Our Strategy for Creating Content that Converts
Episode 570: Show Notes
Today, we want to talk about what it takes to build a sustainable business. One that is focused on making income for the long term, and some of the projects we are focused on internally that we think are just a little bit different to what we see other online business owners spending their time and energy on. To continue with our analogy from last time where we talked about your “Tinder date", we’re now going to segue into "How to make the relationship a bit more official”.
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But keep in mind, it doesn’t have to be forever. You’re not necessarily married to everything you put out into the world, but there is some commitment required when you start to think about how you build a business that creates sustainable, consistent cash flow. So if you want to hear about our helpful hints and top tips for creating that amazing content your business needs, let's get into it!
Our Game Plan for Long-Term Strategies to Build a Sustainable Business
From the beginning, we’ve been accidentally building things that served our long term goals, and then later, when we understood the power of them, we dove in deeper. When we started out in business, blogging was still very popular, and since then we’ve seen people move away from this concept. This is baffling to us because the differentiator between blogs and social media is that with blogs you actually have ownership of the site and the traffic, whereas Instagram could disappear tomorrow. Social media is about “right now,” which is important, but we also want to be doing things that are going to serve us long term. There are pages on our website that we’ve spent time optimizing so they rank on Google; this is such a powerful tool. The amount of traffic we get to certain web pages that then turn directly into sales because we have targeted keywords that we know have traffic to them, is mind boggling! A big part of the long term content that has served us really well is the technical portion of it. We’re educators, so having people do what we’re talking about is really important to us. We try to make sure the podcast has things included in it that are going to serve our business in the long term. Sometimes that means the actual content itself is related to our products and sometimes it’s just us having really interesting and rich conversations.
The Stages Our Content Goes Through, From Idea to Conversion
It’s taken us years to get here, but we really love where we’re at now, where we’re able to start at the very top and let the content trickle down to work for us in all of the mediums that we serve. The content we create doesn’t originate in our own heads like it used to. Instead, we have amazing people on our team who focus on SEO and in this way, help us understand what our audience is looking for. If we’re coming from a place of service, we want to serve our audience where they are at right now. What happens is, we get a long list of keywords and phrases from our SEO team, and we use these to create the overarching theme that we are going to focus on for the month. That theme impacts what we are going to say on our podcast, on our blog, the templates we release within the shop, and the aspects we’re going to pull for social media. We brainstorm titles for our content and send these ideas back to our SEO team who help us package them in a way that works better for Google’s ranking algorithm. Once our titles are finalized, our copywriter breaks them down and creates the bulk of the content. Next is the two-part editing process: we make sure that the voice flows, the introduction is catchy, and that there is a good call to action, as some examples. Then, once again, it goes back to our SEO team to check whether we’ve used the right keywords, whether we’ve used them enough, and if we’ve linked to our other content. After the written content has been approved, it goes through a publication process which includes the creation of graphics for the website, Pinterest pins, and some technical checks. The last piece of the puzzle is, you guessed it, our SEO team does a final check and any last minute clean up the content may need!
Ideas You Can Steal to Start Creating Content that Converts in Your Small Business
For something like SEO, you don’t necessarily have to have experts as permanent fixtures of your team, but you can absolutely bring them on at certain times to help you audit your site, and give you amazing keywords that you could rank for, and you can use those as a guide. It’s totally up to you how you want to manage your content. As long as you’re keeping tabs on how to keep getting your content to rank, that’s great. You can have pages that are super “old” and they can still do really well on Google as long as you’re keeping up with what’s important and relevant right now. The key is to dedicate time to what the long term vision of your business looks like, and how you’re going to attract leads, so that you’re not always required to acquire a new customer or client.
Quote This
You want to see where there is traction and then figure out how that can align with your personal goals.
Highlights
Our Game Plan for Long-Term Strategies to Build a Sustainable Business [0:04:50]
The Stages Our Content Goes Through, From Idea to Conversion [0:11:22]
Ideas You Can Steal to Start Creating Content that Converts in Your Small Business. [0:34:05]
ON TODAY’S SHOW
Abagail & Emylee
The Strategy Hour Podcast
We help overwhelmed and creative entrepreneurs break down their Oprah-sized dreams to create a functioning command center to tame the chaos of their business. Basically, we think you’re totally bomb diggity, we’re about to uplevel the shiz out of your business.
