast via software like?Patreon. This is a platform designed for building a community around your podcast topic. Sponsors also use this platform to find podcasts that reach their audience.

Use AI to help with your podcast. Use this prompt to create a workflow for your team when producing a podcast:

“I need to optimize my video podcast. I want my team to help me edit the video, create Tiktok videos, publish a blog post, and create a blurb for my email newsletter.”

When considering starting a podcast, niche it down as much as possible. This will make it easier to grow the audience within the podcast networks. Consider your audience’s most significant pain point and how you can solve that pain point. Create partnerships with other podcasts that serve the same audience. Cross-promote to grow the audience of both shows.

AI and Podcasting

• Use AI to prepare the podcast overview and questions (for interview podcasts)
• Create scripts
• AI tools to produce video and audio – Descript is an AI podcasting tool for editing. If you also have a video, use a tool to cut that video into small bites for social platforms and promotion. Three possible tools are?Descript,?BigRoom, or?Opus.
• Transcribe podcasts automatically and use the transcript for blog posts. Use small pieces of the transcript for social media posts and other promotions. Descript is an AI tool that will transcribe.
• Summarize podcast transcripts for your show descriptions.

Many AI tools are available – some are free, and others cost money. New ones are emerging daily. Find ones that will support your goals and make you more efficient with your daily tasks. Some I consider cross-over tools. They will work for more than one medium. Descript will edit audio and video and create text transcripts.