pillar content | Beyond Your Side Hustle

Hustleburg Episode 38 – Answering Your Content Creation Questions

This episode is a Q&A episode with questions from you about creating content for your business. In the first podcast Q&A episode, I seem to have struck a chord with many of you, as many of you have been asking questions about content creation generally and pillar content specifically. This episode is for you!

There is No Such Thing As Too Much Content

I’ve often been quoted as saying there is no such thing as too much content. We aren’t going to be creating content for the sake of creating content. Everything that you create needs to add value for your community and it needs to be a part of The Five, your five focus areas for content. This isn’t as tough as it may seem.

Here’s the good news: Each tweet you send, each link you share on Facebook, each photo you post to Instagram, and each video you share on TikTok is a piece of content. If you have a podcast, you can re-purpose it by slicing and dicing audio clips, create memes of important quotes within the episode, use your show notes to create blog posts, and record not just audio, but video to create for YouTube. You can also ask your community to create their own content around their vision and use for what you do. Look around. There are a ton of aspects to your business and your life that you’ve never shared with the community you’ve created.

Re-use your content with context – Use content on multiple platforms, creating multiple posts using the same words, images, videos, etc. The key thing to think about here is context, not simply cross-posting
Re-purpose pillar content – Have a long-form evergreen piece of content that you can break down and re-purpose into multiple pieces of content. White papers, podcasts, videos, and webinars can be very helpful here.
Ask for user-generated content – Engage your community and have them create content for you. Your many fans and followers are definitely willing to share their ideas, create content that you ask for, or even create content for your business without anything more than an ask.
Document your life – Use your daily routine and the activities of your to create content around your business. Treat your life like you’re on a reality show and share the results.

Re-Use Content Across Platforms with Context

The REASON behind your post and the value you bring to the community on THAT platform make up your context. Also, your content can’t be about your calls to action. It should be about adding value to your community. With all this in mind, you can’t increase your content creation by simply cross-posting your Instagram photos to Facebook, which they’ve made super easy to do with only a slide of the switch. Your community on each platform expects something different from you, because they interact with you on THAT platform, not to be a part of a marketing effort. The key is to treat each post as an individual piece of content and craft it as such. You’re reaching out to two or three different audiences on each of the platforms you share it, so you need to consider each of them differently.

There is a TON of content out there, waiting to be consumed. So, you have to be great to reach people where they are and engage them. So, DEFINITELY post that photo across every platform you use, but only do so if you can offer something different to each audience that consumes it.

Re-Purpose Pillar Content

It’s easier to re-purpose content and make derivative pieces when you have a pillar content piece to draw from. A podcast episode, white paper, keynote address, meeting notes, and instructional videos can all turn into several other pieces of content aside from their initial purpose when published. It could be all of these can be broken up into 3-4 blog posts on your website. You can then slice them up further using some of the ideas we outlined earlier in the episode to create even more content for social. This content on social media will drive your existing community toward your other work, and you’ll be able to deepen your already-existing connection with those that carry over.

Engage Your Community for User-Generated Content

Take some of the pressure off by getting your community to create content for you. Whether video, photo, or written work, featuring user-generated content will not only ease your mind about creating enough content, featuring how your community uses your product or service will highlight them. Reach out to your customers to create content for you, based on how they interact with what you do. Your team is second, only to you, in being an expert in what you do, and they may have helpful tips, hacks, or suggestions to make what you do even better for your clients. Focus some of your user-generated content on the people you do business with. This is an easy way to engage your community, both internally and externally, to make content for you. Sounds like a win-win.

Document Your Life

It may not seem like it right now, but by the end of this episode, inspiration will spark you to realize how interesting you are and how interesting what you do is to other people. We love to look at what others do, think, and surround themselves with when it’s not like us or obvious to us. Right now, you could probably create 100 pieces of content based on your view, your desk set up, the tools you use and how you use them, and your calendar.

Like the environment you find boring, your process may seem to be as well, but there will be an audience ready to get a glimpse of how something works or how you get from raw materials to finished product.

We come to care about those we know. Even if we’ve never met, we want to know about the people we interact with.

Documenting is easier than creating, and it’s just as interesting.

Get Engagement Training in Your Inbox Now

If you’re not satisfied with the social media results you’re getting, Beyond Your Side Hustle offers this training via email.

Find out more about Beyond Your Side Hustle here:

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If you enjoyed what you heard in this episode, please take a moment to subscribe, rate, and review this podcast on your favorite player. Each episode is available on its own post, with the entire catalog here. It’s available on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast catcher. We listen to this show and our favorites on Castbox. It’s hosted by Podbean. We appreciate your attention, and we can’t wait to have you back for the next episode.

Be a Guest on Hustleburg

If you have any questions you’d like to have answered on an upcoming Q&A episode, please take a moment to visit beyondyoursidehustle.com/podcastquestion and ask there. If you’re a St. Pete businessperson who’d like to sit down for an interview, please reach out to us here.

How Can a Podcast Help My Business?

There are several ways a podcast can help your brand or business.

Share Your Knowledge and Expertise

The first way a podcast can help your business is by giving you an outlet where you can share your knowledge and expertise, shedding a light on your business while giving insight into your industry. You have direct knowledge and expertise that only you can share about the industry and, more specifically, your business. You are an expert in what you do, and this is an opportunity to share that expertise with people who are already interested.

Plus, if you’re one of the first podcasts in your industry, you also have the first-mover advantage over others that may join the podcast space for your industry down the road. Regardless, you have your unique perspective and an opportunity to differentiate yourself from other podcasts and businesses in the industry.

Sharing this expertise on an audio platform helps you build community around the show and your brand that you may not reach on a visual social media platform. Many people listen to podcasts while occupied with other tasks, passively consuming content while walking the dog, exercising, driving, or while working in a way no other digital media can be consumed.

Creating Connections

A podcast can also help your brand or business by creating connections to others in your industry. If you choose to interview guests on your show, you have the opportunity to reach out to and share viewpoints with your colleagues, vendors, and customers to offer a 360-degree discussion of your area of expertise. You also have an opportunity to add value for them, as well as the audience, while you discuss your industry and business. Without guests, you can share customer stories, solutions with vendors, funny anecdotes, and other content that showcase your expertise.

You also reach people already interested in your industry and business with your show, acting as a reminder of who you are and what you do. It’s like nurturing a community of “warm leads” for your business.

Get Insight Into Your Community

When you engage and involve the listeners in the show itself, you also help your business, gaining insight into your community of customers and potential customers.

Can you imagine being able to ask an engaged community what they want to know about your business or industry? This is like having a FREE focus group to tell you how you can better serve them. You can also test new ideas with them, to find out if your latest idea is a good one. When you listen, you’re able to gain insight into how they want you to serve them.

Is there a better insight into the minds of customers than an engaged community of customers themselves?

Create Pillar Content

Finally, for a brand or business that’s creating content around themselves, a podcast gives you a tremendous amount of long-form content that you can use as a pillar for a lot of other content you create. You can re-package and re-purpose the same content across a variety of channels without having to create something completely original for each platform.

Using a podcast as “pillar content” is a great way to have a variety of content created for many platforms and uses.

Create Pillar Content for Your Business with a Podcast

By having a podcast serve as long-form pillar content for your brand, you achieve two big things.

What Your Pillar Content Does

You create a library of searchable content that stands out when people look for you and in your industry. If they are not a part of your community already, they will be looking for an expert to answer questions in your industry. You are that expert.
When creating content around your brand, a podcast serves as a terrific way to re-use and re-purpose content for other use, by slicing, dicing, and re-packaging the podcast content and using it elsewhere without having to create more content.

Re-Purpose Content

A 20 minute podcast episode turns into several other pieces of content aside from the audio you publish. It can serve as 3-4 blog posts on your website by transcribing (or using your pre-written notes). Think about how much time you save by editing your spoken word to become a blog post, rather than writing, re-writing, editing, and publishing new, original, written content into a blog post.

Also, utilize your laptop or smartphone camera to record video yourself recording your podcast episode to upload to YouTube to capture those who are interested in the visual as well as the audio of your podcast content. It also offers a way to passively consume the audio on their computer while they utilize other tabs in their browser or applications as they work. It’s an easy way to share video content with minimal editing, only requiring a cut here and there and uploading to YouTube. You then create a channel on the second largest search engine in the world for your business. Having that search engine working for you is pretty handy when you consider that Google also owns YouTube and will be able to index your video for relevant Google searches.

Social Media Use

Take short video clips from your podcast, whether your recorded video or “audiograms” to share to Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, and LinkedIn to promote your show, share video content highly-valued by those platforms, and share smaller bites of your expertise with your community. That content will also drive your existing community toward your podcast, and you’ll be able to deepen your already existing connection with those that carry over .

In addition to the audio and video that you re-purpose in smaller pieces, you can also create memes for those same platforms with quotes, as well as offer text excerpts from the body of your podcast to your community across platforms. This creates a TON of content from a single podcast episode without minimal extra effort.

This is how we are able to create so much around Beyond Your Side Hustle, creating articles, videos, quotes, and micro-blogs from the larger pillar content created for the podcast. We also record video YouTube publication to answer each question answered thus far on the Q&A episodes.

There is a lot of potential content created from a single episode of Hustleburg, and it’s replicable for your podcast.

Hustleburg Episode 32 – Answering Your Podcasting Questions

In this Q&A episode of the Hustleburg podcast, Brett answers listener questions about how to use a podcast to help you build a community around your business.

A Little Podcast History

Podcasting has been around for a while, serving as a way to democratize the audio medium for each of us. They reach back to the 1980s, but it was Apple’s introduction of them to iTunes in 2005 that helped to kickstart the beginning of their popularity. NPR is one of the most popular podcast publishers of all time with the smash podcast hits This American Life, publishing weekly since 2006, and the top downloaded podcast of all time, Serial.

The biggest hurdle for most people is answering “how do I listen?” Phone makers have made it REALLY easy of late to just jump right into listening with either Apple Podcasts or Google Podcasts. With hopes of being a disruptor, Spotify has jumped into the podcast world with quite a splash, launching podcasts within its streaming app and gobbling up exclusive content. There are plenty of other podcast players out there to match just about any tastes for layout, features, etc.

How Can Creating and Publishing a Podcast Help My Business?

First, you have the ability to share your knowledge and expertise by shedding a light on your business and give insight into your industry. A podcast can also help your brand or business by creating connections to others within your industry. You’re also reaching people already interested in your industry and business with your show, acting as a reminder of who you are and what you do. Finally, for a brand or business that’s creating content around themselves, a podcast gives you long-form content that you can use as a pillar for a lot of other content you create.

Why Are Podcasts a Great Way to Create Content for Your Business?

By having something like a podcast serve as long-form pillar content for your brand, you achieve two big things. First, a library of searchable content that stands out for people to find you. Next, a podcast serves to be a terrific way to re-use and re-purpose content for other media by using the podcast to be sliced and diced without having to create more content. You can create articles, videos, quotes, and micro-blogs from the larger pillar content created for the podcast to be used across all the platforms.

Should Podcasts be Audio-Only? Or Should They Have Video?

Remember that you are creating content for your community, so consider their preferences first. Will you add value by creating a video podcast?

What Equipment Should I Use? What Programs Should I Use to Edit?

To start, go as cheaply as possible. You aren’t in the business of podcasting. You’re starting a podcast to complement your brand or business. First, you’ll need a way to record audio, and that often means getting a microphone. You could also try starting out with just your smartphone. If you choose to edit your audio on a computer, you can find free audio editing software online, Audacity being the most prominent solution. Finally, you’ll need a host for your podcast. Spotify-owned Anchor is pretty robust for a free hosting solution. We use Podbean. The most important thing to remember is that you should be focusing more on the content you’re creating for your community than anything you do to dress it up.

Get Engagement Training in Your Inbox Now

If you’re not satisfied with the social media results you’re getting, Beyond Your Side Hustle offers this training via email.

Find out more about Beyond Your Side Hustle here:

Website
Hustleburg Listener Community on LinkedIn
Beyond Your Side Hustle on LinkedIn
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YouTube
Brett’s LinkedIn