Content Marketing for Beginners

1. Welcome to the Course: Welcome to the content Marketing course. My name is Villepin. Er, and I'm so excited to have you here in this video. I just want to quickly go over what you're going to learn in this course, how you can have the most success and what I want from you to make this the most successful course for for all of us taking it So first, what are you going to learn? This course is a complete ultimate guide to content marketing. So if you are brand new to marketing or content marketing, that's perfect because we're going to go over all the basics. How you create great content, what types of content there is, how you launch it, publish it and promote it so that it actually helps grow your brand and business. If you are a little bit more advanced in the world of marketing or content creation, that's great to hopefully this course, can you use some new ideas for how to create great content but also how to make it work for your business. You can check out the whole outline of the course and just go through the curriculum and see where you want to start. I've designed the course for complete beginners, and I think that you should go from beginning to end, especially these next couple of sections where we talk about target audience and really coming up with your brand strategy, which helps you build a better marketing plan from the get go. How are you going to have the most success? You will have the most success with this course if you take action. The best way to learn is by practicing, in my opinion and a lot of the content get content of this course is stuff that it's great to listen to and you'll have hopefully learn a lot just from watching me talk and going over key studies and slides. But you're going to have the most success with your business and your own content marketing if you actually take action. So whenever there's a lesson and we show you how to create some sort of piece of content, learn how to do something new, take action and do it yourself and all bet. By the end of this course, you'll look back and see, Say, wow, my content is so much better now. Now what can you do to do for me to make this course the best possible? I know that whenever I launch, of course, it's not gonna be perfect. I try to put everything my heart and soul, into creating this course and put all of my knowledge out there for you, going over everything. I know what I've done successfully my failures as well, so you can learn from those. But if there's anything that I didn't go over over, if I missed it completely, if there's something that just wasn't as clear as possible or something you were expecting from this course that you didn't get, just let me know. I am so happy to go back, update my courses, make them even better for you. And if you're asking about it, I'm sure there's other students wondering, too. I'm really excited about this course, and I really hope to use my experience from the past decade growing my own businesses and online businesses with content marketing, and I hope that it can help you, too. Thanks a lot again, and let's get going 2. Content Marketing - What and Why?: before we go any further. It's great to define what content marketing is and why it's important for your brand, and that's what this section is all about. We'll just cover some of the basics. So what does Content marketing? It's basically the use of any kind of content text, image, video, audio and these type of visuals to achieve your business goals. Now, what's different from regular marketing? I believe content marketing is more about the content itself. Being educational, inspirational even. Just if it's entertaining is not just specifically to sell something. So it's not a commercial is not, ah, billboard. That says, By now it's more some piece of content that interesting that engages with your audience and that through that you start to build an audience that likes nose and trust you. And then ultimately you can also sell through your content. But that's the key difference. For me with content. Marketing is that while the end goal is the same, you're trying to grow a business, sell a product or service, take, get an audience to take some sort of action. The content itself isn't a sales pitch. Why is content marketing important? Well, you've probably heard the saying, Content is king, right? So what that really means is that content is what really helps grow an audience, just like I mentioned. It helps you grow an audience that likes nose and trust you. And you can't really get someone to buy a product unless they trust you Most times and through content, you're able to build that trust. There's a few different specific key strategies with content marketing. One is just toe increase brand awareness. So just to get people aware of what your brand is, a lot of people most people in the world have probably never heard of you or your business . And so putting out content helps people become aware of you. The next is more specifically to find new customers. So beyond just getting the word out for who you are as a business, getting people to who will potentially be your customer. So that includes things like getting people to take action by following you on Facebook or subscribing to an email list, taking those kinds of actions and then, lastly, driving sales throw so through an article or a YouTube video or social media posts, getting someone to take action and click that by now. But it now let's break some preconceived notions about content, marketing and just marketing in general. Do you need a lot of money to do content marketing and to have success? No, not at all. And that's the beauty of this world that we live in right now. Is anybody with a computer or who can have access to a computer and has ideas in their head can create amazing content, even if it's not. The simplest thing is just social media posts or writing an article. But even beyond that, you can take amazing photos and create amazing graphics and visuals with free online tools and a smartphone. You can even create great videos with your smartphone or borrowing a camera from anyone. Because cameras create amazing videos nowadays and so you don't need a lot of money to do content marketing well. So if you ever taken a course, or if you've watched videos about someone who says you need toe, have a lot of money to get customers and to make sales toe do paid advertising and things like that, that's not what content marketing is all about, and it's not what you need to succeed, and we're gonna be showing you that hopefully through the rest of this course. Anyone can create content nowadays and it's easier than ever. And we're going to be showing you lots of cool free tools throughout this course that I use on that you can use to create great content. All right, so that's the basics of what and why. Content marketing. In the next lesson, we're going to go over some basic formats on types of content that you can create. 3. A Brief Overview of Content Formats & Platforms: in this video, I want to go over some content marketing formats and platforms that you'll be using. Now, this is just a brief overview to get the wheel spinning inside that you can start to think of the type of content that you might want to create. We have a full section on content marketing formats later on that dives into each of these these formats even and platforms even more so. I basically break it down into a few big buckets. We got word, we've got visuals and we got audio. So in terms of word, it's basically your articles, your blog's. You can also think of it as e books, downloadable guides that people can get and download from you and also even your social media posts. So your tweets, your Facebook updates. That's content, and it's written word. The next format audio is pretty simple. You can think of it as a podcast doing some sort of interview, even on radio show. Even music can be a form of audio content, and lastly, you have the big bucket of visual. So within this, you can think of photos, graphics or videos, and within that there's lots of different things that you can create by those air a few of the big ones in terms of the platforms that these go on. You can think of it as your website if you have a blawg. If you do video, you can post on YouTube. You can post it on other platforms like vim you as well, or even social media for audio podcasts or music or audio books. You can put those on things places like apple podcasts, Spotify or your own website. And then, of course, with social media, the big ones that a lot of marketers have success using our Facebook Twitter instagram snap shot a little bit. I'm not gonna be talking about snap that much because I don't personally use it. And throughout this course, I only like to teach things that I know and I have done myself, and so I'll be going over Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. But there's who knows. By the time you're watching this course, there might be a new sort of cool platform that people are using and really any platform the platform is not what matters. It's the content itself that you put on those platforms and how we sort of repurpose that content. And we share that content on the different platforms matters, and that's what you're going to be learning in this class. So again, this is just a brief, quick overview of just the major buckets and platforms for content marketing. We're gonna be diving mawr into detail in a future section. But in the next lesson, we're going to look at how this content that you create actually can help you grow your business with how a marketing funnel works. 4. How Does a Content Marketing Funnel Work?: Let's talk about marketing funnels. If you are brand new to business, the term marketing funnel sounds potentially super confusing, super difficult. You might not know exactly where to get started or what what to dio. I want to break it down and make it super simple for you. Marketing funnels can get very complicated, but they can also be very simple. My definition of a marking funnel is basically taking a person from discovering your brand to purchasing a product or service. So just keep it simple is that it's getting someone Teoh. No, you to get awareness of you and your brand to purchasing your service. Now this can be as quick as so on. Typing a search into Google, finding your website, seeing that your website offers a product and buying it. Or it could be as complicated as someone finding your video on YouTube, ending up on a social media group of yours, interacting with them, somehow getting on an email list of yours weeks or months later, getting an email about a new product or service and purchasing it. And that's actually pretty simple. And we're gonna be showing you how to do that in this class with your content and within their. There's lots of ways to make it even more confusing and complicated with how you get those people to your content in the first place through advertising or targeting specific audiences. Lots of cool stuff. But let's break it down and keep it simple with taking a person from discovering your brand toe, purchasing your product or service. Have you heard of the Aida funnel? So I eat a stands for attention, interest, desire and then action. And so you can think of this kind of as the funnel itself, with the biggest part of the funnel being the attention. So getting people's attention, then the smaller part of the funnel as people work their way through the funnel is some of those people who you've got their attention will become interested in you or your content. Then even a smaller, select group of those people will have a desire for more content of yours for a product or service. And then the smallest subset of that big group of people takes action. And so that's what the Aida funnel looks like. And that's what it is. And this is a sort of tried and true definition of a marketing funnel, and you'll see this across a lot of marketing courses and a lot of people teaching about marking. So remember that Aida, attention, interest, desire, action and you're trying to get work your audience through that funnel. So what might this actually look like? So first, maybe in the attention phase, you post something on social media and one of your followers shares it, and one of their friends sees that Social media post and that gets their attention. So that's that first, just getting the word out there. Maybe that Social media post was an image with cool graphic, but it also linked to a block post of yours and toe. That next part of the fun on the next step in the marking system is a block post and getting someone from social media onto your blood. So someone goes on your block that read something really interesting, funny, entertaining. They learn something educational, perhaps on that block. Pitt Post. There's also a sidebar on your blogged website or within the content, a link to a product or service of yours that's related to that block article, and that person who went from attention to interest now desires that product, and they click on that page. And so that's your desire section that desire part of the funnel. And then on that product page, there's going to be a by now, but in, or something like that where they can actually take action and make that purchase. So that's a super easy way hopeful. That's what we all wish is that your friends just share your social media posts and then their friends end up buying your product. But in general, it's not going to be that easy. It's going to take more time warming up your audience, getting people. It's a lot of work getting people into that attention and interest phase before moving on to desire and action. But that's how you can kind of see the idea of Aida funnel working. Another example would be for attention. You posting a YouTube video that getting out there. So when searching on YouTube for that topic, finding your YouTube video from there they might click on a link to your website. That's the interest on your website home page. There might be a lead magnet, which is basically a giveaway in exchange for someone subscribing to your email list. So you give away a free e book or a free online course or a free podcast or something like that, and they get on your email and they take action by signing up for your email list. So there's just another way that the Aida model fits in to content marketing. One thing I want to add, though to Aida is an R, which stands for retention, which is so important with marketing or any business, because it's way easier to sell a product to someone who is already someone who's purchased from you or someone who's on an email list of yours, then finding a new customer. And so we need to do work as content creators and marketers to create follow up content that engages your audience continually and keeps them engaged keeps them liking, trusting you and following you so that if you do end up wanting to sell another product or service to them, they're still there were willing to buy marketing Funnel isn't over. When someone takes action, you do have to have that retention to have a successful business, so that's the end of this section on the basics of content marketing. Hopefully, these three lessons give you a very broad overview of how content marketing works, Why it's important what content marking formats and platforms there are and how the marketing funnel actually works. Next and the next lessons we're going to move on to defining your brand and purpose. So this is kind of backing up and figuring out who you are as a business, so that by knowing that we can create even better content that serves our audience. 5. What is Your Purpose?: welcome to the new section of the content marketing course on defining your brand and purpose. So like I mentioned in the last lesson by going through these lessons and doing some self reflection, it's going to help you create better content that's going to actually work better for marketing. So in this section, we're going to cover what your purpose is. Positioning your brand, finding your unique selling proposition and deciding what your brand personality is. First, what is your brands? Purpose. So this in terms of this lesson, it's beyond what you do as a business. That's of course, what you should figure out. What is your purpose? Are you a wedding photographer whose goal is to capture beautiful weddings? Are you a baker who wants to bake the most beautiful loaves of bread? Are you a dog trainer who wants to be able to teach dogs how to do the most amazing tricks ? That's that's great, and that's what you should know already as a business on a brand. If you don't know that, you need to step back and really focus on what your what your purpose is as a business. But right now what I'm talking about is what are you trying to achieve with your content marketing? Because the way you put out content the way you create content is going to be different. If, for example, you want to just make more money, which is what most businesses do with content marketing, maybe you want to become an influencer on social media and get more followers. Maybe you want to grow a YouTube channel, get more subscribers. Maybe you want to increase website traffic. Maybe you want to grow an email list. These are all specific purposes and goals that you can have with content, marketing, and all of them are great and some of them will work together. Getting more social media followers will probably mean getting more traffic to your website , which will probably mean more people growing getting on your email list, which will probably mean more people buying your products and you making more money. But for each type of content or each piece of content, you really should have one goal in mind set has any of these examples so right now, I want you to pause and just think about what your goal is with the contact that you're creating. You can use one of these examples, or you could come up with your own. But I want you to write it down so that whenever you're creating content in the future as we move through this class, you're reminded about what your actual goal is. Okay, So good. All right, see you in the next lesson. 6. Position Your Brand: in this lesson, we're going to create a positioning statement. Ah, positioning statement defines and spells out who you are, where you are, what benefit your business brings, who your competitors are and what you What makes you different all in one statement. And it's a great activity to do for your own business again, so that it helps you understand what kind of content you should be creating and what your goals and everything are. So this is what a positioning statement looks like. The areas in parentheses is where you replace it with the content for your own brand. So it's four a target customer who their statement of need or opportunity. So let's pause there really quickly. So your target customer, we're gonna be looking at target audiences in the next section deeper. But for now, it's just basically finding Who exactly is your customers? Are they teenagers who are going to college? Are they retirees looking for fun things to Dio who And then it's the statement of need or opportunity. So this is really what they're they're your customer is looking to achieve. So like I said, it's for retirees who are looking for fun activities with people their own age. All right, continuing product name that's your business or a specific product is a product category. So it's within this type of product that this is what it does. The statement of Keep Benefit. Unlike your competitors, you're competing. Alternative your product again, and this is what it makes. Different makes it different, so I know that's a little confusing, so I think it'll help if we look at an example, which I'll bring up now. This positioning statement is for one of my own brands. It's called photography and Friends, and it's actually a newer brand that I came up with as my own photography students and courses started to grow. So you may have found me through my website, video school online dot com. Or you may be aware of that as one of my businesses and brands. And that's a general online school for creatives who are looking to learn new skills to improve their own lives and businesses. Within that, though, I have a big major target audience of photographers, and so I've created a unique, separate brand for photographers because and this is one good tip is to grow a brand faster to grow an audience. Better to do better content marketing. You want to focus on a very specific target audience. So photography and friends. It's a community of beginner photographers learning how to take better photos. And so, with this patient positioning statement, I've written out for beginner photographers who want to improve their photography, Photography and friends is a community that provides tutorials and support. Unlike other online courses, photography and friends is the best online community for new photographers. So you can see there that I filled in all of those areas with what I want photography and friends to be. I talk about our competitors, which are other online courses. You might even go deeper than that by naming specific competitors, and I talk about what we do. We provide tutorials and support, and then I differentiate us off by saying we are the best online community for new photographers. That's our goal. Is that what we are right now? Maybe not. But that's what our goal is as a business and brand. So I want you to do this with your own business. This is where you're gonna have a lot of success with this course. If you take action so positive video, go back to the slide from before and write it down. What you're positioning statement is. And by doing that, you're going to be ableto understand who you are as a business better and therefore be able to create content better. Because now I can always look back on this for my photography and Brandt friends brand and say, OK, is the content that I'm creating? Is it helping new photographers? Is it helping to create a better community for new photographers? Is it a tutorial or some type of support for new photographers? If it is great, I'm following my position. If not, then maybe have to rethink my brand my position or rethink the content that I'm actually doing. All right. Good luck and we'll see you in the next lesson. 7. Your Unique Selling Proposition: In this lesson, you'll learn about the unique selling proposition. This is another one of those exercises that by doing it and understanding what your unique selling proposition is, basically what makes you different. It helps you to create better content. So, like I said, it's basically what makes you different from other companies that you're competing with. So the first thing you want to do is look at what are other similar companies to yours. Maybe this is something that you already know. You probably follow and maybe are inspired by other companies similar to yours. If you don't know who who they are, do some research. Go on to social media YouTube. Go on Google. Do a search for whatever your product or your businesses, and see what other companies are out there and start to look at. What type of content do they put out? Go on their website, See what they're blogged? Articles are like Go on YouTube. See what their videos are like. Go on social media, see what Post they're doing. Sign up for their email list. See what types of e mails that they're putting out. That really is one of the best ways to improve your own content marketing. You can take some from these other companies and get inspiration from them, because if they're successful than they're doing something right, but then you also want to figure out how you can do it differently. That's ultimately what you want to do is understand why someone is going to pay. Pick your product over your competitors and what makes you different. So for me, I'm thinking a lot about my online course business because that's one of my main business and brands is putting out tutorials and courses. So what makes my course is different than my competitors. Is it the quality of the video? Is it the way that I present the content? Is it the subject matter itself? Is it the length of a course? There's all kinds of ways that I can make an online course or ah, YouTube tutorial different, and so I have to figure out how I can do that so that people will choose my business and product over someone else's. So I want you to pause again, keep your notebook out, hopefully have a notebook for this class because we're going going to be doing a lot of these exercises right out. All the things that makes you different or that you want to do that will make your business or brand different. All right, good luck, and we'll see you in the next lesson. 8. Choose Your Brand Personality: Have you ever thought about your brand's personality? If not, it's a really important activity to do because having a specific personality will help you , bro. An audience. If you're trying to be too many things to too many people, the way you present your content starts to get a little muddy, meaning that people won't understand if it's really for them or not. And so I start to think about what your personality is or what you want your brand's personality to be. This is your voice. This is what you're saying. It's how you're saying it, not just in video or audio, but also in a written article or social media posts. It's your style. So this is the colors you use, the graphics you use. Is it more modern? Is it more classic? It also has to do with where you are online. So are you just on a website, or are you on a YouTube channel and Facebook and Instagram and other social media platforms ? Your voice might kind of change on these different platforms, but ultimately it should kind of come across throughout all of this content, your branding and your personality should look similar from your website to your emails to your video content to the articles. You put out any sort of advertising across your products because you want people toe. Be familiar with you. If someone comes from social media to your website and you're using the same logos, you're using the same style of voice. If your personality is funny on social media and on your website, it has that sort of comedic edge as well. That's going to help shift someone into your website and help them to know and, like, know and trust you. Then you send them our emails. And if you automatically in your emails, switch from sort of some sort of entertaining and educational voice to amore sales E pitch like Bye now. Bye now. Bye now then that's going to turn someone off. So you want to make sure that your personality kind of flows through all of these things so that people like I said, become familiar with you and can trust you ultimately. So what does this actually look like for my case study with photography and friends? This brand of mine? I want my personality to be friendly. I also wanted to be confident, though. I want people to go to the website to watch my tutorials and know that we are confident in what we're teaching. I want to be honest, open. That's not like we're holding back any secrets or anything, but also down to earth. We don't want people to feel like we're talking down to them. We don't want it to feel like we are the all knowing instructors who have all the experience and you are just the beginner. And we you are lucky to be here learning from me. There are other brain online brands that that just comes across because of who the instructor might be. But we really want you to feel like you're learning from friends and that hopefully comes cross in this course as well. In all of my courses, I want you to feel like you're learning from someone who is a good friend who is sitting down with you and explaining something in an easy and basic and fund manner, rather than me sitting up at a lecture in a lecture hall, Um, and teaching the word from from far away. I want to be friends with you and teach you. So that's my case. Study with photography and friends similar to the past few lessons. I want you to pause after this video before moving on and just write down what you want your personality to be. Do you want it to be informative? Do you want it to be fun? Exciting? Whatever it is, it's fine. It's just that you want to stick with that throughout most of your content formats and throughout your content marketing. Awesome. Thanks so much for watching this lesson, and we'll see in the next one. 9. Who is Your Audience?: Welcome to this new section on defining your target audience in this section. We're going to cover who your audience is, what are their pain points where they live online and developing a customer persona, which is going to help you create better content for them. And I know you might be like Phil, this seems so basic. I want to get into the good stuff. Well, truthfully, this is some of the good stuff. By going through these exercises and really understanding who you are as a business, which was the last section and who you are targeting, which is this section, you are going to do so much better as a content marketer. So who are you marketing to? If you're a business already, you might have an idea. If you are just starting out, then you might also have an idea. But maybe it's not as much of a good one. Either way, It's a good idea, toe look right now on decide who you're targeting, and I don't want you to tell me that you're trying to market toe everyone. If you try to market to everyone, your voice and the way you mark it actually becomes a little bit too blurred. It doesn't work as well as if you need down. You pick a more focused target audience, and you really focus on creating content for that specific type of person. And I promise that if you focus down onto a smaller group of people, then you're going to grow faster. As a business or brand. This really means looking at demographics. So the age of your customer, the gender, the location, their education level, perhaps their income level and most likely their interest. Now for those first categories age, gender, location, education, income, you might be able to create a product and create content that spans across many ages. Many genders, many locations. You'll probably it will be easier for you to pick specific interests in terms of a demographic. But as you go on with more analytics like, for example, I look at my YouTube analytics, my Google analytics, to see who's actually watching my videos, who's actually going to my Web site, and I have found things like most of my audience are men. Most of my audience are between the age of 24 35. Most of my audience uh, lives in the United States and or in English speaking countries. And so that makes sense because my content I'm delivering in English and, of course, with their interest. Most of my audience are interested in video production or photography, So look at these things when you start to figure out who your target audience is. If you don't have analytics, just plug in some some information on people you would like to target. So a case study for photography and friends is for to target people who are 24 to 40 years old, both male and female. I don't think I have toe to differentiate between genders, English speakers. Primarily. Right now, I will potentially, in the future, start to translate my content with a higher education and disposable income. And their interests are photography. Of course, that's what they're interested in now. This doesn't mean that so one who does not have disposal in bull income, who hasn't gone to college is not going to be interested in my my content, and it doesn't mean I don't want them to be interested in my content or my community. But what this means is when I'm creating content a video, for example. Maybe I am speaking in a way that makes more sense, and it is easier to watch for a 24 to 40 year old than a 65 year old. So maybe I am speaking a little bit quicker. Maybe I'm talking about more modern technology than what I would do if I was trying to teach someone who was 70 years old teaching them a brand new style photography, for example, now with disposable income. Why that's important for me to understand here and have written out here is because when I create content, I am going to be referring to equipment and things that costs more money again while as a brand. And we believe anyone can take great photos with any type of camera to really dive into photography, you might need some disposable income, so our content isn't going to be necessarily the d I y cheap way to do things or the freeway to do things. We might not be using the free applications to edit our photos. We might be using the professional more expensive options. And so, by understanding and doing this case study of who my target audience is, I can think OK, when I created tutorial, what application am I going to be using? Am I going to be using the free one or the paid one? I'm gonna be using the paid one, because that's the one that I want to use. And that's the type of audience that I want a target In general, targeting an audience with disposable income can be better because they're more likely to buy your product or service as well. So if you are on Lee targeting people who are doing free or cheap D I Y. Methods of things that might be a little bit harder for your business business or brand. Unfortunately, so that's just one tip that I wanted to throw out there as well. So, like, always Right now, I want you to pause, go back to the demographics page slide and start to write out some of those main demographics for who you think you're ideal customer is. This is going to help in a future lesson when we develop our customer personas, so it's important for you to do that right now. 10. Understand Your Audience's Pain Points: in this lesson. We're talking about the pain points of your target audience now in the past section and this one. You've thought a lot about this because as you develop your positioning statement and even just from the last one defining your target audience demographics, you are thinking about what what they want and what they need. But in this lesson, I want you to be a little bit more specific. So think about what, what they need. Help with what you can do to help with them, and what do you actually solve for them? So let's look at some case studies toe really break this down. Here are a few problems that some of my audience has. First is just not being able toe. Take good photos, and that's something that's probably the biggest audience of mine or the biggest audience out. There are people who just don't know how to take good photos or don't think their photos look good more specifically, though, and this is good for you to do toe kind of make that your problem and the pain points a little bit more specific is that people don't understand how to take well exposed or well composed images using the manual settings of their camera. Now, before I go on, you can start to see that if this is the problem that my onions has, or that I'm targeting than the content that I create for this case, that he might be a little bit different might be a little bit more focused than what the problem was with the last case study, which was just general not taking good photos right going even a little bit further. A problem for my audience might be not understanding how to use the manual settings of a canon rebel t seven I camera very focused, very specific audience, but not the biggest audience either. So I was writing these down kind of thinking that you can get a little too far with with the problems. And if I wanted to be the Cannon Rubble t seven I guy, the guy that makes tutorials on that camera. I could probably do a really good job at that, and I could really grow an audience of Canon rebel t seven I users. There's a lot out there. Could I grow an entire business off of that pain point, I'm not sure. So I'd rather focus on a little bit larger problem, which is just not being able to use the manual settings of a camera to compose and expose good photos that I think will be better than thin. This problem, but also better than the bigger pain point of just taking bad photos. Of course, though, we welcome people who are in this subset of people, and we welcome people who are in the others upset as well. But as I create content, I'm really looking at the pain point in case study number two to do so. So now, as you write down your problems or your pain points, you can start to write down solutions as well that you provide as a business. So another problem, for example, is that that I get a lot from my students and people in the photography and friends community is that the just are inspired to practice their photography, and beyond that, practicing going on practicing is the best way to become better. And so, by inspiring people to go out, I'm helping to solve those other problems. So our solution that we came up with is to do weekly photo adventures that challenge them to go out and try a new style of photography. So every week in our community, we post a challenge on Facebook in our Facebook group, Teoh, go take a different type of photo. For example, last week, I think with Take a photo of whatever you were drinking this at this moment or later on today. So we had a lot of people trying to compose images of their coffee, cup or soda or whatever they were drinking. In a cool way, I think this week is to post a photo of an automobile, which we've got some great photos and there's a I mean any other sort of idea. Take a picture of something green, take a picture of something that has water that includes water and that just inspires people. Sometimes people just need direction to be inspired him to take action. So that was one way that we are solving this problem. Another problem that we noticed our audience has is that they don't know how to pose their subjects for portrait's or they're not confident in doing themselves. So what we created the content we created was a downloadable guide with 100 over 100 illustrated poses so they can have this guy, they can look at it and then they can even show it to the people there posing and say, Hey, this is the photo I'm trying to get and it really builds up their confidence, especially for beginners. Just getting started out with portrait photography. So as you're going to see, you can start to write out your your problems and to actually come up with solutions for this. Another solution for this exact problem might be to create a series of tutorials on how we go out and pose subjects. Another one might just be posting inspirational images from weddings that we've shot that include different poses every week or something like that on Facebook. So there's lots of different solutions, and that's where content marketing gets really fun is once you have the problems, you can come up with lots of different ways to solve those problems for your customers, and that's great cause you're really helping them with the content you create. So take a moment right out the different problems, all the problems that you can think of that your customers might have, which will come in handy when you start to think about what contact you're going to create later on. 11. Where Does Your Audience 'Live' Online?: Have you ever thought about where your audience is living in doing business in the online world? It's something we sometimes forget about. If you have a local business, it's It might be a lot easier here in the town where I live, there's new businesses popping up all the time. There's a new Mexican restaurant that's opening down the street. There is a new yogurt shop down the street. There's a new toy shop down step downtown that sells puzzles and games, and so those businesses obviously are going to be targeting people within this local area. Now, if I'm an online business, I'm not necessarily going to be targeting that same group of people. And so it's important to know where your your audience is physically so what city they live in, what state they live in, what country they live in, so that you can mark it in a different way. For example, maybe as a photography educational business, I would be targeting people in my local area. There actually is a photography school in my town that targets people within the surrounding cities. Teoh come meet them and toe take lessons in their studio, or they go out and do different photo walks where people learn. And that's one business model. That's not my business model, because I'm doing everything online right now. But in the future, if I ever did decide to do actual lessons in person, I wouldn't be targeting people from around the world. I would start to focus on targeting people within a 25 mile radius or something like that. But the location of your audience can also be important for online businesses as well. Depending on if you are actually selling a product that you have to ship, you might only be able to target people within certain countries nowadays. I mean, it's a lot easier to mail things around the world, but maybe that's not something that you want to do. It also might come across in the content that you actually create. If you are targeting people that live in urban big cities, maybe the types of posts that you pose include that kind of content more so than a rural environment. So it does matter the location. But for us, as content marketers, it's more important to understand where people are and where your audience is online So ask yourself what social media platforms does your customer use or the customer that you're trying to target? Are they on Facebook? Are they on Twitter? Are they on Instagram as Qatar photography community? Ah, lot of my audiences on Instagram, so I target the audience, but and I create content on instagram. But for you it might not be the best place to post content. What Web sites forums are your audience is your audience already using and on what other businesses and brands do they follow? You can try targeting these people on these different websites or forums. You can also just look at these other places, these other business and platforms that other businesses have to see and get inspiration for the content that you want to create. Later on, we're going to talk about creating a marketing schedule, and that means how much content you're putting out on a weekly basis when you're putting out that content, what type of content it is, And so if you know that your followers are are the same followers of X youtuber who puts out daily videos, then maybe that some type of content that you need to put out. Maybe if your followers are really into podcasts and into specific podcast that put out weekly podcast, then that's perhaps the content that you choose to create as a business s. So it's really important to look at other businesses and brands similar to yours to see what type of content they're they're they're putting out. And to understand that this is where your audience is. So you're not spending your time focusing on all the social media platforms while big companies do that, and it can be good to be on B. Have a be everywhere approach. When you're growing your business, it's important to be a little bit more focused. So what I would suggest is picking one social media platform and focusing on that platform to grow an audience rather than spreading yourself too thin and trying to do everything all at once. And that's what this really is all about. So you might already know where your customer is. And if you do great, write that down. If not, do a little bit more research right now, do a little pause and start to see where your customers actually spend time online. 12. Create Customer Personas: in this lesson, you're going to develop a customer persona. This is actually a kind of like a fake customer that helps you to think like that customer when you were creating content. And it makes researching easier when you're coming up with content ideas. It makes writing or creating that content better so that you can actually talk and speak to that customer. And I've gone so far as right now. I actually have a picture of who I believe my customer is for this specific content that I'm creating, which is this content marketing class, and I have a picture of them right in front of the camera. Now you might see me looking down below like this from time to time because I have this picture of some friends of mine who are my ideal customer. They are people who are growing their own online business who are a little bit more in the beginner stage than I am, and this really helps me to actually create this course and talk anymore. Sort of down earth friendly your way because I have this picture of them and it's making me think of them while I'm teaching this class, and that's what I like to Dio. Instead of just staring at a blank camera, I like to really think about who I'm, who I'm teaching. That's a really specific way that I use a fake customer to help me create content. But in general, just having a per customer persona ridden out will help you. So let's look at an example. So I've switched from my photography and friends brand to a completely different business that relates to personal finance, another topic that I'm interested in, but a topic that I don't create content on right now. So we have a fake couple. Mike and Molly. They are married. They don't have kids feel it. They're in their early thirties. They live in Los Angeles. They are currently renting an apartment. They are college graduates. They used Facebook and Instagram, and they want to buy a house. So you might be asking. Okay, so, Phil, where did you get this information? While the truth is, I made it up. I made it up based off of demographics that I researched, and I found to be a good target audience for my brand. Or maybe it's just and ideal customer that I have. It doesn't really matter right now if you are just starting out because a lot of growing your business is going to be testing this out. But really, I'm thinking about who I am as a person or who I waas and I'm creating content for that type of person, so I've just kind of listed this out. But by riding this out, you can really start to visualize who your customer is, rather than just a list demographics. I can have this customer in my mind, so I'm sure that you can pick picture them as well. You can close your eyes thinking of Mike and Molly. They just got married. They don't have kids yet. They want to buy a house there currently renting. They're stuck in that rental market. They live in Los Angeles, so hopefully, by sort of imagining them, you can imagine how I would create content. I also have to think about what their pain points are. They don't know where to buy a house. They're worried about a recession. They don't understand the process of buying a home. They don't know how to get financing these air all pain points that I can remember going through myself before I bought my house. And so that's where I got this information. I just made it up, and that's as a business. You probably will know what the pain points are for your customers, but riding this all out can really help you create content, because now you have this customer persona. Whenever you create content, look at your persona. See if the content you're creating is directed towards them. If not, then it might not be the best content to create. You might want to focus on doing something different. I hope that through this section you've really taken action and it's helped you to figure out who your target audience is. Let me know if this section was good if it wasn't. I know some people don't like going through these exercises or it's a little bit slow for them. But I swear to you that for the first several years of doing business myself, I didn't think about this stuff. I just started create content on anything that I wanted to, and while my business grew, it didn't grow as fast as it could have, and it didn't grow as fast as my business started to grow. As I started to focus more on who my specific target audience is now. That's my personal experience. I know that that's the experience of many other entrepreneurs and business owners who do a lot of self analysing themselves. But I think it's it's easy when you're a new business toe. Feel productive when you're just creating a bunch of content and having fun with it. But you might not grow as fast as if you take the time to step back and really do these exercises. So, like always, I want you to pause right now. Start writing out a customer persona using the demographics information that you wrote out previously right at their pain points, and you should have by now a really thorough, specific customer that you're going to start targeting with your content 13. Your Ideation System: welcome to this new section in the content marketing course, all about coming up with great ideas for content. So now we're getting to some really exciting stuff where you might feel like you're taking a little bit more action and making progress as a content marketer. So in this section, we're going to come up with an ideation system basically a way that you can consistently have ideas for creating content. We're going to be doing a couple idea brainstorms and doing some idea research together so you can see what that looks like. And then we're going to talk about asking your audience and how you can ask your audience for content ideas First, the ideation system. It's important toe have a system that works for you for ways to come up with content ideas . It's one of the hardest things for me. Anyways, toe come to work and not know what I'm going to be doing that day. And, to be honest, most of my work now to grow my business is content marketing. It's coming up with content that's going to help grow my business. And remember, from the very beginning the definition transitioning someone from becoming aware of my business to becoming a customer. So it's important to have an eye system for coming up with ideas. The first thing you wanna have is called a swipe file, and this comes from the term of old marketers and content creators writers who would have a physical file that they kept all kinds of stuff and they kept brainstorms. They can't kept news clippings, images, anything that helped them come up with ideas for content themselves. Now, basically, today, it's just a place where you can keep all of your ideas in one place. This could be anything. There's lots of tools out there that help you with this for me. I use trail. Oh, and I'll be showing you how I use trail. Oh, for for this in a future lesson in the case study. Next lesson. But you can use any type of document or note taking app like Microsoft Word, Google Docks, Evernote or even just Pinterest. Pinterest is a great social media platform for putting out content, but it's also a great place where you can build boards of your own that you can pin ideas that you want to create content in the future, so it doesn't have to be confusing. All these are free to use to get started with. And ah, really, for me, it's more of a Gloria Trillo is a more glorified to do list than anything, but it's cool because you can pin things and add images and links and things like that, which will see in the next lesson. So that's the swipe file, but more so with being a content creator. You want to make sure that you're staying on top of trends. You want to be trendy, so tools that I use to stay on trend are Google alerts. So if you go to google dot com slash alert, you can set up a lurch. For specific keywords, there's feed li dot com. This is a great website where you it's kind of an aggregate of all of your favorite blawg article, blog's or topics so you can choose a topic, and then anything related to that topic wool will show for you. Another great thing is just a follow thought leaders in your in your category or in your topic area. So these air probably people that you already follow already, but staying following them on social media, staying up to date with their Web site, their email list. You can get lots of great ideas from them, Google suggestions. So simply just typing in a topic or a word into Google and then seeing what appears after that is a great way to come up with ideas going on YouTube and looking at their trending page. Things generally will be more newsworthy things, but it's also something if there's some sort of trending topic I remember a few years ago we had the A. L s Ice Bucket challenge. You probably remember that if you were online a few years ago and this was just blowing up across the Internet and you would have seen this if you were on YouTube and checking out the trending page. And when things like that happen, it's It's a great idea toe to jump on board and to create content related to it yourself. Even if it's not specifically what your business is doing. The A. L s Ice Bucket challenge as a business or brand could help people know and like and trust you a little bit better. You should also be going on forums that are related to your product or your business and just following what people are asking about following just the threads just to see what customers are talking about. Because that's great inspiration for content to create. Read. It is a great place they have read Subreddit. It's which are kind of like forums for pretty much any kind of topic. So go to read it and and search for your topic and see if there's anything trending or if there's subreddit, it's related to it. And you can follow those subreddit and get ideas there then, of course, listening to your customers, and we'll talk a little bit more about this later. But if you are on social media, if you have Facebook group or if people are asking you questions on social media commenting on your YouTube videos, just making sure that you're actually listening to them, you can get ideas from all of these places and then put them back onto your swipe file. And that's what we're going to be doing over the next couple of lessons. I think coming up with ideas is a pretty easy thing to understand. You need to do it. It's good to have a system in place and a tool that you use, like trail Oh, or Google doctor anything. But now it's hopefully going to be beneficial for you to kind of see how I do it myself and follow along and take action yourself. So in the next lesson, we're going to be doing a case study on brainstorming your your topics and your content. See there. 14. Case Study: Idea Brainstorm: welcome to this lesson in this one. It's going to be a case study on actually doing a brainstorm. The example we're going to be using is creating content for surrounding the topic of buying a home, so kind of following up with our our first customer persona that we saw in the last section . I'm going to be using trail. Oh, because it's what I currently use and I really like. As I mentioned in the last lesson, you can feel free to use any sort of tool that you want simply Google Doc or a Microsoft Word doc or even paper and pencil is a perfect enough for this doing a brainstorm. So with a brainstorm, I'm really just thinking, using my own knowledge and my own interest as my own customer. Teoh come up with ideas. So here's trail. Oh, and you can see that I have several of what are called boards. So on each board, if I click into one, you can see that it's set up into different lists, and then under each list, there are different sort of what we call cards on trail. Oh, so let me go to a different one Let's go to YouTube tutorials. So here I've already started to do sort of, ah, brainstorm for YouTube tutorials. And so here you can see just ideas that I've written down. And then I have other lists, and you can set this up however you want, but see how I've set it up, where on the left hand side, I have ideas. And then over here I've set up list for where it is in the process of creating this this tutorial. So I have, if the intro has been recorded if the Twitter oral has been recorded, if it's been edited, if it's been approved or ready for upload, and then if it's been scheduled on YouTube. And I have an assistant who worked with me on these, and so they weaken both work with cello, we can see exactly where each project or each content is in the workflow. And that's the beauty of Trela is. You can really set it up. How you want. This is the Japanese can band style of production, and it's basically that I've set up with this board, which is basically being able to move a card from one to the next as you work on it, and that really helps me be more productive. Ah, here's another example. So here's the photography and friends board. So here's my to do list. So I have one list of to do. These are this is just, ah, content that I wanted to create, um, or these air courses that I want to create. I have, ah, competitions. I have lessons that I need to create, and here I don't necessarily have a structure of where it is like in the process of creation is just Here's the idea here it's been completed, so there's so much that you can do with Trela, but I'm just going to show you the basics if you want to get started. So I'm just going to create a new board, which you can do just by, um, clicking. The plus sign and I've done on this is the downloaded, uh, desktop effort, Trela. But you can also use it online just at Trillo dot com. And that's the beauties. You get access to this wherever you go. Even if I make changes here on the desktop app, it will change it all cloud base. And so if I'm on the go on my phone with the mobile app or on another computer, I can see it. So I'm just gonna create a new board. We're going to call this board buying a home. Assuming this is Thebe business that we're creating about buying home. Let's choose a nice background image. That's nice. And we'll just say, create board. So when you create a board, this is all you get. So we're going to set up a couple lists. So right now we're going to just set up ideas, idea, brainstorm. And then we're going to think about the type of content that we create. So as my business creating ah teaching or about buying a home, we're going to create videos. We're gonna also create, um, articles we're also going to do, say, podcast, and then we'll also do social media. All right, so we'll get to those later exit out of this menu so we can see our whole board. Now those air the list. Now we can simply click the plus sign to add a card. And so now for my brainstorm, I'm literally just going to start writing out all the ideas I have for someone who is interested in buying a home. But something that's going to help me is my customer persona. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to type in customer persona, and then with each card, you can actually open it up and add all kind of kinds of content to it. So we can add a description, which I'm pasting my description of my customer persona. You can add links, you can share it. You can add images. You can write comments. If you're collaborating, you can chat all kinds of stuff here. I'm not gonna go into that detail, but I just want to show you that now, for example, with the customer percent, we can just open it up and see what are our description is there or add it at anything to it. And that's not necessarily an idea. It's just I could move this around, have it they're just toe toe look at next I'm going to do is just click add a card, and I'm just going to start typing and ideas that I have. So if I was Mike and Molly and I'm interested in buying a home and we know their pain points from before. A lot of unknown stuff. What can we create content about? Maybe will create content about when is the next recession coming? All right, what else would we need if you're buying a home, Maybe how to get financing? Um, let's see what else to do. I remember from buyouts where to find a house, um, about how to know. I'm thinking, like, more specifically. And this is just randomly just going at it. Just all ideas I have how to use Zillow. What about maybe a comparison that might be interested in, like, Zillow dot com vers Redfin? Or maybe it's just a general best. Ah, um, online plate. I don't know exactly how to call it, but but right now, but best online website to search for Ah, home about, um, tips for, um, hiring. Ah, real estate agent. Ah. How about the just like the steps to buying a home, like a whole list? Um, how about, um um what to do in? Ah, competitive market? How about how much home can I afford? Um, and then there's, like, so many details with it. Like, um, let's see what? Um, insurance should I get What is P M I, Which is the mortgage insurance? Um so, as you can see, I can keep listening out all of the ideas that I have just off the top, my head. And the next thing you want to do is start organizing them into different formats of of ah , content. So when is the next recession coming? Any of these could be really any of these formats, but you can start out with what you think would be the best format. When is the next recession coming? That might be a good article. How to use ILO. That might be a good video. Zillow Verse Redfin. That might be good article How to get financing If you have a podcast, that seems like something. You get a great ah guest on to do an interview about that for hiring a real estate agent. Now that could be an article or a video. So if you want, you can put it both places. We can copy it. So once. If you click this little edit button, you can copy and you can choose where you want to copy it or if you don't want to do it that way. What you might want to do is open up this card and just right and notes, say something like, Make a video. There's another way that you can organize all this Or actually, it would be write an article as well. Another way you can organize all this instead of having different boards is with labels. So, for example, for here we can open up and create a label. We can create a label for video, and we can make it a specific color so we can more visually see it. So now we have Green as a video waas at this video label. So now we can reuse that articles we can add, say, yellow for articles. And now this way it's a little bit easier, because if there's something we want to do, a video and an article, we can add a new label so we can do video and article okay, and then maybe our list arm or of ah, you know, ideas in production posted schedule. Or you can do it in that sort of can ban style. So that's what I would do with Brainstorm. Just first, initially is just right out all the topics you can think of. Remember the pain points and the questions that you wrote out for your customer persona? I didn't list him here, but that'd be a good thing to do is list out the pain points and then just come up with content for that solves each of those pain points if you have. Ah, if you do research, which we're going to be going over in the next lesson about these topics or for coming up with topics and you find inspirational videos or articles or content, you can just add links to it here in the description or or in the comments of that, When it comes time to creating a tutorial on how to use Zillow, you can quickly and easily find that that helped. That will help you make better content that way. So this is just a quick brainstorm tutorial. Just hopefully you enjoyed it. Now is your turn with your business and brand to do an idea brainstorm. Now, this is probably going to be the task that takes the most time out of anything that we've done in this class so far, So I really want you to pause before the next lesson and do a full brainstorm. Just every single idea that you have. Write it down. If it's big of its small, if it's if it's important. If it doesn't seem important, just write it down. We can always edit it later. We can prioritise. That's another cool thing with trailer. You could just simply rearrange these ideas and order of best to worst. And then you just work on the ones that are the best, um, the most the top priority and ah, yeah, just write everything down and we'll see you in the next lesson. 15. Case Study: Idea Research: welcome to this case Study on idea right research. We're going to follow up from the last lesson on just doing a general brainstorm with actually doing research. I'm going to be using a lot of the tools I mentioned previously that I used to stay trendy , to stay on top of things to do on any type of topic. And so this is if you're getting stuck or if you're just getting started out and need to find more ideas, this is what I would do. So we're still thinking about buying a home. And so the first place that I would suggest looking is Google. Just go to google dot com or being dot com, your favorite search engine, whatever it is and type in your topic or your what, your brand or businesses. So I'm gonna just type in buying ah house, see? And we're already getting great Google suggestions. So instead of home, maybe houses a better option and then see, we have all these ideas already showing up for me. So buying house without a realtor, buying a house with bad credit, buying a house out of state. These are topics that you might want to create content on. So just doing a search for buying a house, though we can see what pops up, the first ones are going to be adds. So generally I will skip those because that's only appearing because that person is paying for that to show up there. I want to see what shows up just based off of content and ghoul appearing in Google Search . So what I expect is some general big guides to buying a home. So we've got nerdwallet These other websites Quicken loans. Dave Ramsey truly ah Forbes discover dot com 10 steps to buying a house. That's what I would have thought and expected to show up. So if you want to dive in a little bit deeper, you might want to do something Mauritz more specific. So, like by House in California, it's not your target market. And so see what pops up where people get money to buy Calvary Homes. California Real estate. Why buy one house in California, where he can get six and Texas pretty good articles that pop up? I'm going back just to the first search, and you'll also notice that videos appear videos will appear in your search. People can also click on videos. That's what I do a lot when I do Google searches. So I assume other people do the same. And YouTube is going to rank really well on Google searches because it's owned by Google. And so posting your content on YouTube is is a good idea. There are some other websites here, like CNBC. I see that pops up business insider, but generally Southern living those air big major brands that have their own platforms. Um, so if you're posting your videos, I would definitely suggest putting them on YouTube. It might be a good idea. Just toe. Look at this content. Let's look at this. How to buy a house in 10 steps. How a real estate agent shop for a mortgage. Now we see this, and you might think, OK, well, what other content can I create from this? Maybe you create separate articles or content on each of these things. How to hire a real estate agent, how to shop for mortgage, make a list of needs and wants. That's kind of you'd have to reframe that into something else. How to browse online house listings, how to go toe house viewings how to make an offer and negotiate how to get your loan approved. All these could be great individual content. The next thing I do is when I go to these sites is I look on their sites as well. Truly. It looks like it has a great set of guides. And so here we can look at their bike buying guides and so much great stuff. And this you can use for inspiration. You're moving checklist. How in home expections works. And it looks like, Do we have toe by this content? That's really interesting. Oh, no, that's the category. Okay, so that was like, that would be weird if truly, it was charging people get her guides. Eso awesome. Awesome, great content here. Eso that's Google. And that's what I would do with that that next I mentioned feet lee dot com. So this is another place you can just look at specific trending topics and so you can sign up for free just with a Facebook account or Google account or just with your it your email . But basically what I like doing is following websites or doing keyword alerts. So if you go to key where it alerts, and then you type in something like real estate. We'll see if anything pops up so you can follow Google's news right here for the real estate. Or let's see home buying buying a home cool so some of them will only show up. What, like we'll actually show up in new Google News, which you could also just do this on Google News. But you can doom or things. Let's type of Elon Musk, which is down here. So so that's how you can follow specific keep get keyword alerts on Google. You can also go just do general searches for Web site. So let's do real estate here so you can see that some hash tags pop up so you can follow the specific Hashtags begins. Follow specific blog's. So if we go to real estate, there you go. We got different different content creators so you can click on them and see the content that they're putting out. Or you could just follow him this way. You can also see related topics. So if we want to see um mortgage, for example, we can see what showing up with mortgages so different stuff here lost so much stuff that there's so much contact online. It's crazy and it kind of begs the question. How do you stand out? But this is also how some people can find you. So just do a search for your topic and see what shows up. Maybe you'll find some content that interests you. Really, though if you're just searching, I would use Google. But this is a great way to kind of follow those those topics. Next, let's go to YouTube. So I mentioned going to the trending page. So let's go to trending now. I doubt anything on here is going to be related to buying a house. Now we're searching. This is April in 2019. So when you watch this, it's gonna be a lot later. Lots of interesting. It's tough. I mean, we get the classics like latest music videos. So some TV shows World's biggest Jenga challenge interesting. So I'm tryingto I'm I'm looking and seeing if there's anything related to buying a home that I could do, or if there's something that maybe not related to buying a home but is somehow related, like this one, this ultramodern, tiny house will blow your mind. So if your market is into tiny homes, maybe this gives you some inspiration for, um, the rating, my wife kind of video content that they might be interested in. Maybe you want to make your own tiny home videos like I mentioned previously. Like if there's a trending thing like ah, a less ice bucket challenge or something like that you might see here and want to do yourself. You can also do search. So let's do buying a home and see what step by step tutorial we see the Dave Ramsey tutorial pop up here as well. First time Homebuyers mistakes. That's a great title. That's a great piece of content tohave timeline for buying a house. That is what I would have wanted if I started how to buy a foreclosed house, bigger pockets. And then you start to see people who are in this business or bigger pockets. I know personally as I want to see company that deals with selling and buying houses. They teach people how to be toe, invest in homes and things like that, and so you can go on to their page and see what kinds of videos and content they're putting out as well for inspiration. Next, let's look at read it. So let's check out. Let's just type in home buying. Ah, home. Maybe real estate is probably the better key word to use, so we can see that we have some subreddit. It's some might not be interesting to you, like real estate investing or interesting to my audience. Real estate photography. I'm just scrolling down just to see what there is. Realtors. Okay, so let's go back to this mean one real estate. So here this is it would be a great thing to follow and to see if there's any trending topics that you want to write about or create content about. There is also going to be a lot of questions that people post, and that's one way you can come up with ideas for your content, all kinds of good stuff. Google alerts. This is very similar to feed Lee, so I don't want to spend too much time in here. But if we type in real estate, for example, you can sign up for a real estate on alert whenever Google something pops up on Google with this term you're gonna get emailed about it. You can do like a digest one email a day. Now you're gonna get a ton of stuff for a big topic like this. But maybe if you're searching for real estate Ah, Los Angeles. Maybe that might be a little bit more specific and and better. I have Google alerts for my name for my business name so that I can stay up today. If anyone is creating content about those things, I want to make sure that if something pops up on on the Internet about me, it's it's Ah, it's something good. It's not some sort of spam thing or anything like that. Similarly, Google trends so much stuff out here to use Google trends. So unlike Google alerts, which you see like a preview of the articles and stuff that pops up when you type in a search term, that's just for setting up like an alert. Trends shows you what is trending in a particular topic. So if we type in real estate, for example, we can see is this topic growing? Is it not growing? You can see over the past, ah year. The topic has basically stayed popular. You can see by subregion where it is more or less popular, so it's like interesting, like up in Montana, Wyoming Main. This is a very, very popular topic down below in the South of the U. S. It's not as as as popular. Kind of interesting, huh? All right, Here's one last example of what I would use Google trends for. Say, I was doing tutorials on these different assert home search engines. I typed in the top four that I knew of off the top of my head. Zillow Trulia, Redfin, Realtor. Now the gap is astounding. Realtor dot com shows up a lot more than any other ones. Zillow is next. And then Trulia and Redfin are, Ah, lot lower. And so this would tell me. Okay, I will probably want to create tutorials using realtor dot com or Zillow dot com, knowing that these air the more popular tools that people use. If I create tutorials using truly A or Redfin, that kind of segments my audience to a smaller segment at that, most people aren't going to be using these other sites. Eso making content that's available to the largest audience by using Google trends. It tells me you Zillow or realtor dot com All right, all right. Lots of cool stuff here. But basically, what you should do is do all your research, add any ideas you have to your brainstorm list. And now, if you do that, I would guess that you should have dozens, if not over 100 items that you could create content on it doesn't mean you have to do all of that ever or today or tomorrow. But now you will have a big swipe file of topics that you have you can create in the future . And like I mentioned with your swipe file, it's important to copy you these links. Or if there's an image that you have or anything that inspires you. Copy that to your document so you can look at it later to get helping inspiration. Thanks so much. I hope you enjoyed this little case study. Hope it wasn't too long for you. And we'll see you in the next lesson. 16. Ask Your Audience: So far in this section, we've learned several ways to come up with great topics for your content. Another way is to ask your audience themselves. So if you already have an audience, this is going to be a lot easier. If this audience could be anywhere from une email list to its falling you on social media, your YouTube subscribers, wherever they are, it doesn't really matter. But I want to give you some tips and tools for actually how to ask your audience for ideas . So some tools that you can use our just any sort of survey tool like Google forms type form surveymonkey or on social media. You can often do polls I know on Facebook and Twitter. You can create pulls right within the platform itself. So if it's kind of determining between a couple of different ideas, you can create a pole. Or like I did recently in my photography and friends Facebook group I we I mentioned we have those weekly photo adventures. Every Monday, we post an idea four and an inspirational. We'd take photos to try to get people to go out and take photos. We were running out of ideas for them. So I just Post made a post that said, Hey, what ideas do you have for our weekly photo adventures? And I got several dozens of ideas that we can use now and and now I have another year's worth of photo adventures to post each week. So lots of different ways to ask your audience. But these air the tools that I like using some tips for your surveys just keep it short. If the survey is too long, it's gonna be a lot more difficult to get people toe take action. Usually, if I have ah survey for my audience, all keep it sometimes to just one or two questions. And I'll say that in my email that I send or on the social media posts all say something like, Help me with Help me by answering this one question survey just to let people know it's gonna be short, uh, having open ended questions. While that's gonna be a little bit longer for people toe do, it's better because you'll get higher quality content. Sometimes asking yes or no questions or multiple choice questions is great. But to get really great ideas, you can ask open ended questions. When you are doing a survey, make sure you have it set up. So it's like one question at a time. This is more so. If you're posting on social media, it's probably better to ask one question in a post rather than a but a bunch of questions. If you're doing something more like Google form or survey surveymonkey or something like that, it's OK to toe asked multiple questions on that survey. So you want to avoid those types of leading questions. You want to be more specific. So, for example, if it is about buying a home, maybe you ask question like, What's the hardest thing about what was the hardest thing about getting a mortgage or what was the hardest thing about the home buying process for you, Um, or what? What would make buying home easier for you? Those kinds of more open ended questions and then giving incentives is a great way to get more answers. So give a giving away a gift card, giving away some sort of free be free download another piece of content podcasts. Ah, video. Siri's something like that in exchange for people answering your questions that will help you get more people responding, especially if your audience is in that big. So if you're just starting, here's a few questions that I would ask was the biggest challenge doing ex wires? E. Whatever it is, you're content. It's about your businesses about. You can ask what service or tool would help you doing that? What experienced do you have in this? So this is a good question, us so that you know, if people are complete beginners, if they're more intermediate, more advanced, you can even do more of a pole or a multiple choice. Say something like, What experience are you beginner? Intermediate, advanced. So, you know, if you're creating conduct to more beginners or advanced, what's your preferred method of learning? This is another way not specifically for coming up with ideas for your content, but for content formats. So I would just leave this as open ended, or you could do a poll for, um, you know, podcasts video article book. You could list out different content formats that you want to create and see which ones your audience, like most, and then and then use that when you start creating your content. So if you haven't done a survey for your audience, I would definitely recommend doing that right now and see what they say. Come up with a list of questions just a few or one question and and see what happens. And I would love to know what happened. So once you do it, make sure that you reach out to me. Find me on social media. Andi, share your insights in the course in the Q and a section of the course or anywhere I would be really interested to see what what you come up with. All right, so hopefully this section on coming up with ideas for your content has been very beneficial . And if you haven't been doing so throughout the section, now is the time to sit down and do it. I challenge you to come up with at least 50 ideas for content, and so that way you have almost a year's worth of content that you can create, and that should cover the basis for for pretty much any any brand or business. And yeah, so do that. And we'll see in the next section 17. What Content Marketing Formats Are There?: welcome to this new section of the content marketing course, all about formats. We've talked a little bit about the different formats and platforms that you can use before in the first sections of this course, but in this one we dive deeper and we look at a lot more examples you, from myself and from other businesses and brands that I like that are doing content marketing the right way, hopefully to give you inspiration for what you could be doing yourself. So first, we're just going to run through a list of all the different types of content so that you can get the wheels turning and spinning for what type of content you want to create. Then we're going to go through this case studies for writing visuals, video, audio, social media. And then we put it all together and talk about repurpose ing, which is important, and it makes your life a lot easier when doing content marketing. So before we jump into the case studies, let's just go through a list of types of content. We've got social media, so this includes lots of different types, which could be visual writing. But really what this means is when the content is on the social media platform itself, not necessarily just a link to a non article or a link to a video. So when you actually post something and it's living on the platform, that's content marketing itself. We've got articles, email newsletters that's content itself to Webinars Videos different than Webinars of Webinar is a video but video. There's all types of different videos, case studies, so this could be an article. It could be a video, but it's a category within those podcasts. And when I say podcast, I don't mean you have to create the next cereal or this American life. Ah, lot of great content marketing Podcasts are just a short series of podcast episodes put together. Stand alone, and you don't have to be updating it every week. That's Ah, that's ah, valid way to create a podcast e books, digital magazines, Web conferences or summits, cheat sheets, downloadable or just online workbooks that people can download print work through things templates. So, for me, I think of templates as like photo graphics or video editing templates, visual effects, templates, infographics, another great form of visual that can be used for pretty much any business slide decks, audiobooks, online courses, photos themselves, quotes, images with quotes, quizzes, polls and the list could go on. But hopefully now you have a good sense of a lot of the different types of content that you can create. If you were sitting there wondering, Oh, I'm a business, what kind of content should I be making? Hopefully, this list that I just provided starts to spark some inspiration for you. Next, we're going to be going into the different formats and I'll be showing you what I've done successfully, hopefully to give you even more inspiration and ideas for what you can do in your business . 18. Case Study: Writing / Articles: Welcome to this new case study on writing in this video. I want to show you some of my most popular articles and show you how I've set up my articles on my website for success. So video school online dot com is my main business and brand, and it's a place to learn creative skills. And so, if you go check out video school online dot com, it'll probably look something like this. The Home page has some basic information about what we are, what we dio, what we teach, what you can learn on our website and then at the top of the page. There are links to different categories or different topics. Over the years, this has changed before. Instead of having these different categories, I had a link to just my blog's or just my articles. What I realized was that because I have visitors in different Target audiences who come to video school online, some interested in video, some just interested in photography, it was best for me to actually separate the categories on two separate pages and make it easier for people to find the content that they want that way. Just diving back into the archives thes air three of my most popular articles that I wrote years ago, and they started to rank on Google. And so if you search for terms related Teoh, Adobe, Premiere pro or after effects, or how much to charge as a freelancer, or how green screen works or green screen tutorial, then these articles are going to be some of the first ones that pop up on Google. And that's why articles and rid and word is a really good thing off to do for content marketing. Because if it lives on your website as written word, then Google will see that and other search engines will see that. And that's how a lot of people are going to start to find your website through searching for keywords on Google related to your search terms are related to your articles. This is why, at the end of the day, spending more time creating higher quality content such as an article is probably better. In my opinion, at least, it's work better for me than spending more time on things like social media. One of the best things that I learned as an entrepreneur and as an online businesses that social media platforms they are not. Search engines. While you can search on Facebook for a content or Twitter or or instagram once you post something depending on the platform, that post might disappear from people's minds within a minute or two. Definitely within a day you think about the people on the things you follow on Instagram or Facebook. And how many times have you gone back a year or found something on Facebook or Or Instagram that was posted over a year ago? That is still not that is not relevant today, but that is just post pub popping up on your feet. Not much, if I would bet on it. And that's because Social Media wants you to see new new new content, whereas on a blawg or a website, you don't necessarily have to be posting new content all of the time. And that's one thing I want to get across in this case study is that to do well with articles you don't have to be posting every single week, you don't have to be posting every single day. Being consistent is good, and posting frequently is great. If you can do that. But as a solo pron, your I know how hard it is to where all of the hot of a business person and a marketer and and everything else you have to do as, ah, solo preneurs. And some times it's better to focus on creating a limited amount of higher quality articles than having to post something new every single week, or or more often. So if you're just getting started out, what I would say is pick the 5 to 10 most popular questions that someone may be asking for about your topic and write an epic guide slash article about that. And you can have that what I'll call pillar content on your website. So if someone's new to whatever your businesses and they come to your website, you have content there for them. That will be interesting. Imagine if you were a newbie in whatever business you are doing, whether it's teaching online or baking bread or taking photos or selling, I don't know, selling pancakes on the street, whatever it is, if someone comes to your website, imagine if someone was just getting into that topic and just getting really excited about it and your website was there for them and had 5 to 10 really great articles that were super interesting for that person. Then that's going to be a win right there. And that's kind of what I've done. Although I've been writing articles almost weekly for over five years. At the beginning of this year, when I'm recording this course, I stopped writing new articles because I realized I had written a lot of articles or had other authors write articles. For me that covered a lot of the main topics, and that's what I wanted to do with my website. I didn't want to necessarily become a website where I was writing articles about the latest trending topic related to photography, for example, like the latest camera model that came out. That's not what my website is. There's lots of other websites that do that for me. I wanted the basics of how does one learn how to become a better photographer. So instead of having an articles or blawg page with the most recent articles popping up, I created these category pages and you might not have multiple categories. This it might just be one page on your website for guides or articles, and it just has a list of all of the articles there on this page for people. And these pages are really, really popular for people who come to my website, and it's very engaging. The bounce rate, the rate at which people leave my website after coming to it and visiting only one page is very low. We'll talk more about that in the analytic section of this course. But here, if you're interested in photography and you come to my website and go to the photo page, look at all these articles that are great for someone who's interested in photography. We have the basics camera basics, composition, X exposure, camera equipment. If people are interested in equipment. We have camera equipment and camera lenses, and all of the articles and guides are listed out right here. A lot of these guides I actually had someone write, um, for me last year just because as my business grew, I wasn't having time, didn't have time to write articles myself, so I had someone do it for me, and that was a really good idea, because I was able to publish weekly content. Um, and still do a lot of my other, my other things as well. And so if you go to video school online, you can see kind of the quality of the articles. One thing that also does really well with articles is linking and cross linking to other articles of yours because the goal is to keep someone on your website right. You don't want someone to come to your website and then leave. So if you're in and you come to this depth of field, um, article, you start reading it. You see that there's links to other articles about Exposure Triangle or about APA. True, I make it a little bit more interesting with a video tutorial that is on YouTube again, aperture. There's links to those macro lenses. So if you find something else you're interested in, you might say, OK, I'm interested in what a crop sensor camera is, so I'm going to go. Oh, this is actually an affiliate link, so that's one way you can make money from your block, but let's see under and over, exposing your images for for creative creativity. Here's another article. Okay, so here's something that might interest you and then you kind of get on this track. We're just going from one article to the next, and I like the that. We've set up these pages with lots of articles because it's a resource for that person to come to this page and get all kinds of content. They're not going to consume all this content in one day, but they'll know. Okay, if I ever need anything about video production or photography, etcetera, I could go back to video school online dot com. It's easy to access from these pages, so that's just one other tip. Ah, the last sort of case study I want to show you is You don't have to be posting content on your own site, necessarily. If you can guess posts on other websites, that's great. So, as you know, since you're taking this class, my one of my main businesses is online courses, and you to me dot com, is where I post a lot of my courses, and it's one of the biggest parts of my business. You to meet has a blogged themselves, and a while ago, this is in 2015. They had me right, a guide to photography This is a really, really long article slash guide, but it's super comprehensive. It includes tons and tons of keywords for someone who is surging. Okay, this is just like a blur to you. I know that was kind of annoying, but here's all the topics that are covered in this guide. And this is something that would be great on my own website. Just one long guide, but also toe be guest posting, posting it on another website, specifically the marketplaces Blawg, where I sell my online courses. It does really well, and it converts people into students as well who are interested in taking this, um, this learning about photography. And then there's a link to my course. So if there's any marketplaces or just other websites that are related to your content and your topic, reach out to them, see if you could be a guest post. I know as a website myself, I get people emailing me all of the time, asking if they can guest post on my website. Most times I say no, and so a tip is, if you're going to do that, make sure that you really do your research well and when you pitch your idea to be a guest writer, make sure you include several ideas that are very specific, really high quality and very very related to that. Websites Target Audience Sometimes I get people trying to guess post for me talking about business. But videos go online while we do post some business articles. It's mostly about four video creators, photographers and other creative fields. And so those types of guests post I'm not going to include. Sometimes it's just brands or products that are trying to sell their own products through their guest post, and I can see right through that, So that's not something I want. But sometimes I'm trying to think if there was one here that I can remember, I'm pretty sure that this better cinematography on a budget article was a guest post, and this is something that's on pitch to me, and it works. Works pretty well because it's exactly what my audience is interested in as well. So guess posting is a great way to get your content to more places. Get your content on websites with more visitors, especially when you're starting out. But make sure that your pitching high quality ideas. All right, Hopefully, this case study, looking at some of my best performing content inspires you and gives you ideas. Like I've said before, one of the best ways to learn is to follow people in your niche. So while video and photo might not be what you dio, um, probably isn't. It's important to follow people in your own niche and you'll learn even better that way. Awesome will see you in the next lesson. 19. Case Study: Visuals / Photography: welcome to this new case study on video content. So in this lesson, I want to show you some of my best performing videos to give you some inspiration. As I mentioned in the last video, make sure you are looking at other people's content related to your topic to see what kinds of video content they're putting out. If you want to find me and just look at my channel, you can go to YouTube dot com slash search for Phil, Evan ER or video school online. All pop up just past the 100,000 subscriber mark this year, which is pretty exciting. It just helps when you have. When you do this consistently and you have more subscribers, your content when you launch it gets, gets more views and starts to rank even faster. And that's why you want to encourage people to subscribe to your content. So if you click on the videos tab and then sort by most popular, you can see my most popular videos. Now here's a couple things toe check out, and I would say this is a mistake toe. Learn from come the videos tab and then sort by most popular you can see my most popular videos. Now here's a couple things toe check out, and I would say this is a mistake toe Learn from. Not that I'm upset that I have a few videos here with Well, one has over a 1,000,000 views. One is close to a 1,000,000. But look at the topics for these top three ranked videos of mine. Passive income, early retirement, retirement. These are not related to my core audience. And like I said, it's great to get these views. But most of the people who come to this video are not going to then watch a video on Adobe Premiere Pro titles and graphics tutorial. But this is who my core audience is. Here's another one, baseball explained in five minutes. Why do I have this video? Well, probably four or five years ago, I was just creating content on anything that I was interested in, and I was putting it on my YouTube channel. And while sometimes this works, it's not a great way to grow an audience on YouTube or any platform that you're on. I wish that back then, I had focused on creating more content and not spending my more content on my topic and not spending the time on these other things. Or if I had wanted to post thes video. That being said, here are some of my best, my best videos and we can see why. I think they, um, have done well. Here's one called titles in a Central Graphics tutorial, I launched this in 2017 right after Premiere Pro while looking my funny face right after a Premiere Pro. My video editing application of choice made some major updates toe how you create graphics and titles. So this was a topic that was, I would say, trending as much as you can. Trend with video editing. And it was something that, while there were a few other videos out there already, um, it was definitely a need to have a bigger, better tutorial out there and having a channel that already had several subscribers, probably between 25 to 50,000 subscribers. When I posted this, it automatically got those initial views from my subscribers without any sort of external promotion, and that helped it start to rank even faster. So let's see, if we type in essential graphics, we can see that my tutorial. It has more of use than these other ones that are ranking a little bit better. But it is on this top page, so it's definitely enticing for someone. Teoh, check this out. Um, I also have another update video to the panel 2018 update, which is ranking pretty well. The other thing. Let's I'm just testing this out. Let's see if I type in Premiere Pro. Look what shows up a couple of my tutorials. Here's how to add Camera Shake and Premier Pro. Here's my learn Adobe Premiere Pro. One Hour of Free Lessons Here's the essential graphics video. So several of the top 10 to 15 videos are videos that I've posted myself. And that's good, because if people are just interested in Premiere Pro, then they're gonna find my content. This video the one that we saw a ranking while learn Adobe Premiere Pro One hour of free lessons. This is a case of repurpose ing where we'll talk more about this later in this section, but I took content from my class and put it out there for free on YouTube, and I've included a link to the course. This is part of the marketing funnel. Very simple marketing funnel of just simply sending someone from a video on YouTube to the paid product. But that's a very simple funnel. And today, as over 200,000 views, this video itself has probably made me thousands of dollars from this link itself from people buying the class straight from from this video. So as I go through my videos, you can see that a lot of them are have to do with video production motion graphics. There are some photography to toils of mine that do pretty well. Here's a general promo for my class. Here's some photo editing videos, but really my biggest audience on YouTube are the video creators themselves. And you really want to pay attention to that? Um, and just like I said, pay attention to trends. This is something part of my ideation system. Just paying attention to trends, um, being creating big general videos like this free learned premiere pro guide. Ah, and just thinking about what beginners are are interested in. Here's used the right sequence settings and premier pro over 274,000 views, and the reason why I thought this would be a good videos because this is some a question that I get all the time from my audience. So listening to your audience, um, like we learned in the previous section, is a great way to come up with video ideas. We'll talk more about the creation of video content, the tools and and things that I use in the next section. But if you go through some of these videos, you can see that they range in quality and style. Some of them are just me talking on camera. Some of them are screen cast. These ones up here are a little bit mawr end up there. I did some basic animations, so these were created in after effects and just some basic animations and motion graphics. So those ones it pretty well and ah baby, that tells me if I spent more time creating more videos like that, they would also do really well. But what I also see is that I don't have to do a full blown production, which takes multiple weeks to create, like these ones to have a video that ranks pretty well. Sometimes it could just be simply a screen cast if It's the right topic, all right, So now I'm over on the photography and friends of Facebook group, the community that we started for beginner photographers. And in the group, we've posted several videos. Facebook is a different beast for video content. It is a lot better to stay a little bit more updated, post more frequently and what we'll do. You can see just some of our videos. Here's a couple of videos that are updates. Here is a live stream, so every month we do a live stream with my buddies. We get together once a month and do Q and A. Here's a little update from Will one of the co instructors just talking about, Ah, frame that it got. So we just kind of pop in here and here and there to talk about updates and things like that, and that works really well with Facebook, and it works well on YouTube as well. On YouTube, I focus more on evergreen content that's going to last a long time. Like, for example, if we go back to this page. Ah, lot of these topics, some of them might be have to be updated within a few years. But a lot of these topics will last and people can search and find these videos, and they'll be good for them for years to come. Whereas some of these things like this update video right here, which was a quick welcome to the photography, actually not that video. This video right here. Hey, Phil here, which is just an update to what's going on in the group from in the month of March. That's not going to be relevant in a year from now. So on Facebook and Social Media, I would say it's okay to have more of those videos that aren't evergreen. But if I was a business starting out on YouTube, I would definitely focus on the more evergreen content. All right, I hope this helps and gives you some inspiration, and we'll see you in the next video. 20. Case Study: Video: welcome to this new case study on visuals and photos. We're gonna be going through some of the visuals that I post as a business and brand and talk about what works and most likely, what doesn't work as well. So over on Pinterest, I have a profile that I've set up for myself and my brand, and you can see that over time it's gone in a lot of traffic over 600,000 monthly viewers of the pins that I post on Pinterest. And to be honest, do I do any work on Pinterest? No, I don't do any work at all. It's all set up automatically, and this can be done through your different social media platforms or website to automatically post pins. When you post new content, such as a blogger article or a YouTube video, there are plug ins and tools for Web sites like WordPress, or you can use an external app. Legs Appier. I'll just go to their website really quick so you can check it out. Zap here dot com is really awesome because you can connect different APs and create automated work flows. For example, if you post a new article then it will trigger something. I know this is a little bit of a tangent, but I think it's really interesting. So let's just search. If you go to explore, you can search for absolutes, say whenever I post a YouTube video, what action do I want to take? You could send a YouTube video to a Facebook page. You could see percent tweet new YouTube videos. Let's see if there's one that includes Pinterest as well. So let's typing Pinterest so you can select multiple. We've got YouTube in Pinterest. You can automatically post on instagram post on Pinterest seem with Facebook. So what you could do is send it to Facebook and then create this other automation that sends the Facebook page post to Pinterest. Or if you post a new article on WordPress, it posed a Pinterest so really, really cool stuff. Sometimes you have to set up multiple steps for it to work properly, but definitely check it out. We have a full course on automation that we don't really go over it more in depth in this class, but have created an automation course with Scott Duffy that goes over a lot of these things alright. So back to Pinterest, we can see that a lot of these posts are just recent posts that are automatically pinned from my articles. But if we scroll down, we can see the ones that are most popular. You can see the views here on the left hand side. Here are some of my most popular pins. We've got 25 posing ideas for men that have over five almost 500,000 views over 2000 pins. We've got these different posing guides and this is something where I was actually looking for visual content to create on Pinterest. And I saw that this was working thes visual guides. And so let's see if I just type imposing guide. Let's see if one of my pins will pop up here. Posing guy, lots of different content. See, I saw something similar to this, and I thought, Oh, we can create something like that. So here's posing guy right here. So on the main page for opposing guide so one can come here and then if they click on this , it goes to my website. So, kid, this one's specific kids posing ideas and so the visual is great people can download this. It's not really like an infographic, but it's kind of that infographic style. And on any of these blogged articles people can download. Our guide that includes MAWR poses in an easy toe view format, so that's getting a little bit more advanced into the actual how the marketing funnel works . But the basic idea is that I was looking for ideas for Pinterest. I saw that those posing guides were were popular, so I actually went out and I paid someone to illustrate those poses. And then I put it together myself as that Infographic style. And then I pinned it, and it has done really well, so it was a little bit of extra work, but at the end of the day, it was worth it. Now, if you're just getting started on Pinterest, what I would do is you can set up these different boards. So, for example, I have a photography tips board. I have a video production tips board. I have a premiere pro tips board and then I went back to my website and I just found my best content and I pinned it to those boards and that was the first thing I did that took about a day of work to put together those boards, find all my good content, pin it together and from there I just started automating everything and everything is just running on its own now. So that's Pinterest. Pinterest is its own beast but a great place to post any sort of visual content. So next is Instagram. So Instagram is mostly photos. I have a personal instagram. I also have a business Instagram. So one thing we're doing recently is we're crowdsourcing content for our video school online Instagram. So all of these photos that you see here are photos taken by our students And the cool thing about this is not only do we get to feature student work, but we also inspires people who might want to learn photography when they see Hey, this was shot by a student in this class. That's awesome. Maybe I want to take that class and so we have a link to the class in our profile and on Instagram, you can have one link, so generally you might just put this back to your website or to your main product. But, um, we have it linked out to our our ah photography class for now. Um, so that's pretty cool. We got all these photos just from students that we we posted on Facebook in our photography and friends community, asking for people if they wanted to be featured on Instagram. And we got over 100 submissions on DOF course that takes time to grow an audience. Who's going to want to do that? But it's one idea to use now on my personal instagram. It's a lot more personal, and, um, while I there's a few photos of my twin boys right now, there are almost eight months. There's also just some photography that I do myself, and so I try to keep it a combo of professional but also personal. And I like that because it shows a different side of me that is not shown on my business account. And I think people like that people like seeing a little bit more of the behind the scenes of me, and that helps build my brand and helps people to, like know and trust me a little bit more than just seeing sort of the standard stock photos or things like that. So it's up to you. I think on Instagram and on social media, it's fine to open up a little bit more and to show a little bit more of that, that personal side. All right, so speaking of photography and France, I just wanted to show you a couple of the sort of graphics and things that we've posted. So here's just a sample of a photo adventure post, so every week that they see a graphic like this. This was created with canvas dot com. We'll talk more about tools for visuals in the future. Lesson here is just a visual for a tutorial that we created, Um, and this was also created in Canada dot com. But whenever you post something on Facebook or on social media, posting it with an image gets more traction. So that's why, with most of our post, we try to add a visual to it. Here's our monthly editing challenge, so as you can tell, we have a schedule for what we're posting, and this is each month we post a photo that everyone can add it together. And then we asked them to post the edited photos in the comments so you can see kind of an example of that here. I believe I mentioned this earlier in the class. We crowdsourced ideas, Four photo adventures. So this was just a post on Facebook. We used the sort of big image style text posts that you can do. Now here is a photo competition. So this is a closed group. Um, so you probably won't be able to see this if you just go to the post. But I just want to show you that, um when you are on social media, it's a good idea to to be visual. The next thing I want to show you is just how important it is to stick to your branding. So here's my main video school online page on Facebook. You can see the logo with the colors. You can see the logo here on the cover image. Now, if you go to my website notice anything is the same. Image is the same logo. It's the same color choice. And that is important because it helps people feel comfortable and confident when they go from one page to the next one platform to the next. If you go to my courses page. So if you go to courses dot video school online dot com, it's a little bit different. Just because I wanted the color scheme to be a little different. But the logo is the same. And if you join our membership, you can see that when you become a member and you look at things such as the learning paths , which are in that membership area, colors of the same imagery is the same. So if, for example, you're interested in photography on video school online dot com, you're on this page and then you join our membership, you can see that you have the same sort of imagery there. Same fonts across the websites, trying to make sure that it's a seamless transition and seamless path for people to use. And it's not like a completely different logo or image that would throw someone off. That's very important when you're doing visuals and photography is to come up with your set fonts, your set colors, you set logos, even buying some stock image that you can use across your platforms. We're finding free images and in repurpose that all right, As always, check out your own people you follow. See what they're doing. See what they're doing on social media. So you how often they're posting what types opposed the posting? And that's the best way to get inspiration. All right, have a good one, and we'll see in the next lesson. 21. Case Studio: Audio / Podcasts: welcome to this case study on audio content. This is a bit of a shorter one because personally, I don't create that much audio content. I do have a podcast for the online course Masters brand of mine, and we are currently going through. Some major changes were redoing a website. So it I'll try to update this video when we have the new website up because Rained, our website looks a little funky with the color schemes and everything, but basically we have a podcast that has over well, now 78 episodes two seasons worth, we've done two types of seasons. One, The first season was just myself as a host, and I interviewed other course creators. In the second season, I brought on a co host, Jeremy Deegan, and we went through all of the basic sort of topics of creating in launching an online course. So you can see here on our blogged our podcast page on our website that we go through a lot of the main topics and creating and selling an online course, and we broke those down into individual episodes, and in our third season, we're going to get back to interviewing other course creators and people related in related industries that could help online course creators and ah so both both seasons were really great. I would say that doing the interviews was easier in terms of creating content because it's kind of a a formula. Every episode was very similar. You asked very similar questions, and for a while it was very easy toe batch process and record a bunch of interviews in one day or one week and have enough episodes to launch over the next month or two, or or even more. Um, After doing so many interviews, though, it started to get a little bit harder to find new people to do interviews with with everything else I was doing. And so I went to this next season going in with a co host and we came up with a list of 2030 topics and we just kind of batch recorded a bunch of them in a few different weeks and that was really easy for us. I would say that when you're getting started, I think the interview format is very good for growing podcast because you can use your interview guests and leverage them to grow your audience themselves and try to get them to share your podcast when it's released. So we have a website. It's a separate brands online course Masters. As I mentioned, it's going to be re redoing it right now. Each podcast episode. We have an image. We have a description. We have the podcast player. We have sort of bullet points of what is taught. We have links to subscribe on our different platforms. Resource is and also the video version of the episode Now. I talked about this before about how now, in the new season, I don't think we're going to do the video version of the APP so full up. So because we want people to be listening to the the episode on their podcast app like Apple podcasts or stitcher or Spotify just so that we're getting more plays in downloads there basic outline of our typical post. And so here's the lead magnet on the right hand side started the funnel getting a little bit ahead of ourselves. But for people interested in teaching online courses, they can get that there, as you can tell the color schemes really off because you see this teal, which is going away because that's the video school online. Teal, not the online course Masters color. And we're changing that up to have a more cohesive brand for online course masters. The cool thing, too, is that online course. Masters is now everywhere. So if you turn search for online course Masters podcasts, you can see that we've got our website, and then we also have all these other platforms that sort of syndicate podcasts automatically Pod Bean, Apple, iTunes or Apple podcast. We submitted our podcast there, so that's why it shows up there. Same with stitcher, Um, but Player FM. Listen notes dot com these air websites that just take and syndicate podcasts, and it's a great way for people to find your podcast without you doing any extra work. Here's an example of how a guest or an interview guest can help you grow your podcast. Because this guy, Dan Vega, who I interviewed, he has a brand and on audience of his own, and he posted the blogger article with the podcast itself, and that helps us get more more listens. Eso here you can see on pod Bean iTunes and then this is player FM. How they take those episodes and they actually, um, share share the episodes. And you could listen on here without us really doing any extra work, because these are just They take the feed. And, um yeah, didn't have to do anything to do that. Awesome. Thank you so much for watching this lesson again. This is a quick one just because we don't create much audio content ourselves other than this podcast. But as always, make sure you're listening to podcast related to your topic to get more ideas for what you should be doing as a content marketer. Cheers. 22. Case Study: Social Media: welcome to this case study on social media content. We saw a couple examples in the past, lessons for social media and what to post there. And whenever you post new content, you should be sharing that content on social media across all of your platforms. But on you're different social media accounts. You should also have a game plan, and a schedule will talk more about coming up with that schedule in the future. But I want to show you what's working really well in the Photography and Friends Facebook group. So every week we have a weekly photo adventure. I've mentioned this before, but I just want to show you some more Advent Mawr examples, and these are some of our post that get the most engagement. So this week we saw posting a photo of fire last week was post a photo of an automobile, and so you can just go through we the every week on Monday, a new post goes out. I don't have to be there to post this. I have it all scheduled out. I use scan va dot com to create these graphics, and I also use Can VA scheduled on camera dot com to post them. You can see here that in the future, the future weeks we have new posts that are going out for for many, many weeks into the future. We also have the editing challenges. So we saw this was from this month. Here was the one from last month. Here is the one from the previous month, and one of the things we try to encourage people to do is to post their photos on Instagram with these Hashtags. I think I updated the hashtags for this challenge because we are really pushing the Photography and Friends group. So let's go to instagram dot com. Let's search for this hashtag and see if anyone has actually posted their photo. I've been checked this in a few weeks or a few days to the top post most recent posts. We got a few people posting their photos. That's pretty cool. There are some other people using this hashtag, and so we're trying Teoh like overtake the photography and friends hashtag and make it our own because it isn't that popular here. There are a couple of their pictures from other challenges of ours. Here's our logo itself and so trying to encourage people to use Hashtags on Instagram that will get more eyeballs on their posts and therefore more eyeballs on your post and your brand is a great strategy, and this is all scheduled. Like I said, Weekly monthly, another monthly thing we do is the live stream. So I talked about this. We have our video live stream, and just having the schedule keeps the group engage. It keeps me from having to come up with new con brand new content every month. For example, with the photo editing challenges, I sat down. I got 24 pictures from a website. We saturate dot com or from photos that we've shot ourselves that we can give to people toe edit. And now I have two years of content that is ready to go, Um, and it's all going to be scheduled out, so I don't have to be there actually doing it. And on Instagram. Speaking of instagram, I have I used later dot com the later app to post thes student photos so you can see here the photos that I was talking about, where we crowdsourced the photos from our students and these are all scheduled out for 9 a.m. every day. And if you go back to our group, let's see if I could find out Pose featured on Instagram and I had and the post is deleted now. But I had just posted in the group asking people if they wanted to be featured on Instagram . One other really cool thing that I do is use an app called Ryker Post, which, as they say on their website, re cycles your old content and recycled social media post to increase customer engagement. Because on social media, once you post something, it can literally be gone, and no one can see it a day later on our later or even 10 minutes later. It's a fine idea. Teoh be posting the same content multiple times. So Ricker Post helps you do that. Where you can do is actually set up a content library. So what I've done is set up multiple buckets of categories, so I have photography tutorials, video tutorials, premiere pro tutorials, video production tutorials and these air taken from the post on my website that we saw in the previous case study, and then I schedule them out So my schedule is the on Mondays, we post a video production article. Wednesday's of photography Thursday's of photography to tour So Wednesday's of photography video tutorial Thursday's of Qatar for article and Friday, a Premiere pro tutorial and Ryker Post automatically is going to take the videos or the articles from your content library and share it out, and it's not going to repeat it until all the other content has been shared. So with all that content, I have about half of a year's worth of content, um, to be posted. And so that's awesome, because now, on my Facebook page and on my linked in profile, and if you pay for a Ryker post account, you can do this to multiple even more social media accounts. I have so many things being posted from these accounts that keep my audience engaged so you can see if I go to my Facebook page. Some of my posts are older articles, older tips, but they're still getting lots of likes, still getting lots of of shares from people who have more recently started to follow me and probably never saw these posts before. So that's a cool little tool to check out to recur post dot com Awesome. So this is the case study on social media. I hope you enjoyed it and we'll see you in the next lesson. 23. Repurposing Your Content: Let's talk about repurpose ing your content. Basically, what I mean by this is transforming one format or piece of content into multiple formats. So, for example, we can turn a podcast into a YouTube video or an article into a downloadable PdF guide or turn video content that you have into an infographic. This is a great way to create mawr, content to reach different audiences, to reach not only different audiences on different platforms but to reach people who like consuming content in different ways. I have a lot of lessons in my online courses and our photography masterclass. One of my best selling online courses, has tens of thousands of students, and those videos have been viewed hundreds of thousands of times by people all around the world and its content that I've actually taken some of the lessons from the videos themselves and turned those into blogged articles or turn those those into YouTube videos, taking some of some similar content and putting it out there for free, which attracts people. It brings out that brand awareness and instead of having to reinvent the wheel or feel like I since its content, that's in an online course it's in a product of mine, Then I can't share it somewhere else for free. Depending on what your business is, it might not look as simple as taking a video lesson from a course and putting it out there on YouTube. Of course, you probably aren't doing an online course business. Maybe you are. But if your business is digital media or it has any sort of content that you create, make sure you're thinking about how you can repurpose it to reach multiple audiences. Now it will say one more thing about this, though with a pod cast as an example, I have my online course Masters brand. This is my brand, where I teach people how to create Unseld online courses for for a long time I've put the podcast episodes on YouTube because it, like I said, it reaches a different audience there. Part of me has wondered if putting it on YouTube has decreased the amount of listens I might get on the podcast itself, And the problem with that would be that by not getting as many plays and downloads of the podcast audio episode, the ranking of the podcast and the awareness of the podcast on podcast marketplaces like Apple podcasts or Spotify or Google play might not be as good as it could. So this is an experiment that I'm currently running, where in the future I'm not going to be putting out the entire episodes on YouTube. I might put a short snippet. I might put a little promotion or a preview of the episode on YouTube, but ultimately I'm trying to get people back to the main content because depending on where you're putting your content, a lot of your success is going to have to do with ranking of that content in whatever search engine it is. If it's an e book on Amazon. Still, it's a search engine and you're trying to rank on there. If it's a video on YouTube, it's a search engine. If it's a podcast, it's a search engine. If it's an online course, it's a search engine that's going to determine most of your success. And so by driving a lot of traffic to that core piece of content that you're trying to rank and that you want most people consuming, that's going to do better than just repurpose ing it in a bunch of different areas and spreading it out. So one other tip is perhaps putting out your main content as your main format. So if it's a podcast put out as a podcast. But then also later on, perhaps putting out a blogger article with the transcript for that. You can also do this at the same time, including a downloadable PdF that includes some of the the basic tips and tricks that are talked about in that podcast episode, but not spreading your audience too thin and point pointing them to different places. If at the end of the day, you want people to listen to that podcast on apple podcasts or whatever marketplace you want them to be on, so hopefully that makes sense. But in general, if you're stuck and you're like Phil, I've created a ton of content. I don't know what else to create. Think back and just look at what content do you already have? Can you transform it into an infographic? Can you turn it into a more interesting downloadable guide? Can you turn it into a video or or vice versa? Thanks so much. I hope you enjoyed this section and we'll see you in the next one 24. Introduction to this Section: welcome to this new section of the content marketing course up. It'll now you have a good idea for how to set up your business and brand for success with proper positioning, targeting the right audience. And now you have some ideas for what types of content you can create in this section. We're going to be going over tips for creating your content. I'll be going over some of my best practices as well as tools that I use to create all of the great types of content you'll be creating, such as Write it written in articles, video visuals, photography, audio and social media in general, What makes great content? It's helpful, relevant, unique, user friendly. And it has some sort of morality to it, meaning that it is easily shared. And it prompts people to share it, even without any sort of hard nose asking or calls to action for people to share it. So, of course, with your videos articles, it should be helpful no matter what it is, and mostly for most businesses, unless you are based and your revenue sort mean revenue sources based off of just views or clicks which in that sense Maybe it doesn't have to be helpful, but maybe more just entertained, entertaining or interesting. That might work. But for most businesses, your content should be helpful. It also needs to be relevant, of course, and needs to be timely. It needs Teoh be something that people are actually interested in and related to your actual brand. We saw in the last section how I've made that mistake in the past of creating content that's not relevant to my main brand. And that probably actually hurt me in the long run rather than then was good. It should be unique. Of course. Every idea has been been done before. Most ideas have been done before, and when you're thinking about creating content and you're writing that list of ideas or coming up with ideas, you're going to be taking from all kinds of different places. But you need to have a unique perspective, a unique voice, a unique way of telling it, just copying what else what other people are doing isn't going to be successful. It might get you to a certain level, but it's not going to make you a really great content marketer. There has to be some side of it that is special and is a reason for people to follow you to go to your your website or business compared to your competitors. User friendly, it just has toe be easy toe watch, easy to read if it's an article broken up with images, headlines, If it's video and I gotta have graphics or make sure that the video actually looks good, they can hear you and in general, just high quality. And then, like I said, there has to be some sort of morality to it. It doesn't mean that you have to be viral to be successful. None of my videos have gone viral. None of my articles have gone viral. None of my content has gone viral. Even without that, I have a seven figure business that is doing really well based off of content marketing that I've done over the long run by creating content that follows the rest of these main tips. Of course, going viral would be great, and it would help, but depending on something to go, viral isn't the goal here. At the same time, whatever you create, it should be something that you yourself would want to share online on social media or with a friend. Just just think about that when you're creating the content. How Make sure that it's good enough that you yourself would share it publicly on social media. So the next lessons we're going to dive into each specific bucket of content and go over my tips and tricks and tools to use. 25. Write Great Content: welcome to this lesson in this one. You're going to learn about writing great articles. Here's the process for writing a great article. Select the topic. Research it. You organize your article, you write it. Actually, you make it beautiful. You edit it and then you post it or you schedule it. So let's break down each of those parts with topic selection. We've talked a lot about this in this course. So for you, you really just have to go back to your ideation process. If you have that swipe file of documents and links or ideas, go back to that that and pick your top article ideas and start with those ones. When you're looking at those topics, you want to make sure that you're thinking of something that's current or something that's just completely evergreen. So something that it doesn't matter if someone's looking for it today or in a year from now or five years from now, it's still going to be relevant. And then you also might want to look for a gap in the market. So look for something where it's it's a hot topic, but there's not as much content out there yet okay, so that's also a fine way to do it. And sometimes you can kind of catch fire with those types of articles or written content. If there is that gap in the market. And really, the only way you'll know if that's true is if you're staying on top of you're trends. You're following other infant influential thought leaders in your topic area, and you're realizing that there's something that is new and exciting that hasn't been talked about enough. The next stage is research, so what you want to do is find all of your related content yourself that you've posted. So if you have videos or other articles or other products or services related to that topic , then keep that on hand because you'll want to be linking out to that other content, just like we saw in the case. Study on the articles from the last section. I do a lot of cross linking because you want to make sure that you are keeping people on your website as long as possible, and cross linking doesn't necessarily have to mean just on your website you could be linking from a NAR tickle to a YouTube video or an article to a Facebook community or group or something like that. When you're doing your research, you want to be looking for other things like quotes, images or case studies that can make an article more interesting. There's lots of great places to find free images will talk about that in the future. But looking for images that are free to use or licensing images is an option and then looking toe other thought leaders or finding examples. That's really what people connect with IHS. If they hear stories that they can relate to so trying to find those the stories can be helpful. Once you have your topic, you've done your research. It's time to organize. So before you actually start just riding it out to create better articles you want toe have a structure. So that structure is typically going to be an introduction, the body of the article clothes and then a call to action. And then sometimes you'll include a call to action earlier in the introduction or after the introduction, such as if you have a lead magnet like a downloadable PDF guide, you can include that higher up in the article rather than just at the end. You'll probably get more engagement and conversions with that sort of called action up above than if it's just at the end of the article, because most people that end up on your article aren't going to reach the end. That's just the fact of the matter. So start to outline these different sections. So really think about with the introduction, what's going to be catchy? What's going to get someone's attention if they land on that page for the body, think of the 3 to 5 main points that you're trying to get across. Break it down into those big, big sections of the body and then later on your right out all the content and then, lastly, with the clothes, make sure you have some sort of reason for people to to do something next. What's what's the next thing you want people to do? Is there another article you want people checking out? Is there a product or service that you want people checking out that's going to be tied in with the clothes and with another call to action? And then it's time to write. One tip is Teoh. Really think about your customer persona while you are writing. If you need to have that image like I do while recording this video of your ideal customer right in front of you, so I can pretend like I'm talking to them. And if you're writing, that's a really good idea, so that you are speaking in the personality and the tone that you want and really thinking from their perspective and thinking of their where they're at eyes, your writing, you also generally, uh, what is typical nowadays is to speak directly to your reader just like I'm speaking directly to you. In this video. You can use the words you and I in your articles to build that connection. I don't think having your articles completely in third person is the rule anymore, and I think actually trying to connect directly with the view the reader is more important when you start writing. It's probably better to start with the body of your content, right, all of that out before you do the introduction and the outro because as you write the body , just like if you're doing an essay or a research paper back in school, you probably did the same. You would write the body before the intro and the conclusion. At least that's what I was taught to do so that you know exactly what is said throughout the body. So you can really pare that down into an engaging intro and outro later on. And then, lastly, you gotta add your calls to action, so this should not just be lead magnets that are separate from your article, but they should be written content within your guides and your articles explaining what people should be doing next. If there's another article or guide that they're interested in, it could just simply be a hyperlink that send them there. Or it could be text that's written out, saying, If you're interested in this topic, you should check out this other article or course or or whatever it is, you're other content that might be they might be interested in. In the last last time, we talked about wanting your content to be user friendly with articles that means beautifying it. So adding images graphic videos to break it up and also just make it look more appealing. Add headings, so that means changing the font size and actually making it a header header style font. That's going to be different, depending on what website creator you use. But in general, with any website creator, WordPress or ah, blogged creator or wicks or or really anything squarespace, there's going to be an option for creating text that's a header. And not only is that good for breaking up visually the content of your article, but Google and other search engines read those headings differently than they read the regular text of the article. They see that as more important until with your headers, you definitely want to include have that be your main like keywords and section headers that include keywords that people might be searching for on Google or other search engines on. And those will carry more weight and help your articles and you're reading content rank higher. If you have proper keywords in your headers, you want to add a title to your post, and this is something that you should spend justus much time thinking about what the actual title of your post should be, as you probably did, writing the actual content. It should definitely be keyword friendly. It should should be exactly what your article or content is. But it also has to be catchy and in tasing uh, not spammy and not click baby, but trying to get people onto that article. And then sometimes, depending on your your website creator, you add a featured image, which is not only the image that shows up at the top of the block post or the written content, but it's also an image that will show up in search engines as well next to your your content. When people see that in a search engine. After you do this one pass of just creating the content, it's important to edit it. Walk away, take a break and come back to it and make sure that you re read your article, fix any mistakes. And also ask yourself if it solves the initial problem of the topic the pain point that you were creating this content for, Does it truly help that hopefully it does, if not figure out ways to make it even better. Check for s CEO and keywords. So S CEO is search engine optimization. So you want to make sure that throughout your articles you are using keywords definitely don't want to just be adding a bunch of keywords just for the sake of adding keywords. But if there's ways to say something, that's a little bit more keyword friendly meanings, using words that people will be searching for, use those words whenever possible. Also ways to make your website content Maurizio Friendly is to use things like the alternate text for images again, This is going to be different for any sort of website builder, but you can usually edit an image and at alternate text. This not only helps people who are visually impaired to understand what is on your your content, because with different Web site readers for people who are visually impaired, it can actually read through and say exactly what the image is. But Google and other search engines see that alternate text as well. And again, if it's something keyword friendly, it's going to help your your article rank well. And then, lastly, it's time to post it or schedule it. Most of us are going to be creating content in advance and scheduling it to be posted. It's great to have a schedule. So posting a new article at the same time or on the same day of the week. Just so your audience knows when it's going to come and they expect that. And when they know and expect that, they're more likely to come back to your website and try to consume your content. So that's up to you, depending on your content schedule. Overall, though, remember that quality of content and the quality of your writing is better than quantity. Of course, it's great if we can put out a ton of great content all the time multiple articles a week. But if you're doing this by yourself, that's going to be difficult. So I would much rather have you spend the time creating 5 to 10 amazing articles or guides , then trying to post every week quality over quantity. The next tip is that the headline or the title of your article and the first sentence are the most important. If you don't know nail, those people are going to click away or they won't even end up on your article or reading content. So spend time thinking about how to make that enticing. You want to be true and honest. No spam, no trying to trick people, especially if this is a part of your marketing funnel and trying to get people to buy a product or service from you and they're going to see right through you if that's the all tear, your motive of an article, the main point of your written content is Teoh to be engaging, to be helpful to to be entertaining, but not to sell. So just remember your audience. Remember who you were talking to, remember who you are trying to help, and when you do that, your content is going to be great. 26. Make Great Video Content: in this lesson, we're going to go over how to create great video content. First, let's go over the some ideas for video content that you can create. You can do things like tutorials, interviews, vlogs, which nowadays is more of that Behind the scenes personal style video video vlog came from the term video blawg, which could mean anything. But now the vlog term has meant that sort of D i Y sh recording yourself Selfie style video . Ah, webinars events, testimonials and reviews from your customers live streams of any type on any type of social media, which could include things like tutorials or webinars or or events or things like that. Or, of course, there's just traditional types of videos like entertainment, documentary, comedy, drama, Anything you could you come up with a scripted video for your business or brand as well. The key with content, marketing and video, and you probably see this a lot more with big name brands is that it's not always a commercial for a product or service. The product or service might play a part, but that's not really what the main video. Maybe about in California, we have a lot of ads from the helpful Honda team. So Honda, the car car maker. I don't know if they do this around the world, but this is their new style about where they actually just go out and do helpful things around around around the state. They will go, uh, remodel a a faculty lounge and a local middle school. They'll go pay for someone's bills. We'll go hand out free hot dogs at a baseball game. Now it's hard to tell if this is is completely documentary. A lot of the times, it seems like the people in it. Maybe actors may not be actors, but they're definitely partly acting in it. But that type of content, even though it's a commercial, it's not about the cars itself. It's just about them being helpful, and that's what they want to get across. That their personality, that's their brand. And so that's the content they're creating and putting out in their commercials. And that's what content marketing is all about. Creating videos that are interesting for people. Toe watch that aren't just a sales pitch, so what do you need to create great videos while you need a camera? Nowadays, you can use your smartphone, a DSLR, fearless camera, even a webcam. Any of these cameras are great for beginners. Getting started. Most cameras, if you do any type of photography, can shoot great video Even 5 10 years ago, when I was getting started out with my business, making video content was way harder than it is now. Now we can shoot four K HD stabilized video that is well exposed. Great colors from the tool that's in our pocket. Eso You don't have to get an expensive camera. Teoh to make great videos. Start with what you have for audio. Audio is important, and it is a little bit trickier than the video aspect because having great audio is really important. You can do something if you're creating videos with your computer, like using a USB microphone that plugs right into your computer and allows you to record better audio that way. Then there's different types of microphones, like the lava leers lapel microphone. Those are the ones that clip onto your shirt or the shock on microphone, which is like a boom mike. You probably, if you recognize on the film, sets the person holding the boom pole And then at the end there's a microphone that they point at the person's mouth. Right now, I'm actually using a boom mike. You can probably hear that. I'm touching the shotgun microphone and it's pointing directly right in front of my mouth to get the best audio, because I have this studio set up at my house and I wanted to be set up all the time. I don't have to be worrying about up clipping on a microphone or anything like that. So, depending on how often you'll be making videos will determine how much money you want to invest in getting the video production equipment. Now I'm going over a lot of this, and you might be wondering, like Phil, I want to know the specifics. I will include some links earlier in the course to gear that I use and recommend. You could also go to video school, online dot com and check out My resource is page, which includes gear that I'm currently using and I I approve of and recommend to people. If you're wanting to get a little bit more in depth in creating videos, we have a complete video production course that you confined on any of the platforms that you are watching this course on, and that course is great for complete beginners. It's co taught with my buddies, Sam Shimizu Jones and Will Carnahan, and it's like I said, a great course for for absolute beginners. We dive into all of this content a lot deeper. This course is not a video production course, so this is kind of a brief overview of the tools and the tips that you need to great create great videos. But if you want to learn the actual production sides of things, definitely check out that course. After you have a camera and a microphone, you don't necessarily need lights. But if you're filming indoors or if you want one set up that's going to look consistent, which is good for branding consistency, having lights is a good idea. Nowadays, they make great led light kits that are relatively inexpensive. If you go on amazon dot com and just type an led light panel or led video light, you'll see lots of options. And honestly, some of the cheaper options will be just fine. If you're just getting started out right now, I used the Dre cast set, So it's D R a C A S T Dre cast, and that's the brand that I use and trust. And I love their lights. I'm using three of them right now and again. Check out the video production boot camp or check out video school online dot com. We've got lots of free articles that go over all of this stuff that if you don't want to pay for another course, you can learn over on video school online dot com. If you don't have lights, you can even just use natural light coming in from a window or a door or sit outside. It is kind of an art to make natural light look good. You want to be sitting with light shining on you. You don't want the window to be behind you because then it's gonna be hard for you to be exposed properly. But that's definitely a viable option. If you have a room that is well, well, it naturally, any video is going to probably need some editing. The tool that I use is called Adobe Premiere Pro Final Cut Pro Axes, another great professional tool. If you're looking for something a little bit more inexpensive and easier to use. Film Aura and Apple I Movie are great options or for Windows users, Windows movie maker. Those air great ways to just get started. And really, with any of these tools, you can do the basics of of editing out mistakes, adding music, adding titles, adding basic graphics or photos and things like that, and you can create great videos with any of these tools. And then, lastly, if you don't want to be actually creating the videos yourself, you can outsource this up. Work dot com and freelancer dot com is another one that their websites, where you can hire freelancers Teoh do any type of job for you. And I've outsourced a lot of editing, including the editing editing of this course itself to a freelancer who lives on the other side of the globe. Ah, and that's the amazing world we live in nowadays, where you can do that for rather inexpensively. In terms of tips for creating better videos, you want to remember that each of your video should be answering some sort of pain point for your customer, so again, go back to your customer personas think about what pain points they have and make a video that's going to help them out through your videos. You want to be telling a story, even if it's not a narrative classic story, you're not creating the next Finding Nemo. This is a good thing to do is to try to create a story and be a storyteller throughout your videos, because that's what engages your audience more than more than anything. You don't have to be a perfectionist, though as much as I think it's good to have a video that is easy to see, even see the person in it. You can hear the person clearly after that. You don't have to be again creating the next Hollywood film. Just be putting out content out there. You'll get better as you practice and with all the online courses and tutorials and help out there right now, it's easy to learn how to create great videos, and a lot of it is just practice. And one of the most important things is to be authentic. Be honest, be yourself. Share yourself. That's what I'm trying to do with this class. I'm trying to be completely authentic I'm not telling you things that I don't know if it works or not. I'm not telling you things that I've never tried myself. I'm trying to be completely honest and authentic with you, and that's the worst you've probably noticed. Noticed this? If you're on YouTube and it video pops up from someone who's trying to sell you something, you know it. You know, if they're trying to sell you something and that works for some people, some people can get caught up in that. Some people are tricked by that, but most people aren't, and you're going to grow an audience in a business that likes nose and trust You way better if you're completely authentic with them. And lastly, remember, you're calls to action at the end of every video during a video, even at the beginning of a video. In the video description, when you posted on YouTube or social media, make sure there's some action that you want your user to take, and that should be important for every single video that you create some sort of action. Even if it's just subscribing to YouTube channel, it doesn't have to necessarily be going and buying a product, and more often than not, you don't want to directly have people send people to a product page from a video that sometimes works. And that's worked for me in on some videos on YouTube. But in general, when you're putting out content online, especially video content, people aren't in the mode of buying right. People don't go to YouTube to buy things. If they're on Amazon and your E book shows up, then they're likely to buy it, because that's what mode there. And they're in the mode of buying. If you're on you timmy dot com and you're looking for online classes, you're in the motive buying. But if you're on YouTube and your ad pops up for buying something, then it's not going to is not going to work as well as creating great free video content that sends people to great free content on a website or on social media, and then building that trust through that. So your calls the action can be anything from directly to a product. But more often than not, if you're just growing a business, just sending people back to a Web page that gives them great content and then on that website is more of the start of your funnel. Ah, with lead magnets and opt informs all stuff. We're gonna be going over later in this class. All right? I hope you enjoy this. This video again. If you're interested in taking it a step forward, check out our other courses on video production and check out our articles and free guides on video school online dot com. Cheers. 27. Make Great Visual Content: in this lesson, I'll give you some tips and tools that I use for creating great visual content. Remember, visual could mean anything from a photo to a graphic illustration. INFOGRAPHICS SLIDE DECKS These are all great things that you can create that are appealing and great for social media as well. The graphic design tools that I use and recommend Arkan va dot com Canada is great because all cloud based its online. You can access it wherever you want. You can create up pre a profile that has a specific brand color logo font choice that will actually be easy to use throughout all of your graphics. They have great templates for all kinds of of anything. Really. Any specific type of social media posts cover image, downloadable, printable, slide show anything they have templates for, and they look really great and it's free to use. They have free images that you can search and use as well. If you're looking for something a little bit more professional and robust, Photo shop is the tool that I use. It's also on another adobe product, so if you do want an adobe membership, you get access to things like Photo Shop Premiere Pro for editing light room for photo editing all kinds of applications there. Gimp is a free option, similar to photo shop, It's open source and a ah lot of people recommended. I don't use it myself because I use photo shop, but if you are on a budget, it's a great option. Word. Swag is another graphic editor. Great for creating social media posts. If you're looking for free photos, some other places to check out our unspool ash dot com pecs als dot com picks obey dot com And like I mentioned, Canada dot com has a library of free photos that you can use on most of these all these sites. The photos are free to use for whatever so commercial purposes, noncommercial purposes. You don't have to worry about licensing some of the photos and some sites they do require attribution, so you have to actually think or say who the photographer is. But these ones, I believe, and then them require that although it is nice toe, attribute the photographer whenever possible. So those are the tools that I would recommend in terms of just creating great visual content. I think it is, it just means going back to the basics of of all content you want it to be on brand. Use similar styles of photography's similar styles of graphics, colors, fonts, those kinds of things. And that's why using Canada dot com or creating templates of your own so that all of your YouTube thumbnails look the same, all of your social media posts have a similar vibe. That's important because it becomes familiar to your audience and builds that trust. If you're looking for a more in depth guide on graphic design principles and those and even using any of these tools like Canada or Photoshopped, there's other courses out. There's there that we've created and also great free tutorials on YouTube to check out. Thanks so much for watching. I hope these tools and resource is help you out. And if there's any other ones that you would like to recommend and you would like me to share with the rest of the students in this class, please let me know, because this is a world that is always changing. Thanks so much, and we'll see in the next lesson 28. Make Great Audio Content: in this lesson, I will be giving you some tools and advice for creating great audio content, so backing up to our audio ideas. The big categories are podcasts and audiobooks. So with podcasts could be interview based lesson or tutorial base or just behind the scenes . And just kind of chatting about things and having conversations about what you do as a business with audio books that could be more of a narrative story or typically more like a self help guide style book. So what do you need to create great audio? Luckily, nowadays you don't need much, and if you create great videos, you might already have the tools you need for audio production. You do need a microphone or should use a microphone. And while the microphone that's built into your phone or into a camera can work, it's probably not the best for a podcast or an audio book. With these two formats, you really, really want the quality to be to be high, and it's very noticeable when audio quality is not that great. If there's background noise or any sort of distortion like that with your smartphone, though, you can use a non option. Like the road. Smart love, which is a lot earlier microphone that plugs into a smartphone and a allows you to record even better quality audio than the built in microphone. So that's probably the easiest way to record audio. You can also get something like an audio recorder, like the Zoom H one N Soon H foreign, or is a zoom H six thes allow you to plug other microphones into them and record, which is great if you're on the go if you're actually traveling and you are interviewing people alive, or you can also use these microphones these recording devices as a USB interface. So I have a video on YouTube if you search for Zoom H four n on my channel. But basically what I use now is I have the age six, and you can plug these into your computer with the USB plug and it becomes a USB microphone or whatever microphone you have plugged into. The device becomes a USB microphone. So right now I mentioned, I'm using a shock on microphone for this video. It's actually plugged into my computer, but because most microphones aren't USB, they don't have the right plugs. For us to go directly into your computer, you need some sort of conversion, and that's where these recording devices come in handy. Ah, and you can do that. The other great thing is with these devices. They also have great microphones built into them. Eso you can actually use them for recording and the microphone itself and then the last option. And probably the best option if you're doing things like podcasts or audiobooks, is to get an actual USB microphone like a blue yeti. The audio Technica 18 21 100 or the road podcaster, Thes air all relatively budget friendly microphones. I would say if you have the budget, I would get the audio Technica 18 21 100. A lot of podcasters use that and love it. I'm actually using a completely different microphone for my podcasting, called the Heil PR 40. It's a little bit more expensive, and it's not USB, so you have to have another device like Zoom H six to plug it into the computer and record with it. But any of these ones up here on the screen you can use directly right into your computer in terms of recording audio into your computer. There's lots of different ways to do this. If you have a Mac computer, you have the quick time application, and you can actually just record audio right into quick time. You could use a more professional application, like Adobe Audition again. It comes with the adobe sweet like the other APs we've mentioned in this course, and that's a great one that a lot of podcasters use. I also use a screen recording tool called Screen Flow. They make it for Mac. And there's also options such as Camp Tasia great for Mac or PC users that allow you to record just audio or as well as your screen or webcam to. But you can use that for podcast. I also use a tool called E Cam Call recorder E Can E. C. A. M M. Call recorder is a great option for recording Skype interviews, and it records both your audio and your guests audio and allows you to edit those separately. There's another app called Pamela for Skype, like the name Pamela, which is good for PC users because e cam color recorders only for Mac users. There's lots of different options for recording audio again for specific tutorials on how to do these. Just go over to YouTube search for how to record audio on a PC or how to use Adobe Audition to record a podcast. If you don't want to enroll in our other courses specifically on podcasting or audition, which we have courses on in terms of audio content tips, this probably looks very familiar. You gotta answer a pain point. You got to tell a story. Don't worry about being perfectionist. Be authentic. Remember your calls to action. I'm not going to go over any of this because it's the same as in the previous lesson on video creating great video content. But know that all the rules apply here for creating great audio content as well. Thanks so much for watching, and we'll see you in the next lesson. 29. Make Great Social Media Content: welcome to this lesson on creating great social media content. So this, of course, we've talked a lot about social media and posting your other content onto social media. In this video, I really want to talk about specifically what goes on social media. Types of social media posts that do well and how to make your post do actually better on social media. So going back to our formats and are are types of content that you can create within this category. On social media, you can do things like contests and giveaways, those air great for social media. You can share. Use your submission similar to what I'm doing on instagram with sharing my student photography, sharing behind the scenes photos of your business and brand what goes on behind the scenes . People love connecting with you and and that builds mawr. Trust on liking you. If you do that, you can create condensed visual style text videos. This is great for social content because a lot of people are scrolling through social media on their mobile devices or even on their computer, but they're not listening to it, or they're not in the mode of listening to it. So videos that include text graphics do really well on social media. Or, if you do, just sort of talking, had or narration. Make sure you include subtitles. Polls are a great way to create engagement in with your audience doing life dreams another great way to create engagement because you're there, you're able to ask answer questions, chat on People are able to interact with you live, which is exciting for an audience. I found live streams to be really fun with the photography and friends community because so much of the content that I create is I've created it once. And then I put it online for people to consume, and people might consume that in a year or two years or three years, and when they're consuming it, it might fuel like Mawr live or recent to them. But when we're there, live on the life dream. People can really see us and who we are right then and there, and it again just builds that connection. Here's a few other ideas just to help you put more content on social media that does well. One is to share third priority content, so this means actually sharing articles or content from other people. Of course, it's great if you can create content and you have everything on your own website and under your own brand. But if you don't, it's okay to share other people's content. It reminds me of Miracle on 34th Street, the original video movie. I don't know if you've seen it, but there's a part where the the Santa Claus character he is working in the Macy's department store and a customer asks him, Oh, do you have this specific toy? And he says, Oh, sorry, we're out of it And he directs them to the competitors store down the street. And at first the manager store manager is really upset with Santa Claus, Kris Kringle that he has directed people to 1/3 party to purchase this product. But that customer ends up coming to up to the manager, thanks him so much for being so helpful and assures him that they're going to be a Macy's customer for life. And that reminds me of how actually sharing third party content is completely fine as a content marketer and as the business, because if you're the one sharing it, people are going to come back to you to find out about this. They might. They may start following that third party content provider, but more than likely they're just going to continue to follow you and like and trust you even more anything trendy you want to share on social media, so make sure you're staying on trend. If there's anything that's happening, I keep going back to the Ice Bucket Challenge as an example. But that was so It was one of those first things that was trending across the board. Ah, on all business. All businesses and brands were catching on with that, and you saw it on social media everywhere several years ago. So that's just an example of that. Sharing tips doing throwback Thursday. So throwback Thursday is every Thursday you post a photo or post something that is from years ago, our months ago. That's a great way to bring up old content to hosting and ask me anything in a m. A is also another great thing to do on social media. We kind of talked about this before, but I think the most important thing for keeping you sane on social media is toe. Have a schedule, so come up with what you're going to do each week or each month. So, for example, with the Photography and Friends group, we have weekly challenges monthly live streams, quarterly competitions. Other ideas could be daily quotes, whatever it is, have that schedules and batch process it. Create a schedule that you can batch process and schedule out that's going to make your life a lot easier, especially if you're working on this yourself. A few tips for creating MAWR engagement with your post tag other people and brands. So this doesn't necessarily mean just like big name brands or influencers. This means tagging people who follow you. One of the things and tools that Facebook gives us as a group creators is where we have the ability to create posts for the most recent members of the group. So every week or so, we have hundreds of new members in this group and often will create a post that just says welcome, welcome to the group. And that is a post that creates a lot of engagement because those people get notified of that post when they are tagged in it, along with actually tagging people in a post using relevant and popular hashtags is a great way because hashtags you see the hash hash signed. The number sign now is the hashtag sign. Those are great ways to make your content more searchable, depending on the platform. Most social media platforms use hashtags, I would say, on places like Twitter and Instagram. It's a little bit more popular to use and use Hashtags and Facebook, Although Facebook use hashtags as well. Instagram is a great way if you're just getting started out. Searched for relevant hashtags related to whatever you're posting in your brand and use those because people click on those hashtags and find lots of great content. Just searching for hashtag keynote though Onley Use hashtags related to your brand. If you are a company that is helping people learn how to buy a house, you're not going to want Teoh. Use Hashtags related to the latest Coachella Music Festival because that's going to throw off your visitor. And if someone clicks on the hashtag clicks on your post, sees, it's completely unrelated. Not only could that person just click off of it, they could mark your post as span and that's going to hurt your ranking on possibly ban you from social media platforms as well. Another idea is to come up with a hashtag for your own brand itself. And this is a great way so people can easily find all of your content that you've posted for us. We've created and or we use we haven't created. But we use the video school online hashtag and the photography and friends hashtag um, and we try to get people who who interact with us to use those hashtags and well as well so we can follow them and see what content is being posted related to us. We also asked people to tag us in their their posts, especially on Instagram. We have students who are attacking us in their posts and again, not only is that great so that we can see it, but for their followers to see that they're tying us as the instructors and if they're interested, they're more likely to end up on our profile that way. Another tip is to use more Emojis emojis work emojis make your written content, Mawr visible and mawr more interesting to look at, and the fact of the matter based off of the data is that emojis work. So add emojis to your text based content, and another tip is that you don't have toe necessarily keep your content super short. I've seen a lot of data and from personal experience and from interviewing other people in this area, especially when they're doing marketing content on social media Longer format Post tend to work Justus good as shorter form, text based content as well, so don't limit yourself. Generally, of course, you think social media is limited Teoh 160 characters or whatever, depending on the platform. But that's not necessarily the case for content marketers and last hips toe. Just create more engagement. Get your followers Teoh like know and trust you more is to interact with them, share other people's posts, comment and, like on them, respond to any of your followers who post or comment on your photos or your post. Interaction is what social media is all about, Um, and if you're posting and commenting on other brands, other people's posts, the more you do that, it just means the more opportunity for someone to see your comment and end up back on your social media post. If you're living in a siloed world of social media where it's just your group gesture page or gesture profile and you're just posting, trying to spread information out, you're not going to do as good as if you are actually getting out into the world into the social media world and meeting people chatting with people and getting your name out there that way because it's a lot harder for people to find you. If you're just from one location yelling at the edge of a cliff, posting all your content, it's really hard for people to find you that way. It helps when you actually get out there and and and meet people where they're where they're at. All right, that's it for tips for social media. I hope they help you create even better content and a lot of this stuff I know in this section you might be thinking, OK, that's some basic content, Phil, But really think about it. Are you putting into practice all of these tips? If you're not, then you have some room to grow and room to improve. As a content marketer, good luck and we'll see you in the next lesson 30. Create a Marketing Plan & Content Schedule: welcome to this new section of the content marketing course all about publishing your content. So, up until now we've learned a lot about what content marketing is. How to create great content with lots of tips from the last section. Now, once you have your content created, where do you publish it? And it's not as simple as picking one platform to publisher Blawg article on or one platform to publish your video on. There's lots of ways to actually get your message and get your content out there to more places, by syndicating and by redistribution on different platforms. So we're gonna go over those things in all of our main buckets, including articles, videos, visuals and audio content. We're also going to first talk about creating a marketing plan and why having an actual plan is important. Ah, and a content scheduled to help you become a better content marketer. So why is a marketing plan important? First, it inherently will allow you to have better consistency and consistency with content is very important. It is a lot more important than frequency of content. We've talked a little bit about this before, but no matter what type of content you have. You want your audience to be be expecting that content at a regular interval. So if you're a daily blogger and you don't post a daily blawg, your audience is going to feel like they're missing out. They're going to wonder what happened. If you write monthly articles and you send a monthly email newsletter with that article in it, your audience is going to expect that it doesn't mean that you have to do daily vlogs or monthly articles. You can do it at different intervals, but being consistent is really important, and having a schedule on a plan will help you achieve that. When you actually have a plan in action, it increases the quality of your work because you have a system from the start from coming up with the idea all the way through creation and publishing, you have a system in place. You have people to do the work, even if it's just you doing everything, and that's going toe again. Inherently make the quality of your content better. It also helps you stay focused on your goals, so when you have a marketing plan, you're always focused on your goals which go back to who your ideal customer is, what they're pain points are talking directly to your customer persona, and so having this plan will help you stay focused. And depending on where you're at in your business, you might be trying to achieve one goal in this quarter of the year and then later on, you're trying to achieve other goals. But whatever your goal is, having a plan will help you stay focused to achieving those goals, and it just keeps you sane, as I've mentioned before. If you're a solo preneurs, you wear many hats. And if you're trying to do all of this yourself, it can get really frustrating at the beginning of every work day and you come until the office and you don't know what you're going to be working on. So having a plan and a schedule will really help you stay sane. So the major part of having a plan is having a schedule. Like I said, what works for you is going to be best in terms of how frequently you come out with content . Remember, we also talked about how Khan quality is a lot more important than quantity of articles or of content, so make sure that whatever the schedule you pick, you can still maintain the quality. Then you want to create a workflow. So you want to answer all these questions. Who comes up with ideas? Who's going to create the content itself? Who proof, reads or edits it, who publishes and schedules it, who promotes it, and then who follows up, who follows up and responds to any sort of interaction by your audience. This might be you. All of these things might be you, and it probably is going to be you if you are starting a business of your own. That being said, if you work for another company, if you're trying to expand your content marketing on in a company work with, if you're partnering with someone, it's a good idea to divvy up these tasks so that you know exactly what your role is. So in terms of coming up with ideas and creating the content that might be you. But it is probably a good idea to have someone else proof. Read it or edit it to see if it one answers your customers pain points to. It's just sometimes When you're creating content yourself, you don't see the mistakes that you make, and it's better to have other eyes on in terms of publishing, promoting and responding and following up. These are probably the things that you want to first start toe outsource as you grow your business. There's lots of re sources and tools out there. Up work dot com and freelancer dot com are two of the ones that I have used in the past to actually hire assistants who can help me do this, For example, with YouTube videos, I've actually had people people edit my videos, but also those editors then go onto YouTube and schedule those videos for publishing. I have assistants who helped me with my manage my Facebook groups in my Facebook and all of my social media accounts. Responding to comments and questions, I have people helping me with content like this in the class is responding to questions as well, and this goes back to kind of going on a side tangent the 80 20 rule. So the 80 20 rule says that 80% of your results will come from 20% of your actions, and you could kind of use this however you want, but it's the 80 20 rule. So 80% of my return comes from 20% of the stuff that I do basically. And I found that on the contrast, 80% of the stuff that I do and spend time on Onley results in 20% of my return, and that's how the 80 20 rule works. And so a lot of times I felt before I hired an outsource some of my work. I was spending 80% of my time just doing the sort of time consuming stuff like uploading videos, scheduling videos, publishing it and promoting it on social media, following up to comments and responding t questions that someone else could ultimately do. And so I sat down, I realized, What is the 20% of the things and actions that I do that results in the 80% of my return? It's creating mawr content. I am the content creator myself. In all, outsource as much of the other stuff as possible. So start to think about that yourself, and you can see where you want to outsource your your, um, your work for you. Maybe you spend 80% of your time creating content and, UH, 80% of your return comes from the time you actually spend promoting and being on social media. So maybe you yourself are good at social media, and you want to be promoting on social media and interacting on social media. It's up to you, and it really depends on what you want to do and what you're best at. Just a few tips for helping you schedule your content. One is to choose a specific day to publish content. This is easier for youths to know when you have to publish. It's easier for you to schedule it out if you can in the future, and it also keeps your audience engaged. There's tools like Who? Sweet buffer. Later. I also used Can va dot com. They have a scheduler right within their to schedule out my Facebook group host, but any of these are free to get started and then, most likely, they offer a tiered pricing plan. Depending on If you want to add multiple social media accounts on and those might be worth it to you, you can sign up for something like buffer and pay for the subscription and you can autumn A and schedule all of your social media platforms from one dashboard. These are very, very useful. And at first it took me a few years to actually start to use these because I felt, oh, yeah, I could just do it on Facebook because you do have the option to schedule outposts and Facebook groups and on your pages. But when using it on a platform that's meant for actual scheduling and content organization , it really does help come up with the schedule. Here's Justin. Example. One weekly block post one weekly video, one daily instagram post, three daily Facebook posts five daily tweets. This is just an example of what a typical brand or business might be doing with their content marketing. It's up to you to decide. I would definitely look at your competitors, see what they're doing. See what platforms there on. Of course, looking back at your target audience, what platforms are they on? Perhaps it's a more professional audience, and instead of Twitter, you want to be unlinked in more doing updates wherever they are at. Make sure that's a part of your schedule, and yeah, I just play with it. A lot of this will have to do with testing it out, analyzing the results and then making changes, and will be going over more of the analytics later on in the course. One thing that beginner content marketers don't do enough of is actually re sharing and re posting content. So it's important to come up with a template and a schedule for what happens with each piece of content. And here's one example of a schedule so say you have any type of content. Let's use a YouTube video, for example, or just a video piece of video content. It doesn't have to be hosted on YouTube. It could be on Facebook or wherever, but you create this great how to video on Published A. You're going to put it on YouTube. You're going to share that video on Facebook on Twitter, on Instagram. It doesn't end there. The next day you're going to tweet it out again, and then you're going to post it on linked in. And I've come up with this schedule based off of the frequency that people see things and the that most brands actually published on these platforms for example, if you have a Facebook group or a Facebook page, it might not be a great thing to be posting the same content every day for a week. On the other hand, on Twitter, it's It's not as rare to see that, and it might be more beneficial because there's a lot more tweets that go through someone's feed, and you're more likely going to be seen if you post it every day. So published day, you launch it on the main platforms. The next day you add it to Twitter again. You added to another social media platform, like linked in Still not done. A week later, you're going to republish it on Facebook. You'll post it again on Twitter and LinkedIn, and then a month later you're going toe again, posted on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter. So this is just an example of what you should be doing with any major piece of content that you put out, and I'll bet you that you're probably not doing this right now. Ah, bet that you put it out into the world, and then that's maybe it. That's what I was doing for a long time. Now I'm using tools like Ryker Post, which we saw in the previous section to automate some of this re tweeting and re sharing on social platforms. But some of this might have to be done with scheduling, or you can do it manually as well. But again, if you're using when the schedule is, you can do this all on one platform, which really helps out. So really start to think about how you can create this schedule, and then it makes it easy if you have the schedule. Whenever you have a new piece of content, you just plug it into the schedule, and there you go. One other tip for your content is that once you post content, not only should you not be done sharing it, but you should revisit that content over the months or over the years to see if there's any updates you can make to it. You don't necessarily need to create something completely new from scratch, especially if it's the same topic. Answering the same pain points. You might just go back to that blogger article on YouTube. It's a little bit, and with videos it's a little bit harder, but with articles, it's a lot easier to go back and update that content, refreshing it up and then re share it on social media when you have it updated. All right, Hopefully you enjoyed just these tips on having a content schedule in a plan of action for all of your content. In the next lessons, we're gonna talk about where you should be publishing each type of content. 31. Where Should You Post Articles?: welcome to this lesson on publishing articles. The following lessons Air going to fit have the same structure. I'm gonna talk about where you should be publishing your actual content, meaning where it should be hosted itself and then where you should be sharing it, and this is going to be specific to each type of content. So for written articles or written word, you, of course, want to publish it on your blogged. You can also republish it as an email newsletter. This could either be just publishing it and writing it out in an email and sharing it with your list. Or you could just have the article itself and share it with your email newsletter. Another place to share your written articles is medium dot com, so medium dot com is ah, website that's just written articles. But it's articles written from people all over the world, and it's basically it's not really a good place to host your own blawg. I always believe it's a good idea to have your own platform, so you should have your own website and post your articles there, but they allow you to repost articles on to medium dot com And the best part about that is that because medium is more of a startup marketplace, but it's a search engine where people can be searching for all kinds of topics. You have a better chance of getting eyeballs and people reading your articles on medium dot com, then people just stumbling upon your website. So check out medium dot com. It's a great place to post your articles and then also related blog's as a guest post. Reach out to other bloggers or digital magazines related to your topic in your niche and pitch them your ideas for your articles and, lastly, guest posting. If you have a great article or written piece of content, reach out to other bloggers websites, digital magazines in your space and see if they would like to publish it as well. A couple smaller, maybe more random places to actually publish articles is read it dot com itself so you can actually publish an entire written article on on Reddit sort of as a post, and it's a great place to get more eyeballs linked in articles Linked in has their own sort of space for publishing articles. That's a great place to do it scoop. It is sort of similar to medium dot com. It's a great place to post articles, and they curate the content. And again, it's other people, other marketers, other people looking for content that they can publish themselves or just read. So it's another place to find a new audience. Cora dot com is a place where people can ask questions and answer questions, and so you could literally just repub post or republish an entire article that answer the question. If there is that question asked on Quora and ah again another great place to get more eyeballs steam. It is another newer website. It's ah place where similar to read it. There's just lots of different types of content on there, but it's growing. There is sort of a connection to some crypto currency because you can actually get paid through steam dollars. One of the cryptocurrencies Um, I'm not really caring about making money with steam. It is more just about getting people aware of my brand. And because it is a website that has grown significantly in the past few years, it's a good one to check out. So those are all great places to host your articles. What about actually just sharing that content whenever you share your content? I think you should share it from your own website or blog's so you shouldn't post it on cora dot com and then share the kora article right? You should share it from your website, and you should just posted on all your social media Facebook, Twitter, instagram, Pinterest. These are all great places to share, some sort of content linking back to an article. Remember what we talked about before? Though visuals are key unsocial media, they get more engagement, so you don't necessarily want to just post a link to your article, create some sort of graphic that then also includes a link to your article to get even more clicks. And, of course, if you have a an email list, you should definitely be sharing this content with your email list. So those are just some tips for publishing articles. We'll see in the next lesson 32. Where Should You Post Video Content?: welcome to this lesson on publishing your video content. First, where should you host your videos? YouTube, I think, is the best place for video creators. It's become by far the most known place for publishing and hosting video content, so I would definitely post your content on YouTube. You can also post it on other hosts, such as video or West AEA. These are gray. If you want to embed or put the video content on your own website and you need a little bit more control, you can control things like how the video player looks. You can control things like who has access to the video player? The quality colors, all kinds of different things that you might not get the most control out of with embedding a YouTube video. You can also nowadays publish video content on most social media platforms themselves. So Facebook, instagram, even Twitter. You can post videos. Some of the platforms have a time limit, and so depending and it's always changes. So for a while, Instagram has was a minute. It might be longer when you watch this. Facebook doesn't have any sort of limit, but you do have to pay attention to those things. But the benefit of actually posting the video on the social media platform itself is that these social media platforms do, Ah, a lot of work. Teoh make those videos appear more so than if you share a YouTube video. You probably noticed this. If you've seen YouTube videos posted on Facebook that they're not as as visible, there's no such. They don't do like the auto play thing, which, if you actually upload your video content to Facebook, it's going to show larger in the feed. And it's going to have auto play and better things like engagement and think and metrics that you wouldn't get if you post it on YouTube when you upload it directly in a Facebook includes those things like auto play, um, and a lot of more engagement features than if you posted on YouTube and share on to Facebook. So I would definitely encourage hosting on both places. I don't think I'm as a content creator. I'm not worried about sending all of my traffic to YouTube itself to get more views on YouTube in general, because at the end of the day on Facebook, you are going to probably get more views on your video if you hosted on Facebook, rather than sharing the YouTube link. Wherever you post your video, though, you should be sharing it on social media on these platforms. Facebook, Twitter, instagram, Pinterest And if you posted on Facebook, that means sharing it to other groups, sharing it two pages Sharing on your personal profile. There's lots of different places that and ways to share your video within these social media platforms as well. Depending on the quality of the content, the breath of the content, you should definitely be sharing it in an email newsletter to your audience and your list. You can also post it on other websites, like linked in Reddit, Quora, those ones that I mentioned before steam it. Even you could post your video content there as well. Definitely search for a subreddit search for a topic that's related to it eso and posted in those groups or those subreddit so that it gets even more engagement. And it's not something that's random that people are seeing on those platforms that should be posted somewhere where people are going to be interested in it. So some of this again might sound a little bit basic, but think back to yourself and think about the last video you posted. Maybe you haven't done this. Maybe you've ever posted a piece of video content. But if you have, think back and ask yourself, Did you post it on YouTube? Did you post it on Facebook as well? Did you convert it into a shorter video that goes good on Instagram? Did you then look for a sub subreddit and questions on Quora that this video answered and posted their? Did you send it to your email list if you did all these things? Great. If not, though, there's room for improvement, and hopefully these lessons are giving you that inspiration to help you become a better content marketer. 33. Where Should You Post Audio Content?: welcome to this lesson on publishing audio content. Specifically, we're going to be focusing on podcast, so we'll just like in the last lesson with videos. There's different ways to host your podcast. This is where it lives. Unlike video, there's not really, Ah, a great place toe host, your audio podcast that's also a marketplace or a search engine. There's not really a YouTube for podcast soundcloud dot com trying to be that, but they their business model has changed a lot, and it's no longer a place I suggests hosting your audio content. Here is a list of podcast hosting companies Lipson, Pod bean, buzz sprout, blueberry, automatic and Speaker. These are all really great host that a lot of podcasters use. I personally have used Lipson and Pod Bean. I know people who use buzz, sprout and love it. I know people who use the rest of them and and love them. Lipson has been around for a lot longer than some of these other ones. Pod being has been around for a long time as well. And while some of these platforms do have a search engine and a way for people to actually just search and find audio content themselves. There's not a lot of people going to these places to find your podcast. People are actually going to be going to a podcast directory, which will see in the next slide to find your actual content. But this is where your content will live. So generally you're going to have to pay for a plan. And these plans will usually limit you in how long of a audio file you can upload per month or how larger audio files are. And you'll have to see, depending on how much you're publishing, how big of a plan you need. But generally, if you're posting once a week, you can use one of the smaller tears, and it will be less than $20 us. Um, and it shouldn't be that expensive to get started. So you basically pick one of these. This is where you upload your audio content and then you syndicate it. You put your your audio podcasts out to the directories that actually take it from this one host. You'll see all of your stature, downloads and everything from this one host, and you can also embed from this one host to your website, but it's not necessarily where people are going to be finding your podcast. There's lots of directories, the main ones being apple podcast. Spotify has really, um, grown in terms of podcasts. Google play stitcher, tune in blueberry speaker all great places to actually go out and submit your podcast feed . So again, if you upload your content to one of those podcast directory or podcast host from the last slide, you'll get a podcast feed, which is how these directories can stay up to date. If you publish any new content, they read that feed. And whenever there's new content, they actually can take that that audio, and they read it through their directory, and people can can listen to it through their directory. The submission process for all of these directories is different, but just go to their website or do a Google search to see how you submit your podcast to each of these different platforms. So you're hosting your podcasts or your audio content on your host. Your syndicated it through these directories. What about republishing your content? We've talked about that before about repurpose ing your content into other formats for podcasts. You may want to do it as a video. Maybe you are recording video as at the same time, so you already have that video content. But doing that and publishing on YouTube or Facebook is a great option as video. And then I did mention soundcloud before. I don't think it's a great place to host your podcast, but it's an additional place that you could host your audio content because it is more of a search engine marketplace where people are going to find audio content and people might find you that way. And just like before in sharing our video content, you want to make sure you're sharing it across all of your social media platforms. E mail lists. Reddit, subreddit linked in, uh, steam it cora Any other platform that you can find related groups that would be interested in your content? Make sure you do it there as well. All right, hope you enjoyed this lesson and we'll see him the next one 34. Where Should You Post Visual Content?: welcome to this lesson on publishing visual content. So visual content is a little bit of a different game than your written your video or your audio content. Because with visual content you're not really uploading it toe one host and then sharing it across different platforms. You really are going to be re publishing it on all of these different platforms. So, of course, you're actually going to be publishing on social media platforms, interests being one of the best ones for visual content. Facebook, LinkedIn, instagram, Twitter. All of those places are great for actually posting and uploading your content, some or places that you can post your visual content. Flicker. 500 picks Stumble upon imager Slide share visually Read it. These are all places that you should also check out and post your visual content. Now how do you go about it and make sure that people are actually consuming your visual content and then getting back to your website or taking some sort of action. You could do different things. You can include ah watermark. You can include a logo. You can include text that has a link on your content itself, or depending on the platform, you might be able to include some sort of description with a call to action that goes back to your website or other content that is related to that visual content. So check them out. Some of these air better for photos like Flicker 500 picks imager, these Air mawr for actual photography content. But other ones like slide share that's more for slide decks or graphics. Visually is a great place for infographics. Stumble upon. Read it great for everything. So check out all of these platforms and again, think to yourself. The last time I posted any sort of graphic or visual content on Facebook, did I take the time to re share it to these other platforms, if not, start doing it today. 35. Create a Marketing Funnel: welcome to this new section on growing your business. This is really some of the best stuff of this course. Ah, lot of the course so far has just been about creating and publishing your content. But actually, how do we use it as a marketer? So we're gonna be talking about the marketing funnel, and then we're going to be looking into different case studies, and I'll be showing you examples of funnels that I have with all of the different types of content that I publish. So let's just go back and refresh your memory about what a marketing funnel is. A marketing funnel is basically taking someone going from awareness, being aware of your brand to considering your brand or your business or your product that you're trying to sell and then converting that visitor or that member of your audience into a purchaser into a subscriber. Depending on your goal, you're converting them and having them take some sort of action. Another way to look at this funnel is going from awareness and interest to consideration to the actual intent to purchase. Then, when they have that intent to purchase their evaluating, maybe multiple choices from you evaluating you compared to a competitors, and then they're deciding in making the actual purchase. Does this sort of final look similar to something we've seen before? Yes, of course it does. This is the Aida funnel awareness, interest, desire, action. And of course, we added retention to that. This is basically the same kind of funnel that we're going to be talking about and creating with our content right now. And the thing about what content does is that content marketing plays a role in all of these steps. Content helps people become aware of you and your brand and your products. Content provides information for their interest and helps them become a fan. A follower. Your content encourages them them to consider paying for one of your products or services. And lastly, your content gives them the option to take action within your content. That itself there will be opt in forms for them to become a subscriber. There will be buttons to buy a product or service, so your content really does play a major part in your entire marketing funnel. So let's make this a little bit more real for you by looking at actual marketing funnels that I have set up with all the different types of content, so we're going to be doing that in the next few lessons. 36. Case Study: Email Marketing Funnel: come to this case study in this one, we're going to be looking at a basic email marketing funnel, and this funnel can be as complicated or a simple as you want. Sometimes it converts and works better if it's more complicated, but also sometimes it's better and converts mawr if it's simple, and that's what I want you to take away from. This lesson is that you don't have to get super complicated with your email marketing. Yeah, as in your content, Teoh to make it work properly. So remembering our funnel, the first thing you need is your audience to become aware of of you or or something. And since this is an email marketing funnel, we're basically looking at how we get someone onto our email list and then using email to market something. So if you go to the video school online website, if you go to the photography page and you scroll down, you'll find lots of content that I have out there articles, lots of cool stuff. You also have content such as courses and one content that a piece of content that I have is this free photography fundamentals course. So if someone finds us by going through my website or by going through a Google search or by finding it on social media or whatever. They end up on this page where they could enroll for free in this free foot RV course. Once they enroll, this is hosted unteachable, but it integrates with Convert Kit, the email marketing tool that I use. And so whenever anybody in roles in this class, they automatically get added to an email list of mine. Once they get enrolled in this class, they automatically start to get e mails from me. And you can see that this is a very simple email sequence. It's three e mails long. The 1st 2 are content based and our educational. The next one is a promotional email. And so this is a very an example of a very, very simple email marketing funnel. This course isn't about email marketing, and we have other courses on email marketing, so we dive deeper in those other courses. But one of the main rules that I want to get across with the email marketing is that you want to be helpful and you don't want to be sales e No. One wants to sign up for an email list and just start to get promoted. To write. That's pretty annoying. And so, as helpful as you can be, that's what you want to do. And so with this course, the free course absolutely free. We send them to e mails that refer back to the course to keep them engaged with the content , building that trust, hoping that, hoping that they like us, and then we follow it up with an email about our membership. So if they want to take their skills to the next level, which we've added a lot of courses since I set up this email, then they can get access to all of our courses for just $9 a month. Okay, so that's a very simple email marketing funnel. It goes from the content, which is the free course to the emails, which we used Teoh. Warm them up to the membership itself. Let me show you another example of an email marketing funnel back on our website. We have our photography page, and we have this 10 week email. Siri's. It's 10 weeks of photography lessons that you get to your inbox. So if you want to learn photography, this is a great option for you. This is actually something I recently set up because I realized I needed I needed email marketing segmented to my different audiences. Video versus photographers, for example. This email sequence is a little bit longer. It's 10 weeks long and it really is completely educational. And at the end of the 10 weeks sequence, we promote our photography masterclass, which you can purchase by yourself or you can get in our membership. So we link out to our membership page, and we linked directly to the check out for someone if they want to purchase the membership . That's a longer email sequence, but still, the marketing funnel itself is rather simple. Go to our website. We you can sign up for our email marketing our email sequence. Within that sequence, we send out a ton of great content. All of this content is coming from articles or YouTube tutorials that we've already put out . So it's not new stuff. It's just old stuff. We're repurpose ing. And then at the end of the day, we promote our membership is one last email marketing example, and this is It's not really a full funnel, but I just want to show you what we're doing and what we have success doing. So we send out a newsletter whenever we have new content on the website. So this is an example of an article about choosing the right microphone. So let's see. Let's get to that article. This is what it would look like. Here's the microphones guide and we send this out and when we launched it. But in that email, we also included ah, linked to our membership page with the graphic Teoh be a little bit more visual and eye catching. So this is an example of sending out a very helpful email, but also including a little bit of promotion in there as well for anyone who wants to take it to the next level. Just if you see if we go to this article, you'll you'll notice that we have links to other articles. We've, of course, got our recent post on the right hand side. Lots of reasons for someone who Teoh continue consuming our content. And again, this is just all about continuing to build that trust and warming up our audience so that later on. If we want to send a strictly promotional message about a new course or something like that , they are more likely to convert. But as you can see, our content plays a big role throughout all of these little funnels. They are not only the entrance to the funnel, meaning a course that get someone into onto our email list. It is also the content of the emails themselves that we send out, whether it's the emails for the course, that word directing people back to course content or for this photography, Siri's, where we're sending people to block articles or videos that we already have existing as hopefully you can see, content is so important, and, uh, hopefully this gives you some ideas of what you can do with email marketing. We'll see you in the next lesson when we cover another type of funnel 37. Case Study: Article Marketing Funnel: welcome to this lesson on an article marketing funnel. So what I mean by that is a funnel where an article or ridden piece of content is thes start of your funnel. So here we have this article that I rode wrote called Posing Ideas 100 plus ideas for couples, woman, men, Children and groups. You'll see me reference this throughout this course for social media content. Um, visual content because this is something that that worked really well for me. I was coming up with his downloadable guide. So if someone comes to this article, they can see lots of different examples of poses that they can do with ah, with couples. And they see the visual examples. We have explanations and we have them for all different types. So not just couples, but women. Men, the the visual infographics on are here as well, but also they have the downloadable guide. So here we have the downloadable guide at the start of this article. This is the lead magnet that is specifically related to this article. These lead magnets when they are specific to the page that a person is viewing work so much better than a General General one Here. On the right hand side, you can see our sidebar, which is just our weekly tips. Um, newsletter email. Opt in form. This does not work as well as the specific one. The the conversion rate for this is way, way lower than than this. And that's just because if someone comes to this page, they're more likely going to want to download guide that is related to what they're reading , right? All right, So say you want this, you sign up for an email list. And while this might be the start of the funnel for someone, they might just come to our website, go to the photography page, click on this article. This funnel could have also started on social media and way we see this, um, in other parts of this class. But Pinterest, we saw this guy and it has over 400,000 impressions. You can see this one specifically as foreign 482 link clicks. So these are people coming from Pinterest to this article, so that could technically be a social media funnel as well. They all kind of overlap. So this form itself. Let's see if you go to convert Kit, This is my convert kit back and you can see all the different forms that I have on my website right now. Here is the posing guide right here. See this in the middle? So this posing guide back here has had over 43 3000 visitors since we launched it. 3412. Those have subscribed. That's this almost 8% conversion. That's pretty good for, um, for converting for a form that's on an article, at least for me. You can see, like this sidebar only 0.4% of people who see that sidebar convert and actually sign up on the home page of video school online. Only around 1% of people sign up for our email list and again, that's because these air more general and this is very specific. So once you get on the guy, the posing guys, you can see what happens. This is the automation convert kit. It's really cool because it has, ah, this visual style of automation. You sign up for the posing guide, and as long as you aren't already a member, that's what this step is for you are added to our welcome sequence. So this is a sequence that I created last year and is still doing well, very short sequence as well. Um, you just get it the first welcome message. Talking about all the content we have to offer. We also have another email followed up to get people to engage with us. So try if that's your goal, trying to get engagement. This is the email that would help that following this on Instagram subscribing on YouTube liking on Facebook, for example. And then lastly, we get an email about signing up for a free trial of our membership. So this is ultimately the goal with someone who signs up for this opposing kite is that they get to this step and they become a member. And this everything that went in between downloading the guides sending the multiple emails is just a way to warm up that audience and get to the final action, which is signing up for our Our membership makes sense. So that's a pretty straightforward funnel for articles is you get so you have an article, you want someone on your email list so you have a lead magnet on that article, you send some emails and then you pitch a product, right? All right. Hopefully, this inspires you will see you in the next lesson with a different type of funnel. 38. Case Study: Video Marketing Funnel: come to this new lesson on marketing funnels in this one. We're looking at different video marketing funnels, So what I mean by that is a funnel that begins with a video. So let me show you some really quick examples of a super simple funnel that basically goes directly from a video to the paid product. Here on YouTube. I have several videos that are direct promotions of a course, or they are just content that is related to a course of mine. So here, for example, is our photography class promotion. We posted this in 2015. It has over 150,000 views, and we linked directly in the description to the course. One tip for YouTube is that you want to include links or your main called action within the 1st 3 lines of your description. Because if it's not in those 1st 3 lines, the viewer is going have to click this show more button to see what it is. And not many people do that, so make sure that any important links are up at the beginning of your description. As a side note, you also know that see on YouTube that, um we can promote our shirts using a tool called T Spring, and we'll go over, um, merchandising and a future lesson. So it's a very simple funnel. Step one watching this video, Step two by the course. Here's another one that is something a little bit different because this is actual content . That's not a promotion more of like the traditional content marketing we've been talking about in this course, an hour of free lessons in Adobe Premiere Pro. And then we promote the full course. And this is a great one because it really does warm up. The audience were teaching something. We're teaching something specifically related to the course, and so it's an easy one to step. If someone enjoys this content, and if they're looking for a full course, they can buy it here. So that's what we're doing. We're solving that pain point of someone who wants to learn how to edit in Premiere Pro. Here's some free preview lessons to get started, and if you want to take it a step for further click on this link, here's another example of that. Just an aftereffect tutorial. This one is not lessons from the course this is just a related tutorial, and then we have a link to our full after effects class there as well. Here's a different type of video. This one was more specific just Teoh, with the goal of increasing our subscribe email subscribers. So we had a giveaway when we hit 100,000 Subscribers on YouTube. No longer have the link down here for people to subscribe to this because I don't want more people subscribing after the first week. But basically people were able to get a free course, but by doing to do so, they would have to stay, submit their email address and become an email subscriber. So this was a great way Teoh increase our email list. I think we grew it by like 500 or so users within that week by doing a giveaway. So if you are ever doing some sort of give away, make sure that you are funneling them through an email, opt in form so that you can continue and build that retention. Remember, the Aida Aida are have that retention for people. You don't want to just necessarily give something away for free and never be able to follow up with them. Here's another example of ah funnel, but a little bit different. So those other ones you saw, we just kind of linked directly to a course this one links to our photography page. So here in the video itself, it's just a photo editing tutorial. We, um, taught we recover how to edit this photo. And in the video itself, I talk about the photography and friends community on Facebook. I talked about the benefits of it, and you have to be a student of ours to join that community. So I encourage people to check out our photography page, which is this page that we've seen before. That includes not only at the opt in for this email. Siri's are other guides, but also all of our courses down below. So if someone's interested in this tutorial, they might end up on our email list or they might end up directly in one of our courses. I'm happy with either way, and this is just a test is kind of start to see what happens when I include a link to that photography page rather direct, then directly to, of course, you may notice something to in all of my descriptions, I started with this how to subscribe or start the rest of the description. Usually the first few lines of, Ah, my description are about this particular video. And then there's this. How to subscribe button, which when you click this, it is a link to our main channel, and when you click on that, it goes to my channel with this subscribe Pop up. And to do that, you just linked to your channel with this text at the top. Ah, at the end of your channel, your oral question mark sub underscore. Confirmation equals one. That's what creates that pop up. So if you go to my any of my videos and click on that how to subscribe, you can get that text and just replaced this first part of the link with your own channel link that encourages more people to subscribe. So that's another kind of funnel, Um, just getting people onto or the start of the funnel of just getting people onto an email list or into a course. Here's another sort of example of a different type of video. Here's a vlog. So again, just educational content, not promotional But in this one, we're linking directly to the course itself. Here's one other idea. So here this is an a tutorial in after effects. In this one, we've created the project file and assets that people can use. And so to get those project files, which a lot of people like doing, it's kind of like a template that they can use. They have to go to my website, which takes him to a blogger article. And this blogger article includes an opt in form where they can sign up and get all of the project files once they get on this list, which, ah, over 2000 visitors to that page have resulted in 325 subscribers, almost a 15% conversion rate. So if you remember, our email are posing guide from the last less, and that was about an 8% conversion rate. This one's a little bit higher, I think, because most people coming to this page or more people coming to this page already know that they're coming to this page to get those project files compared to the posing guide, which, um, not as many people know that they they will have to download it. Once they get onto this email list, I send them my welcome sequence and again, just like before. The main goal with the this funnel is to get someone to become a member to pay for that monthly membership. And so if they click on that link in that last email, it takes them here to get their free trial, which works really well for getting people onto my membership. So, as you can see, here is the start of the funnel YouTube, then working all the way through to ultimately become a member of our site. So those are some examples of how your video content can play a role in your marketing funnels I hope you enjoyed, and we'll see in the next video. 39. Case Study: Social Media Marketing Funnel: come to this lesson on social media marketing funnel. So in this one, we're showing you how your social media content can play a part in your marketing funnel. So here I am on my video school online Facebook Page. And here is one of my posts from recently that was actually posted from Riker Post. The tool that we talked about that allows us toe repost old content, and this is a guide to making better Webcam videos. So it's an article, so if someone wants that, they click on here and they get the six tips. So here are six tips to making your Webcam video better. At the same time, though, there is a free Web cam production course, So if they click on that, they get to this free course. This is again Mawr content, and if they enroll in this free course, just like we saw before, using teachable integrated with convert kit, they automatically get added to a quick sequence. So this sequence is super super quick. It's two emails. The 1st 1 is just an introduction to the course. It's got some links to equipment that we use, and then the 2nd 1 is you guessed it a linked to our membership. As you can tell, that's our main goal. With all of our content, marketing is generally to get people to enroll in our membership. And that all starts with this Social media post. Another example of another quick funnel on social media is this instagram post? This is just a post for a new class that I taught with my mom. Actually, she did most the teaching on beginner art. And in that post itself, we linked to the course I mentioned before that on Instagram you have the option for including one link. So I do that as well. Whenever I post something, I'll add text like Click the link in the bio to access this course or get the course. Um, but I change that link up to depending on what? Um, I want them to be looking at that moment, but I also like you saw in this post, I included the link in the description for people who go to this post later on and still want to get this class. Another example. So here's on video school online Facebook Post again. Here is a link just to a blogger article. So if you go to this block article, it's there's no free course or anything that specifically related to this. But if someone likes this content, they read through it again. Links toe lots of other articles that might be interested interesting to them. But if they get to the very end, there's an and a call to action for signing up for our full photography masterclass, so someone can click this and go over to our master class. Now you may be saying, Phil, what about your membership? Why not send people to an opt in form or send people directly to the membership? What I've found through my analytics is that this type of often does better. This type of action does better for this article because it's specifically related to this article. The membership. While it includes this course and several other photography courses, it's not as specific intangible as saying. Hey, join our photography masterclass. So always playing around, always looking at what's working, what's not working and, for example, this one. We're sending people back to you to me, so we're not even sending people to the course on our own platform. We're sending them back to you to me. And that's because we want to make sure that this class is the best selling course on you to me. Um and so we generally send traffic when they sent it for this course to you, to me, rather than are other platforms. All right. So that is just an example of how social media can play a part in your content. Marketing funnels either by New Post or by posting old content. Just I think this is a big key to success is repurpose ing. Old content is good. It just you can see this article itself. It was reposted. This was all automated with Ryker post over 21. Interactions, 21 likes several shares. So this is getting a lot of engagement from people. Just automatically. Okay, let me know if you have any other questions, and we'll see in the next lesson 40. Introduction to this Section: welcome to this new section on promoting your content. So in the past few sections you've learned about creating your content, publishing it, but it doesn't end there. It's time to actually promote your content beyond just posting on social media and sharing it out into the world. On these different platforms, There's things you can do to make sure you get even more eyeballs on your content. Of course, there's social media. There's email marketing we talked about before, word of mouth and traditional marketing collaborations and then, at the very end, paid advertising. So in this section, we're going to be breaking down and giving you tips for each of these strategies, so enjoy, and we'll see in the next lesson. 41. Boost Social Media Engagement: welcome to this lesson on boosting your social media content. So this is content that you host on social media itself, such as a video you upload an image you post or just a text based post. Or it could be something that you share on social media, such as a YouTube video or an article that you've written on your website. Some of this we've already talked about, but in my courses, I want to make sure that I cover everything in different places in case people are jumping around. So if you jump to this section about boosting your social media content, that's perfect for you. If you've watched the entire course, some of this might be a little bit more familiar. Really. What I want to share with you today are just tips on how you can get more engagement with your posts. So the first and maybe the easiest, but really the hardest for someone who's new is paid, boosting or promoting depending on the platform. Ah, lot has changed over the past decade as social media has evolved in particular in places like Facebook Page on Facebook pages, even within different groups. If you post something not everyone that follows your page like your page or is in a group is necessarily going to see that content. So social media platforms have realized that we can start charging content creators and a group admin Page admits to actually present your content in front of more people. I personally don't do a lot of boosting or paid advertising because as a content creator and as a marketer, I just want to use all the freeways that I could get more eyeballs on my post. But this is the easiest way to do it, just to increase the number of eyeballs that see your content. We've talked about this before, adding an image using the hash tag or adding hashtag. Those are great ways to get more people viewing your content on social media. One thing we haven't talked about much is customizing your content. For each platform, that can mean changing the image size or the type and form format of your content. For example, on Pinterest, an image that is a vertical up and down image does better than wide images. But a wider image might do better on a platform like Twitter or Facebook than on Pinterest . Sometimes it's a good idea to actually recreate the content and recreate your graphics or whatever that is for the different platforms. Another way to create more engagement is to ask questions for every post that you do. Try to figure out one question that's related to that content and included in the description People love sharing their opinions and then share to communities. So we talked about this in the last section, but sharing to groups or pages or within whatever plot from your at communities that are related to your content and would be interested in it. Make sure you're also doing these things tagging people, tagging other people who are interested, tagging influences that you know who might want to be tagged. And I see that content itself responding toe all comments, using influencers who might want to share your content. So if you know anybody or you can connect with other people in your industry, see if they would like to share now. If this is, ah, high level influences, some of them like being paid to share. But maybe it's something where you know someone who viewed help out in the past and so they can return the favor and share your content. Now use emojis and emotions. So on Facebook you can add emotions like feeling excited, feeling energized, feeling angry, feeling sad. Whatever it is, you can add those emotions to your post, and that makes it look a little bit more visually interesting. Ad called Action buttons on things like Facebook pages even on Instagram. If you have an account with a certain number of followers, you can add called action buttons specifically on instagram stories. You can add called action buttons that link out to a YouTube video or to anything that you want. I see a lot of people doing that. You do have to have a certain amount of subscribers. I think nowadays it's 10,000 maybe, or followers that is in the future. Who knows what it's going to be. But you can add these calls action to not only make your your content look more visually appealing or visually different, but also, of course, to get people to take action and then lastly, reward your followers. This could simply mean liking their comments or liking their posts. It could also mean creating a separate post that thanks certain followers who have interacted with your content. One thing that I do in our Facebook group is you can see analytics for who has. Ah has the most engagement from the past 30 days, and so every month will post create a post that says thank you to our top contributors, and we'll tag all of the top contributors, thanking them for what they they contribute to the group. And even doing that sort of free we're rewarding helps build ah, community and incentivizes people to interact with your content even more. And of course, you could do actual rewards so you can give away content. You give away merchandise, you can give away actual things to people who engage. You could say 1st 50 people to share this get X wires, the first people 50 people that like this, get X wires e and that's a great way to increase engagement. I've seen this work really well on YouTube when you say something like 1st 100 comments gets free access to some sort of content that way. All right, so these are lots of ideas that hopefully you are already doing, if not, think too think to this list when you post your next piece of content on social media and try to hit all of them and see what the difference is before and after when you implement some of these strategies. 42. Promote Content with Email: in this lesson, I want to briefly cover email marketing and how you can promote your content with email. Now email marketing is a completely separate topic that is connected to content marketing, but it is something completely different. But I did want to cover some basic tips in this class to help you use email marketing. Teoh Boost and create more engagement with your content. So there's a few options in terms of sending out emails to promote your content. One option is sending an email whenever there's new live content. This can be done manually, where you just send out an email. Whenever you post a new video or a new article and you send it to your audience, you could also have a scheduled newsletter. This could be once a week once a month. The key to this and the mistakes that I've made in the past is that when I did a weekly newsletter, it forced me toe have toe be creating new content every week so that that newsletter had something in it, and at times when I didn't have a new content for that week, I wasn't able to publish that newsletter, and my audience missed out because they were expecting the newsletter. They were expecting new content. So make sure if you are doing a newsletter, make sure that it is out of frequency when you know you can create new content. The next is to create sequences using existing content that you send to either new subscribers or odd people from the past onto these sequences if they're interested in that topic. So this is this. For example, a couple things that I've done on my website is if you go to the photography page or the video page, we actually have sequences related to those topics. One is a 10 day video production sequence. One is a 10 week photography sequence, and each week or each day, depending on the sequence, they will get one email with some sort of content, some sort of lesson that links to existing content of mind. And this is a great way to refresh old content. Get more eyeballs on old content that you have. That is still great content, but you don't need to be re creating a few more tips for email marketing. Whenever you send out an email, make sure it's on one topic. If you send out an email that has multiple topics in it, it's harder for people to pay attention to what's most important because they don't know what's in most important. And so stick to one topic. One email equals one call to action as well. So if you're linking out to something, if you're trying to get people take some sort of action, the action could be to read an article to watch a video to buy something. Whatever it is, Make sure you include only one called action in an email that's going Teoh. Make your success rate higher than if you have multiple calls. Action toe. Watch this video to read this article and also to buy this product that doesn't work that well. If possible, use split testing depending on the email marketing software you use. I use convert kit dot com Teoh, Send my emails and to build my email list, you can actually do split testing with the these tools. I can split test email subject lines to see which one works best, and they actually break down the percentages of who opens and how many clicks I get based off of the headline. So doing split testing of headlines or of email content itself. If there's a way for you to send your email to just part of your list and then to another part of your list and see what does better, that's a great way to learn how to write better content. Write better headlines, uh, format e mails in different ways. That's going to be more successful. You definitely want to be segmenting your list, depending on your website. In your audience, for example, I have photographers, I have video creators. I have business people all in my email list, and I want to make sure that those different groups are getting content that they are interested in in most. And so I'm on Lee going to send my photography articles to the guitar, the people interested in photography, because if I send it to the people interested in entrepreneurship and business, while some of those people might be interested in it, most people won't meaning that the open rate is goingto go down. The unsubscribe rate is gonna go up, and that's going to hurt my overall email marketing, so make sure that you are segmenting your list again. It depends on the software you use, but there's waits to do this. You can tag people depending on what opt informed they they subscribe to. Or you can literally send out surveys where people click a but in and if they click a specific photography but in or a video. But And when you ask them what they're interested in, you can actually tagged them as that sort of set and start to segment them again. This is a little bit more in depth in what this class should be going into. But if you have questions about how you do this, a quick Google search about how you segment your audience depending on your your email marketing tool should really help you out. Another thing to remember when writing emails is to try to create engagement. Ah, lot of times as email marketers were just kind of spreading word, and we're just talking at people. We're not trying to have a conversation with people, but conversations work better. So ask questions. Ask for feedback in your emails. You should always try to get people to respond to you that could be responding to you through the email or on the content. For example, if you're sending a video, you can't ask people in that email to like and subscribe to your channel and also to leave a comment toe. Make sure that you know who's watching your videos or not to try to get people to engage with your content that way through your emails and then, lastly, measure your results. See when you send out different types of content, what does better? Is it better when you send out videos? Is it better when you send out articles? What types of videos do well with your audience? What types of articles do? Well, you can Onley improve by looking back and seeing what you've done right and seeing what you've done wrong and making changes. We'll be talking a lot more about measuring your results in analyzing that data in the next section. But I just want Teoh mentioned that here because it is so important, all right, Hopefully these email marketing tips help you. If you have questions, let me know otherwise we'll see you in the next lesson 43. Promote Content by Word of Mouth: word of mouth. This is something you might not have thought you would hear in this class about content marketing. But word of mouth marketing is really important for content creators. If you're just starting out of business, if you're just starting out creating content, who are the first people that are most likely going to see your content or consumer content ? It's going to be your family and friends. And if not, it should be your family and friends because they're the people that are most interested in what you are doing. So if you haven't done so already with whatever content you're creating, make sure you are sharing it with your friends and family. Of course, this could and should be by picking up the phone, hanging out with friends and telling them about the content you're creating. But of course, it could also be using digital formats to social media, email, whatever it is that you used toe communicate with your friends and family. This is going to get the ball rolling, and I think a lot of marketers kind of forget about the power of word of mouth marketing because they think everyone is siloed in their own world online, viewing their own content. But really, most people who they trust the most are the people, like their own friends and family. So if they're friends of family are sharing or talking about your content, they're going to be more likely to check it out than if some random person posted on social media and they see it there. So trying to encourage that is a good idea. And this could be done by having calls to action in your videos in your articles and just basically saying and telling and asking the person consuming that content to share it with a friend to to send it to someone who might also be interested in this content. I see this working really well for actual products that people sell online, asking people to share it with someone who they think would be interested in this kind of topic. For example, I have a friend who does real estate, and they dio free seminars on all topics of of real estate, and one thing they always do on their social media posts or in their emails is asking to for us to share it with someone who might be interested in, and we've definitely done that with our friends who are getting started out with buying their houses or investing in houses as well. So and then in the day, word of mouth marketing. It's a technique that kind of happens organically, but it's also a technique that you can encourage in your content itself and something you should be aware of. 44. Promote Content with Traditional Marketing Techniques: another kind of marketing that can go hand in hand with content. Marketing is some traditional marketing in the sense of merchandise. So I show you this because I've been wearing this shirt through this entire course. And I try to wear my video school online shirts in most of the content video content that I create now nowadays because people see this and they asked what that is not just online but also in person. I'll be wearing this shirt and people will say, Hey, what's video school online? And I'll explain to them and I'll tell them to go to the website, and it's a great way to find new people out out in the world. It's also a great way to seem a little bit more legitimate if you do have merchandise. So if you are willing shirts, if you have ah, stickers or hats that are for your brand, it does seem a little cooler, a little bit more professional if you have that kind of stuff, and it's easier than ever to create this kind of merchandise. Couple tools that I've used are t spring dot com and print full dot com T Spring is great because it actually connect with your YouTube account. And so if you're ah verified YouTuber Utkan actually sell merchandise and have it posted on your YouTube account. So if you do want people to actually be able to purchase merchandise of your own, they can do that. Merchandise is great for giveaways as well. One company that did this really well was Convert Kit, my email marketing tool that I use if you are in their Facebook group. They used to do a monthly thing where they would give away T shirts to the 1st 50 people that commented on a post. Not only this. That's great, because it creates better customer, um, satisfaction just by giving them stuff. It helps make people happy getting free things. But what also happened was because most their cup customers are content creators themselves , they air creating videos wearing their T shirts. And so when people when other people are wearing your merchandise and they're creating content wearing your merchandise, their audience, their group, their circle is going to see that T shirt or that merge and wonder what that is, and so it helps spread the word even faster that way, so I wouldn't say this is the most important thing you should do as a content marketer. But down the road, if you do want to create some kind of merge, it's easier than ever, and it can help you create a more well rounded brand. 45. Promote Content with Collaborations: another way to quickly grow an audience and get more eyeballs on your content is through collaborations. This could either mean through influencers, partners or co creators, so this depends on the type of content where you're at. But getting an influencer to share your content is a great way to quickly get more people viewing it. You can also partner with other people. Teoh. Share your content. This can be through some sort of affiliate relationship. If you're sharing some sort of paid content, depending on how your website is set up or what tools you use, there's different plug ins to create affiliates. Or, for example, I used teachable to sell online courses on my own website, and I can actually add affiliates who, if they share my website or a course, they There's a cookie that is on on the website that if someone visits through their link, they'll get credited for that student if they sign up and you could set that to a 30 day and 90 day cookie, whatever you want. And so that's one way to get more eyeballs is basically incentivizing other people to share it. The other way is just to collaborate and create content with someone else. This is what I did with my podcast. I partnered with someone a co host to create content, and my co host does a great job at sharing that content with his own audience. We also do interview so collaborating that way, doing interviews. I've done things in the past on YouTube to collaborate with other you tubers. And when you do that, you just allow more people to see your content because they're sharing in the contact with their audience. You're sharing the content that you create with your audience, and it automatically is going to be more than if you're doing it by yourself. But when it comes down to choosing someone to partner with, it might not be the best idea toe. Collaborate with someone who's a direct competitor of yours, but maybe someone who's more aligned that will help you. That can bring a different side to the story, create content with you that expand your audience, expands the type of content. For example, I partner with a lot of photographers and video creators who know different applications who can teach different types of things that I don't know personally, but its content that my my audience is interested in. So that's it's not a direct competitor. I'm not finding someone who is going to create a an adobe Premiere pro tutorial that's going to compete directly with my own Premiere Pro tutorial. Rather, I'm finding someone who's going toe, know how to do audio production really well and edit audio in Adobe Audition because that goes hand in hand with my video editing audience. Does that make sense? So again, this is one of those things where you might be like OK, yeah, Phil, I know that collaborating is good thing, but have you actually done it? That's the question and the challenge that I have for you in this class. After this lesson, Maybe it's a good idea to go out. Search for 10 to 15 people who might be good collaborators with you. Reach out to them, have an idea for what the collaboration should be and see what comes of it. Thanks so much for watching and we'll see you in the next lesson. 46. Promote Content with Paid Advertising: in this lesson. I want to talk about paid advertising. So again, this is a topic that is not what this course is really about. Paid advertising is a completely different form of marketing than content marketing, but it is something that you can use in conjunction to get more views and watches or listens for your content. So with paid advertising, there's lots of different types. Social media boosts. We talked about this before how you can pay on Facebook or Twitter, basically to get more people to see your content. There's also paid search, so this means on Google or being when someone searches for a term, you're paying for your content to appear at the top of the list on the side of the website . There's also display or banner ads. So this is if you are, um, on a website and you see a display ad on the side. This could also be an email when you see related content on the side or, um within the content itself. And this is through a tool like Google AdWords. So that's what paid advertising is. It is a way that you can get more views on your content. It is not something we're covering in this class how to do to be completely honest, because I don't do much of it myself. I think that to do it successfully, you need to be a lot smarter than I am at paid advertising. You also have to have a lot more money to do it successfully. So I would warn anybody before you spend any money doing any kind of paid advertising that one you don't need to do it and to you probably shouldn't do it right now. If you're just starting out, you should know exactly what you're doing before you spend any money, but primarily the first reasons, because you don't need to. Content marketing is all about putting out great content that you don't need to pay someone to read or to watch for it toe work. So I've created a business based off of content marketing that doesn't include any paid advertising, and many, many other people do the same. There is a point in a lot of businesses where it makes sense to start paying Teoh increase your business, but that's not something that I necessarily need to do or want to do myself with my own business at this point, Um, and it's just not something you need to dio. But I did want to mention it here because it is a way to get more eyeballs in to boost your own content. If you are interested in this topic, I'm sure there's other great classes on this platform or free videos on YouTube or guides that can search on Google for how to do it. But word of warning, um, you are probably gonna lose money at the start, especially if you don't know what you're doing. All right, thanks so much for watching. And I hope you enjoyed these lessons on how you boost and promote your content. 47. The Basics of Analytics: welcome to this new section of the content marketing course all about measuring results. Your job isn't done once you get your content out there. It's really important for you to look at your content to look at the analytics on any of the platforms and see what's working, what's not working and make changes. So in this section, we're going to be covering what you should be looking at, and we're going to make it easier than ever for you to look at your analytics and see what's working, what's not. We're going to be doing case studies on a analytics for a website on a YouTube video and also on a social media group, or posed to see what we can do to improve their. And then we're gonna talk about making adjustments and what that means. My goal with this video and the section is to help you analyse smarter. We want to do smart analyzing of our data. When you start looking at analytics, there's so much it can be really overwhelming, so we're going to start small. We're going to keep it ongoing as well. You want to continue to look at your analytics over time, not just once, because things change and then where you want to also make goals and start to use our analytics to help us achieve those goals. So let's think back to some of the goals you might have as a content marketer. One is maybe to bring more awareness to your brand or your products. One is to create more engagement with your content itself or your website. One is retention. So getting someone who has subscribed who is like to post followed you on social media to come back to you. One is lead generation, so this could specifically be increasing your the number of people on an email list. And then another goal might be actual sales or conversions. So this could be selling a product that could be getting someone to sign up for a webinar whatever you're trying to get someone to take action on. So let's look at each of these different goals and break down what type of analytic you should be looking at to see if you're achieving those goals. So with awareness, maybe this is just looking at how many total people read an article or washed a video and to do it even better. It would be how many people read that article within a certain amount of time, or how many people watched a video after you shared it to a specific platform. Another thing that you might look at with awareness is how many other pages did that person visit? So if you see the number of people who visited a new article or an old article, how many other pages on your website did that person visit for engagement analytics? You might look at our how many people share your content. So if you posted on social media, how many people actually shared it? How many comments on your post? How many comments on an article, how many comments on a YouTube video? That's a kind of engagement you can look at how many video likes or dislikes. So on YouTube, you can see how many people are actually clicking the like, button clicking the dislike. But it and sometimes it doesn't matter if it's a liker dislike, but actually getting someone to engage with it actually will help, no matter what it is. So those are a few kind of examples of what engagement analytics would look like. So with retention. This has to do with trying to get people to want more of your content. So this could be looking at how many people joined a group of yours on Facebook. This could be how many people subscribe to you on YouTube. This could be looking at how many feel unsubscribe from your email list. By looking at any of this data, you can kind of start to tell how well a piece of content is doing at encouraging retention . Right? So if you have different videos that you're looking at, you can see OK, This video converts 1% of the viewers into subscribers, whereas this video converts 5% of the viewers into subscribers, obviously the one that has a 5% subscriber rate. Is Bette doing better at retention? Right? Or you could look at your emails and you could see that this email 2% of people unsubscribed and this email 8% of people in subscribed 8%. That would be a lot, and so hopefully you're not getting those kinds of percentages. But obviously looking at that, you would know that the 2% unsubscribe rate email was better. And then you start to iterated and make changes to how you write emails based of off of that data with lead generation, what will you be looking at? You might say how Maney email subscribers are coming from a specific page on your website or how many subscribers went through an entire sequence, so you'll be looking at this data in different places. But for lead generation, you could do split testing. You could just look at different articles. You can see that this article again, a certain percentage converts to email subscribers, and this one a certain percentage does. And again, just looking at what content does better. And then with your email sequences. Maybe you have multiple sequences, and you can see what type of sequence works better. What tapas sequence to do. People unsubscribe at a higher rate. What type of sequence do people go through the entire thing? And then with sales and conversion, a couple examples would be simply how many subscribers made a purchase. So if you promote a new product, you send an email to your entire list if you have 5000 people on that list. If 50 people bought it. That's what 1% of your customer base purchased the product from you. Another example is how many people downloaded a giveaway, so it doesn't have to be a sales option. It could be something that you're giving away for free but still analyzing that data to see what types of giveaways do better. Depending. Maybe you send a giveaway to two separate segments of an email list and see which segment does better. All this analytics can help us improve our marketing. So hopefully that kind of overview of your goals helps you understand what types of data we're going to start looking at again. In the next case, studies will be looking more specifically at some of that data, so you have more of a real world experience with that. A few other core metrics that I want to cover that are related to analytics that you should be looking at. This will appear differently whether you're looking at YouTube analytics, Google Analytics or your Facebook analytics. But often times the this kind of data will be represented somehow. So you have your basic traffic metric. So this is could be how many page views a site has how many hits it has. So how many watches A. A video has. You also have unique page views, so unique patriots means how many unique people different people visited that page. Paige. You might include someone going to the same page multiple times, And so when you're looking at your past months worth of data, your unique page views is probably going to be lower than your page views, because hopefully you have people who, like, know and trust you who are coming back to your website. But you probably don't want to necessarily count that towards how many people are actually visiting your website during a month. And then, like I said, video views similar to on a website. Just how many people watch a video, both of time related metrics. So this could be how much time people spent on a page of yours. How much time, on average, did so in stand your website once they entered your website, no matter what the page they came in on your home page or an article that's good to look at , and then also, how long did someone watch a video, for example? This is actually more important than the number of individual views. Often, times are people watching just the 1st 5% or 15 seconds of a video. Where are they watching 75% or four minutes of the video? I don't know if this percentages in amount of time was right, but the longer a person watches the video, the better. Another core metric that you might see is your balance rate. So this is how many visitors enter a website or a Web page and leave it without any kind of interaction. Google sees this interaction as visiting one additional page. So searching on Google, they go to your website onto an article that shows up. And then from that article, they go to your home page or to another article or to another page on your website. That means that that visitor that hasn't bounced right, so if someone enters that article and then they leave your website and don't interact or go to another page, that is a bounce, and so that will increase your bounce rate. Now all of this has asterisks to it, because if someone leaves your website, it doesn't mean that your content didn't fulfill their need, and potentially you might have a new article that links to a video on YouTube. It leads to a social media group and links to a product on another platform, and you're a person might come to that article and then go to those other platforms, and that's a good thing. That means that person is continuing to engage with your brand or content that you create. But that means the bounce rate is going to be higher. So take the bounce rate with a grain of salt. Of course, we would like people who enter our website to continue to interact with it and go to more and more pages. We want to encourage that with things like cross linking to the other articles, including content in a sidebar that's that's related to them and things like that. But don't get hung up if you're bounce rate is really high because I'm most websites. It is. It is up there. Another core metric is engagement. So on a Web page, this could be something like comments. So how many people are commenting on a NAR tickle? It could be votes or like so this could be on social media. How many likes your posts are getting? It could also be back links. So this is how many other people are linking to your content on DSO. Google does. Look at this. This was a way that websites back in the day could really rank quickly on Google. Basically get a bunch of other people to add links to their Web site. And so Google saying Wow, this website. There's a lot of other websites linking to it, but people were able to trick Google that way and so they kind of lowered the importance of back links in terms of determining the ranking of a website in Google Search results. But they still are important, especially if they're the back. Links are coming from higher quality reputable websites, but you used to literally just be able to pay a service toe. Add thousands and thousands of back links to your website, hoping that that would increase your Google ranking and that doesn't work anymore. And in fact that would hurt you more than help you and also social metrics such as likes shares or comments. So we've talked about this a little bit before, but depending on the platform. Even on a website, you might have things like likes or shares for an article that you can look at. All right, this is a lot of information. Hopefully, this makes sense so far. And then the next lessons will be diving into some case studies so you can see it in action in the real world. 48. Case Study: Website Analytics: welcome to this case study on website Analytics website Analytics will come in different forms. I use Google analytics and I use WordPress to build my website and so you can hook up and integrate Google Analytics with your website through the Google Analytics website and also through plug ins that WordPress has depending on what website builder you use, you'll be able to hook up Google Analytics or your website builder might have their own analytics for you to use. It's up to you to figure out how toe hook that up. That's that's out of the scope of this class. There are courses or lots of free tutorials on how to set up Google Analytics with your website, so I encourage you to do that. But once you do that, you'll get analytics like I show you Today there's two ways I'm going to show you. One is just through the main Google Analytics dashboard, and then the other is through this Google Analytics Plug in and Google Chrome Extension. So here I have. I'm using Google Chrome and I have the extension that when it's all integrated, it actually shows you some cool data for your website. when you're on it. So, first of all, I can see that here, our analytics from Let's see, this is the past. Ah, 30 days or so. Let's go ahead and make sure we're past 30 days. Yep. And so this is for my home page. Ah, Video school online. This page has had 9000 page views, almost 8000 unique page views. So remember we saw that metric in the last lesson. Thes are unique individuals who have visited this page. Here is the average time on this page, which is lower than our overall site average. Makes sense, because if someone was on an article or something like that, they are more likely to spend more time on it. Bounce rate for this page is 58% while our site average is 85%. So psy average bounce rate. That is really high. But imagine that a lot of those people are coming to specific articles and then leaving them. When someone comes to video school in lines home page, they're much more likely to click on another link and this exit percentage. This is similar to bounce rate. This is just how many people leave the site after visiting this. The page and what's really cool is this real time number right here, where you can see how many people are actually 100 website right now. The other cool thing about this is we can scroll down and see the percentage of what people click on from this page. So up here in our top menu, we can see that 12% of people click the start here button, 20% click video, 13% click photography and then lower for these other categories. Search a lot of people doing search and then re sources. It's a decent amount of clicks. What does this tell me? This tells me that a major portion of my audience is video creators. Not so much design. So how do we use this analytics? Well, we probably would use it to say, Let's create more video related content. Or you might say, On the contrary, I want more designers interested in video school online, So maybe I don't have as much many people clicking design because I don't have as much designed content, so I actually need to create more of that. You can scroll down and see where people are clicking from a swell. There's other links to like the start here page. Other links to those other pages design, business, etcetera. And so say we go and we see Okay, well, most people are clicking on the video page. Let's go there to that video page and see what people are doing. So once people get on this video page, notice how the percentages change. 16% of people from this page jumped to the photo page. I kind of makes sense because people are coming to my website. There may be first interested in video, are just going through all the pages. So they start going through all these pages left to right, but also below, we can see the percentages of people clicking on different articles of mine. So here it kind of makes sense that that first article gets the most clicks just because it's the 1st 1 and then also the first ones in each of these categories. Get this the most clicks because it's easier to see. But I can also see here that this article here, 20 plus film shots you need to know has a lot higher of a percentage, then this 2nd 1 Ultimate guide to creating better videos. Almost twice as many people click that. So maybe that's something it tells me. Okay, I should move this link up. Or maybe it tells me I should create more content like that. So that's one way to look at simply, just this data that we see on our course on our on our page here. So what if we go into one of these articles? What can this tell us? So we can also see? Let me go back and see what the balance rate is for this page. And then if we go to this article, the bounce rate similar 68%. If we scroll down on this page, we can see that as we scroll now, we have different links. And look at 21% of people click on this link with in this article. This is why it's so important to have leanings cross links in your website. If I didn't have this linked out, most people would probably just keep scrolling, keep reading and then exit. This makes me so excited when I see all of these links being clicked on by by a higher percentage of people. Then I would have thought, as you go down, the percentages get lower and lower and lower, which makes sense. But what does this tell me? This tells me that this article is doing pretty good. That bounce rate is a little bit higher than I would like it, but not so bad as some other pages. For example, if we go to another article, that's how to make money on YouTube. Article 84% balance rate. That's a lot of people leaving this article if we scroll down trying to find links within this article that people are clicking on. And I realized there's not many links, especially up at the top. There's not that many people who are clicking on actual links within the this article. So this tells me one is the content bad? Maybe, maybe not. But to probably there's nothing for a person who is reading this article to do next. I have lots of content related to YouTube and YouTube marketing. Maybe I should include a link to one of those other pieces of content up here at the top. Or maybe I should put together a free video Siris on how to make money on YouTube, embed it or have a link to it. So that's how I would use this, the the analytics on this page toe to make changes. What's interesting, though, is the average time on this page is two minutes. The average time on this page is four minutes, and the total page views is actually higher. Interesting. So I could go into Google Analytics and see how people are getting to this page. Maybe it's a lot more people coming from ah, Google or something compared to maybe most people on this page are coming from my own website. Let's go into the analytics dashboard. So if you sign up for analytics and you hook it up with your website, here's the main dashboard. So this is my entire site overview. I'm not gonna cover everything, but I want to show you the basics of how this works, and then I challenge you to go through and start playing with it. So here we have our main data, like the number of users from the past 30 days balance rate, average session duration. We can see the active users right here on the right hand side and see what pages they're on . We can see where people are coming from. Our people coming from organic search is for the past 78 Let's go to 30 days. Are people coming from search? Are they coming from social media? Are they coming from links? Are they coming directly to the site? Meaning are they like typing in video school online. We can see more specifically where they're coming from for referrals. A lot are coming from you to me. Some are coming from Pinterest, some from YouTube, some from Facebook for source. This is ah lot coming from Google again. You, to me, Skill share. Cool. That's good to know, because recently I started sending out more emails to my skill share students with articles . So that's working on the right hand side. We can see what countries are students are from makes sense mostly from English speaking countries, but also it's really cool to see where other people are are coming from. If we scroll down, we have our most popular pages. So here I can see our most popular articles. These are articles I can tell from the these links this right here is our home page. The 2nd 1 What's what this shows to me are that these articles are ones that are ranking well in Google, and a lot of people are finding them from Google searches rolling down. This is a really cool piece of data. This shows you the retention of your users. So in week zero, if someone comes to your website, that's 100% retention. How many people come back the next week and the next week in the next week and the next week in the next week? This is really, really low. Actually, I don't know what it would be like for other websites. I haven't done that data or that research, but Onley three. Less than 3% of visitors come back the following week, and then it continues to go down. So seeing this obviously retention is a major part of building on audience and building a website. So how can I do things to get people back to my website? Maybe it's improving the way that I do email marketing. Maybe it's putting up more content because, as I mentioned earlier in the course, I stopped creating a bunch of new content this year on my website to focus on Just figure out how I can use the existing content, the best possible. But maybe this has decreased because of that. So lots of cool stuff here over on the left hand side, we have all kinds of different links. So if we go under the audience link, for example, this is where we can Seymour information about who our audience is weaken. See, um, I mean all kinds of information from what country they're in, what browser they're using. If they're on mobile or not, we can go under demographics and see what age they're at. Male female, as you can see mostly male users. For me interest, we can see just an overview of the interest. These air sort of buckets that Google has lots of media lovers, technology technophiles, so these kind of information can help us put together our target audience and customer personas. Going down to acquisition. We can see some really cool information like what people are searching for. So most people who come to my site are coming from organic search, which is cool because that means people are just finding it through like a Google search, not as much through email or social. And so this information tells us well, are we happy with this? Or do we want more people finding us on social media? Maybe we need to boost our social media, presidents doom or on social media. Make sure we're linking back to our website on social media whenever possible. Right? So that's what we see with this data. For search terms, we can see this is what people are searching for. Video school online. That's obvious. Aftereffects. First Premier pro couple poses Let's open up a little bit further to see what else people are searching for. Some of these are just kind of random premier pro settings. Adobe Illustrator editing movies, green screen. So this is cool, because when we see that people are searching for after effects for his premiere pro, we know that that's one of our most popular articles. Maybe we need to create MAWR content related to that. Or maybe we look at that article knowing it's the most popular one or one of the most popular ones and see how it's doing converting people onto a course we're onto an email list so we can then go look at we can add a an opt in form through convert kit. We can see the percentage of people coming to that page and signing up an and do that kind of analysis as well down below, under acquisition. We have a social category just in the overview I wanted to show you. It tells us the different social networks people are coming from lots from YouTube, lots from Facebook, lots from Pinterest a little bit from Instagram and Twitter. All right, what does this tell me? How can I use this while this helps us understand who are customer is and where they live online? It also tells me I spend a lot of time on Twitter. I actually don't. But if I did and this is what I saw, I would say, Well, that's a waste of time. I should focus more of my attention on YouTube and Facebook and Pinterest Or on the contrary, Hey, I really need to figure out how to get Twitter users back onto my wife website. Let me experiment with Twitter and see what I can do differently. Or maybe this just says I haven't posted as much of the stuff that's on YouTube and Facebook to linked in. Let me go through and see all of my posts. See, all my automation is that I've set up and make sure I'm posting the same content to these other platforms, right? Lots of different ways to look at this information. Let's go under behavior. This is really cool because this helps you understand what people are doing on your website a little bit deeper. The main page has kind of the general popular pages, so this is cool because you can see your most popular pages and and look at them. What's more interesting to me is behavior flow. This is a flow chart that shows me what people are doing so we can see. We kind of saw this already by going through the main pages. This is the home page. If I click on this and highlight traffic through there, we can see what people do through that. So people go to the home page, and then what happens a lot on the go to this video page? Some go to the about page the start here, page the tire. A few page Resource is more pages from the video. The video Let's go back, Back, back, back highly. Only this segment, this will be a little bit easier. So Home page. Most people go to the video from the video. Most people go back to the home page or the fit our review pages or to 20 other different pages, So those are probably the specific articles. All right, so this is interesting. But let's go back to something we don't know because we kind of already knew that by looking at the analytics on the main website back here, Let's go to our very most popular article, the green screen from for premier pro tutorial view only the segment. What do people do from here? Most people go to the home page. Some people go toe the start. Here's some people who go to video. Some people go to other articles. I think this is what's linked into linked in the article itself. What I noticed, though, is what a gigantic drop off of people out of 2.9 sessions. Most of those people, only 0.38% of people are going to another page of mine this is a dramatic room for improvement for myself and something that I need to work on. So how do I use this information to make it better? Well, I need to look back at my goals. So if my goal is to get someone who comes to this page to go to my video page, then maybe I need to include more links in the article itself, talking about the video page and linking out to it. But what you need to do is come up with that ideal behaviour flow that you want people to go through and then you just start experimenting, start making changes, editing your pages and then come back here Ah, a month later and see if this has changed. So we have to go back to our marketing goals. Think about what are you trying to achieve with your website or with a specific page, Each piece of content each page should have a goal. And so whether it's getting more people to read an article, getting more people to view a specific page from an article getting people to comment on a page, that's something that I didn't look at through Google Analytics But I could just literally look at different articles and see which ones get more comments. First, the others Maybe I need to try to engage more with the reader in the article and ask them questions or creative video and embedded and ask questions there, and asked people to comment. Those are things you can do to increase that engagement. Maybe I want people to subscribe to an email list so I can use things like convert kit and or whatever email marketing tool you use Odd and opt informs onto your pages and see how many people are opting in. See which pages do really well and then replicate that or if your goal is to increased sales, for example, there's complicated ways to do this with Google Analytics, where you can literally track people through the entire sales process. You can see where they drop off. You can see a way. Did someone visit this page? Did they get to the check out page and drop off, or did they get through the check out page? Or there's easier ways to do this, depending on what type of product you're selling or service you're selling, you could create a unique product, or you could use a unique You are l for that product page, and you can Onley have that unique your l used on different articles. And so for each article, you use a unique curole. You can do this with something like bit Lee. You can also do this with with, ah, plug in for WordPress like pretty link where you create unique Urals and you can track how many people go through those links and then depending on what percentage of people actually buy a product. Through that link, you can see which articles are actually doing better or not. In general, some of the best thing just to look at is simply how many people are visiting your website . How long are they visiting your website and what the balance rate is? And then comparing that over time. So if I look at my information from the past year, I can see a slow climb and how many visitors I have. That's great, but maybe it's not as fast as I would like it to grow. I see there's a major drop off here, too. In January, what was that about? Maybe look back and see what kind of content was I putting out Then? If there's any spikes, see what content was put out then or what was launched then or what I was doing on social media, then to increase that those views so you can do simple analyzing that way as well. It doesn't have to be complicated, all right, I hope this sort of brief overview of how you use analytics on a website inspires you. I definitely recommend checking out the analytics for your website. Ah, and also looking at Google and YouTube to see tutorials on how to set it up if you haven't done so already. Thanks so much for watching and we'll see you in the next lesson. 49. Case Study: YouTube Analytics: welcome to this lesson on video analytics. For this example, we're gonna be looking at YouTube's analytics, so if you have a YouTube channel, you can sign in and go to the YouTube studio. So just goto you tube studio under your profile. And then right now it's in the beta mode. Something's air changing as they change this back end sort of management tool. But on the left hand side, you should see this analytics dashboard so similar to our General Google analytics for the website. This page has a lot of general data. We can see the total watch time. So how long people were watching our videos? We can see the total number of views subscribers revenue, which is the revenue on YouTube itself. We can see our top videos. We can see real time activity like who's watching right now, what they're watching, etcetera. We can dive into all of these things by clicking on these tabs or clicking on the more information down below. So for reach, viewers weaken Seymour information like how maney impressions we have. How many times were our video thumbnails scene based off of that? How many people actually click through and washed our videos 6% which led to how many views how maney unique viewers. So you can look at this data and see OK, we have a 6% click through rate. What can we do to increase that? What can we do to make our thumbnails even better if you click on one of these tabs, or if you click this Seymour button down here, you can get more information specific to more videos. So how would I use this data if I want to increase my click through rate? I would look at these videos with the higher click through rate and see what the thumb hell's look like. So let's look at some of these higher ones. Relinking offline media in Premiere Pro kind of hard for you to see, but I can see that the thumbnail was literally just kind of a blank thumb. Now with the text offline media tutorial so very clear what that is. Let's go down, Um, how to use sequences in Premiere Pro again same format. It just includes the text how to use sink wins sequences in the thumbnail itself. Let's look at one of these ones with the lower click through rate, so this one was a different style. The text is a little bit harder to see. There's more text on it. And so maybe this one people don't know really. What? This is based off of the thumb now. So I would simply do something like that where I look at the ones with the best click through and then see what we're doing with the bad ones. And you can always update your thumbnails and see what changes. All right, back to our main reach. Viewers analytics. You can scroll down and see how people are coming to your videos. Some are from YouTube surge. Some are from external websites. So if I click on this, we see more. We can see that most are from a YouTube search. If I want to go into any of these, let's ah, for example, going to YouTube search. What are people searching for? Lots of stuff about baseball, and this goes back to what I talked about early. Lots of people coming to my channel for this baseball video. Now I need to decide. Is this hurting my channel? Helping it should I take down that video because ultimately do I want people searching for these terms to end up on my website? Not as much as I would like for these people who are searching for premier pro tutorials or other video related tutorials or for tired feet tutorials. So ah, on one hand, this tells you potentially what you're doing right and wrong with your videos. But also it tells you what other content you could create to have a successful channel. For example, now that I know lots of people are coming to my channel because they're searching for baseball rules, maybe I need to create more content on that topic, right? So you're seeing what people are searching for and what people are clicking onto your channel for create more content about that. Of course, hopefully it's on Brand. But maybe you realize that you're spending a lot of time doing photography vlogs when most people are coming for aftereffects tutorials, which are a lot easier to create. Now. I'm talking to myself right now because I know that's what I've been doing the past few months. I've been creating a lot of photography of logs, but those are getting as many views, and most people aren't coming to my channel. For those. If I scroll down on these analytics, I can see that our top playlists are ones about after effects and Premier pro. So that tells me that, really, I should be focusing on those topics rather than even the photography ones. Under the interest viewers tab, you can see more information about your top videos from the past 28 days. You can also see the top videos by end screen playlists. You can also see information about your end screens, so end screens are a tool in YouTube, where you can add links to related videos or other things. And so here I can see which videos are are opened by end screen and also which and screen elements are most clicked, such as videos versus like no one subscribing from my end screens top cards. So cards is another thing. YouTube has added where you can add links. Teoh, other other websites try to get people onto your other content so I can see which ones are working. So if I know, for example, that this text is working here, 50 plus courses start for free. Maybe I need to change the other cards toe match, that same sort of style. I love this building audience tab because it really shows you what your subscribers are doing. So it shows you who your subscribers are, what their ages, what country they're in, what language and so this you start to see and then you can change, maybe your personality or your branding and style. According accordingly, we can also see where people are coming to your channel and becoming subscribers. So if I click, see Seymour and Click subscription Source, we can see that a lot of people are becoming subscribers from our watch page, meaning the videos themselves. Some are from our channel itself. Some are from search, so they see are channelled pop up in the search. But let's go into the videos themselves and see what the subscription rate is for these videos. Let me on zoom out a little bit. So here's our most popular videos from the past month. What percentage of people are subscribing for this learned Premiere Pro? We have 5.6% for this graphics tutorial in Premiere Pro 7% Baseball, explaining five minutes 2.9% that lower. And that doesn't surprise me because they probably see while he has a lot of other content about Premiere Pro, but not a lot of content about baseball. And so uh, so that's why that would be lower. So all these videos that are more about premiere, pro or video production have a higher subscription rate. We can also look at these videos and say, OK, maybe in this video, the one with the 7% I talk about subscribing. I talk about the benefit of subscribing to my channel. And if I'm doing that in these videos and it's a higher percentage, maybe I need to do it Maurin these other videos as well. So that's what I would do is look at the videos with the highest percentage of subscribers and see what you're doing well and how you can implement that in any other videos. Then, lastly, we have the earned revenue tab. This will show you how much you've earned from their video. The admits that they show on your videos so you can see how much you earn by month. You can see how much you earn by video. You can see what type of ads are working. What I would look at is my top earning videos. If my goal is to create to make more money, I would look at this and make more money. More videos like this, for example, some my top video earning videos. Arthuis, Financial, personal finance related videos. So if I really just wanted to make more money with my channel on YouTube, that's probably what I would dio. But YouTube ad revenue isn't a great source of income for a business. It's kind of nice extra on the side, but I wouldn't depend on it for your business. And so, with my YouTube channel, I'm making a lot more money directing people to my other content, sending traffic to my website, to my courses to my other products and services. And that's really the money maker from YouTube. So you have to look at that those analytics as well. So you know how I have links on a lot of my videos to a website or two courses? I look at that data and I see OK, This video has sent X amount of traffic and that has resulted in X amount of income And then I see which videos air doing the best. And then I again kind of replicate those styles of videos or replicate how I sell my courses in those videos. Whether that's through end screens, cards, calls to action in the video, the description, all those kinds of things I look at. So just like I talked about in the last video, you really want to go back to the goals you set with your analytics and see how looking at these analytics, you can achieve your goals even better. Thanks so much for watching, and we'll see in the next video. 50. Case Study: Social Media Analytics: in this lesson, we're going to be looking at analytics for social Media. This specific example is going to be a Facebook group. Depending on the platform you use, you'll have a certain amount of analytics that you can look at. I definitely encourage having a Facebook group for your audience. It's a great way to build a community of like minded people and just a really great way. Teoh encourage people toe like now and trust you. So here's our photography and friends group. If you sign in and you have a group, go to it and then click on the group insights. So here you can see basic information like how many new members you can see total engagement for the past 28 days. You can see your top contributors. If you scroll down, you can see more information. Ah, for just these basic insights for from total members, you can change the length of time so you can see the growth your membership requests, etcetera. If we go into more of our engagement details, this is where it gets really interesting. You can see the total number of posts, comments and reactions, and of course you want to see this kind of increasing, and you might also see spikes. And so you can look at these spikes, go to those days and see what was happening on those days that created that spike. You could also see active members. So right now we have over 16,000 active members, and that's out of our total 20,000 members. And so that's really cool to see that that's such a high percentage, and you can see across here over time, like how many people were active per day, even Ah, and again, you can kind of see Okay, 11,000 people were active on the second of April or the third of April. What did we do that day to create that activity on these down days? What aren't we doing down below? You get more information about popular days and times. So for us, it's kind of static throughout all the days we can go even by day and see what times are good. And this will tell you OK, knowing that five PM or 6 p.m. Is really popular, our most popular time on Mondays. That's when we want a post on Tuesdays. It looks like about 10:30 a.m. or 10 a.m. Wednesday again. 10 a.m. Thursday. A lot of people in the middle of the day like being on our group, and so you can start to interact more at that time, posting more at that time down below, we can see the most popular posts, and so these are the ones that get the most comments, interaction, engagement and views. And so a lot of these air post that I've posted. But some of them are what other people are posted so you can see what are what are other people posting and try to replicate that or encourage other people in your group to post similar things. Then, lastly, in this last, have you have your more member details? So this will show you who your top contributors are. And I mentioned in another lesson the idea of rewarding your your members in your audience . So creating a post where you think all these members for the time they spend in the group would be one way to reward thes subscriber years or these members rather and also to encourage people who want to be recognized. Teoh interact and spend more time in the group. You have more data about who is in your group women, gender or age, top countries, even top cities. So this has kind of inspired us to think about ways where we could potentially have in person events, knowing that there are a lot of people in New York, London, Bangalore, Mumbai, Mexico City, we can potentially plan some sort of event for people in the the cities and know ahead of time, which might be most successful. It also doesn't mean just having like events in person, but maybe creating content and using images, imagery or language from these different locations. And that might increase your engagement for those types of posts. So lots of really cool stuff, basically, just looking back at your growth details, seeing when you were growing seeing what post our most popular. That's how I would use this kind of data. Ah, and then make changes accordingly. Thanks so much for watching, and we'll see in the next lesson 51. Making Adjustments: just looking at all of this data isn't enough. What we need to do is make adjustments and changes based off of these analytics. So some examples of this might be creating similar content to what is working, seeing what does well and doing more of that. Another option is repurposing old content in new ways. So seeing that an old article does really well and it it does really well on Google gets a lot of traffic from Google, maybe repurpose ing that into a podcast episode or a video or a social media post. Or lastly, an example would be making content evergreen and updating it. So if you see that an article that you think is really good isn't getting enough traffic or or engagement, maybe it means changing it up, adding content to it, updating it. For example, you can take an old article and add a new infographic to it. You could turn it into a video and then embed that video into the article to make it more engaging or adding a new lead magnet to an article or a piece of content that is working really well. I've done this before where I have articles, hat, get a lot of traffic, but nothing was happening with that traffic. A lot of it was just bouncing. Some of it was going to other pages. But if you have really popular articles, make sure you are capitalizing on that that traffic by adding specific lead magnets to that article, downloadable guides or something that's really related to that. The content of the article and then, of course, re sharing old content as well or old articles if you see in your analytics that you have on article that got a bunch of use when you launched it. But then it started to fade, fizzle out, not get so many views. Maybe it's time to re share that content on social media to boost it again. So this really is the most important part about analytics. It's fun to look at. It's fun to see who's watching your videos, who's coming to your website, what pages they're going to. But unless you actually do something with that information, it's not going to help you become a better business or content marketer. If you have any questions about this, let me know. But hopefully, through the case studies and the ideas in this lesson, you will come up with ideas and ways. Teoh. Make your content even better with your analytics. Thanks so much for watching and we'll see you in the next video. 52. Conclusion: Wow. Well, this is the end of the class, and I hope that you really enjoyed it. I hope I've achieved my goals of helping you understand what content marketing is how to create better content, how to promote it and actually make it work for your business. If there was anything in this course that you thought I could do better if there was anything that I didn't cover enough, please let me know. I really need students like you to provide feedback. So an analytics so that I can make my own content better if you're interested in other topics related to this, such as general digital marketing, email, marketing, social media marketing, YouTube marketing. We've got courses on all of those topics. If you need to take your skills further in actually creating content such as videos, photography's graphic design websites, YouTube, we've got courses on all of those topics as well. Head over to video school online dot com to see all of my courses or, if you're on this platform, go to my profile or search for my name or video school online to see all of our courses. We would love to see you in another one. If you haven't done so yet, make sure you leave a rating for this course. Those ratings help new students find this course and know whether it's the one for them or not. And they also help us understand what we can do better or what you liked about this course . Thanks again. I hope you have a beautiful day and best of luck with your content marketing.