Did you catch this podcast episode?
On Through the Marketing Lens I interviewed content marketer Beck Power and got to hear her amazing slew of knowledge on the topic of growing your business through content strategies. We got to discuss how much mindset has to play in your marketing and spoiler alert...it's about 90%!
We talked through that and many other great topics and you'll be able to take so many gold nuggets of info from this so let dive right in!
A little info on Beck Power. She is a content marketer. She's also a speaker and she's got her own podcast which is Amplified Content. It helps small businesses to create content, and we all need that right, but she also repurposes our content and she makes their content more effective. She's all about driving awareness and engagement and leads in sales, and she founded Power Creative Media, which is a done for you, and AMP Content Academy, which is a free resource for DIY content hacks.
Katrina Aronson: Beck, in your words, what is it that you do exactly?
Beck Powers: So I run a content marketing agency. Essentially its content repurposing is 99% of what I do. We help clients to take their content and turn it into a whole lot of pieces so one video turns into 100 or so pieces that they can take and post on social media so they appear more often in front of the audience.
Can you please define for me your definition of what content marketing is?
Yeah, sure. So, content marketing is how you explain to your audience in different ways how you help them through a bunch of different mediums. Such things like blogs, videos, audio, and all types of different things. However you communicate with your audience is content, and there are a ton of different ways to do it.
So for someone who's struggling and who is having a hard time coming up with the content do you have a hack or something that just really works?
I follow James Archer throughout the years as he's one of my favorite authors, and he has this whole thing where he would come up with 10 ideas a day and they could be about anything I happen to use them for content writing, but he said if you can't think of 10 ideas, then you have to think of 20. I feel like that's such a cool thing because it is true. What we do when we try to think of content and we feel a bit of pressure, we want to get it right, we don't want to get it wrong, we don't want to make a mistake. The really important thing I think with content, topics, and ideas is that you have to be willing to make a mistake, you have to be willing to try different things, experiment, not everything is going to work. About 50% of the content that I put out is average. You know, I think it's good content but it gets average results. You know no one clicks it or no one sees it or Facebook doesn't advertise it. So I think the key is to experiment and just put out as much content as you can because at the end of the day it's what there. How else do you communicate with your audience, you know you want to be talking to them all the time and communicating back and forth with them as much as possible, that is made possible through content. So, in our academy actually, we have a tool that you plugin in your stuff, and it shows you how to come up with 100 ideas in 10 minutes and then you click a button and those ideas are put into 20 frameworks so it becomes 2000 different topic ideas for your content, and that's in two minutes. The short answer is to not be precious about it.
How do you get into that creative space, how do you allow yourself to not see this as a chore?
It's a mindset. Right, so you have to get into the mindset, that you do have the value, you just have to pull it out with you. You want to get out of that box where you wake up and go oh crap, what am I supposed to post today. It's really funny that people see content as a chore, I don't because I'm in this business and I love it. I get really excited about the prospect of thinking of a new way to do content. I think a lot of times people get stuck in what everyone's doing or what they see, you know, or doing like the most basic version which is Hey, find my thing, right, and no one wants to be on there every day promoting themselves in that way. It starts to feel icky, after a while because it's not free. It does feel icky because you know you're just saying the same thing over and over and you know people are getting sick of it and they're getting sick of it because you haven't done anything creative with it. I think that people get tired of doing the same thing over and over again but if you've got these new fresh ideas, not just topics but the actual method it will surely be easier. Going back to mindset it's not just like coming up with the ideas of what you're gonna post, it's being creative about how you post them.
So, something that you said just triggered this thought and I wanted to go there. So, as you know, we're on Facebook and Instagram a lot as that's how we share our messaging. But the truth is that the posts on there if you're not paying for them, they're obsolete within a day. So, you know, I hear a lot of people say like, I don't want to keep posting, it's annoying. Do people really want to keep hearing from me but you're being a narcissist if you think that people actually see all of the things that you're posting at this point.
Yeah, definitely. I agree with you. It's funny because we see all the stuff we post, we get sick of it, and as I said, anyone would get sick of it if you're just saying buy my thing every five minutes but there are so many different ways to post that that can keep it exciting. As well you can repost old articles, they're still relevant. You can post old recordings and stream them or re streamers as if you're live and I use software like One Team and things like that you can reuse episodes and you should be reusing them you know it's good for your guests, it's good for you and it's content that you don't have to create again. So, even sharing an episode, once every three to six months the same episode just rescheduling because ideally, it's still relevant. The other thing and this is kind of where my stuff shines is chopping that interview into pieces. So, in any given podcast episode there's, you know, somewhere between 4 and 10 pieces of content there. You can pull those out so they're just one or two-minute clips and then use those clips and you can brand them or put subtitles, your logo, or whatever on there. Just using software like InShot, things like that. You can take those clips and use them on social media as your daily content and that shows you as an authority. It has your face popping up in it and It shows some of your best content so people hear a one-minute clip, then they're gonna go wow, there's a whole episode of that I want to listen to. Then you're sending people back to your old episodes.
Talk more about your tips for pulling out content:
In terms of pulling more out of that blog post, I would go through it and pull out some quotes and put those onto quote cards. You can then put those quotes on a short post on Facebook. Also, what I like to do is grab the paragraph out of that blog post and turn it into a LinkedIn or a Facebook post or an Instagram caption. If I've done a video on like five ways to get more views on Facebook or something like that, then I've turned that into a blog post, then I can go and pick each one of those five points and do a video and then a blog post on that. So essentially you can do as little or as much as you want to do. The point is that you don't even really need to come up with new content all the time because you've listened to people say the same 20 things all the time. We try to find different ways of saying them which is great and there's kind of like mind map bubbles, outside of all of them and that's great, but we can just kind of keep on linking those mind map bubbles to each other and doing them in different ways and putting them on different platforms. Making us get more and more creative with them rather than going, Oh crap, I can't think of anything else to post on I've already posted all the stuff, just say it in different ways.
So I read something recently that said, 60% of people are inspired to actually seek out a product or service after reading content. Like that's a pretty powerful number to hear. I think that's where people fall short because they stop talking about it expecting they've talked about it too much or that people remember them already posting it so, really when you're creating the content it's about showing up a million different times, right?
I think it is, I hear arguments to the opposite side as well. But in my experience and my client's experience that showing up regularly as much as possible is the best way. Now, can you overdo it? Sure you can but I always think like if someone has seen your content, many times, like, that's good. You have to be reminding them of what you do. I get comments and people messaging me all the time saying holy crap you're everywhere. You know, and it makes you think you must be killing it right now, right? Like if that's the message I'm putting out then like yeah I'm gonna keep doing what I'm doing. I'm really committed to my business. I'm committed to making this a million-dollar business. I'm gonna do what it takes to reach my goals.
I want to bring you back to something that you said, which was 90% of your revenue comes from Facebook. I want to dive into that so -- are you on many different platforms?
I am on different platforms, I don't spend much time on them, I follow Gary B's philosophy of putting 80% into one platform with backup ones where I put content on there but I'm not super intentional and I'm not trying to engage daily. My recommendation is to go on one platform and the second one is a backup. Because at the end of the day whatever the platform is that you choose, you can reach your goals just from that platform.
Who knew when we talked about content marketing it would really be about mindset.
Yeah, it's coming from a place of like, you have to be able to run a sustainable business. It's just, I mean I've tried to be on many platforms, it didn't work for me and I can say that it has never worked for any of my clients. Like can you keep up with it or will you last three days and then it would be too exhausting, it's just that we don't need that kind of pressure on our mental bandwidth because we don't have that much energy. You know we've got enough to work and doing a really great job of one platform and maybe have a backup one if people are like, Oh, are you on whatever other platform. I think people really do feel a need if they've got a platform that they should be posting all the time and what that does is make us feel guilty, and all that guilt does is drain our energy, because it's just not worth it. So if you permit yourself to forget that Twitter exists to forget that Tik-Tok exists in terms of your business at least, that frees up some energy that you can put into whatever platform excites you.
You know, it's like that whole thing when people say that by saying no to something it's actually saying yes to something else. That's exactly what fell on me when you just said that is like, you're allowing yourself the space to actually be successful on platform A by not being on platform B, C,& D.
Always go with the platform that feels right. So if someone's on Instagram and that works better, stick with it. I mean it's difficult work and don't feel guilty about not doing everything.
A major question we always get about social media is, how do I get an actually successful post? So as a content marketer are there any thoughts there on how someone can be truly successful with a singular post?
So there are two elements right there's firstly writing the post and then there's from distributing the post. So you want to write a really great post and then you need more people to see it so you need both those elements.
You want to speak directly to your audience so that they have that moment where they relate. Something I find that does well is something fun. That's why I like memes. After all, they're shareable, because someone without hardly any words can have that feeling of like, oh I know what this is like. So sometimes you can create that effect with things like testimonials or case studies or, you know results.
Oftentimes, the post that I write with numbers in them do really well, because people love to read numbers. Then having some elements of like talking to the pain of a person so having them relate in a way or like having them respond. Because a post that does well gets ideally comments and actions taken by likes or whatever, which is so that more people see it. So, if you can connect with them in a way that makes them want to like or share or comment. You want the algorithm to show it to people and how you do that is, like I said, getting comments and likes and shares on the post because it will show it to more people if they do that.
The other thing to do and this is something I've been working on and experimenting with is in the half-hour before you make a post, being involved in other people's posts. So if you go on Facebook and you haven't been on there in two days and you post something. No one's gonna see. If you've been on there for an hour and a half and you've just been commenting back and forth with people on their posts and you've scrolled your comments on different things, you watch the video, then you make your post, it will show to a lot more people.
I think that's so incredibly helpful because I think, I'm going, to sum up, what you said, How I received it is that basically, you need to create really good content that people can connect with so that you can get engagement, but also take the time to engage before you post it so that you get the credit on whatever the platform's algorithm is.
Yeah, and every platform has its nuisances. So, doing some research on whatever your main platform is will go a long way. Like I said earlier, this is your livelihood so you know this is the thing that's gonna make your sales. Since it's your main platform so learn everything you can about it, forget about the other ones, and learn everything you can about creating better content on that platform. If that was a difference between having a, you know $ 2,000-month business and a $20,000-month business then I'd be doing everything that I could about it now.
I want to talk about your business a little bit. So, when someone comes to you and says, I need all this content, how does this logistically happen, how are you creating the content for them?
So really it's a simple model. Usually, if we're doing the 90 Day offer, they give us four or five hours of content could be video episodes of a podcast could be, you know, webinars, or training that they've done or interviews that they did. We take that and we turn it into micro-videos so one-minute clips, audiograms so same audio version with, you know one of those waves related graphics, and then quote cards as well.
One of the things you said I want to get to, which is which apps that you've been using. Can you tell me about OneStream?
OneStream which takes any video that you have like a podcast or a video podcast or an interview or whatever and you've got one that you recorded and have a copy of then you upload it to OneStream and schedule it, and it will show it as if it's live. Super cool you can schedule I think like eight videos a month. Therefore you can just look like they're showing up live in your group doing interviews, or whatever they were. It's really like my business is working behind the scenes for me.
Before we sign off, I want people to know how people can find you?
I have a free resource called AMP content academy. I decided to put all of my freebies and cool stuff. I like to create tools and I put them all in one place so there easy to find. I just put everything in almost like an online course format but it has all my freebies and stuff inside the one area. There are a few of my workshops and things that are for sale in there as well but most of the stuff is free. The other one is if you're interested in having my team, repurpose your content, it's called power creative media.
Content marketing is a pretty powerful tool. Understanding that creating content does not have to be your entire business is also kind of a big deal. Take that in.
