Content Creation Made Easy: Unleash Your Creative Potential!

As I said, wanted to go through some slides just to give you some context as it relates to content creation. And they'll give you some of the tips and principles that, as I said, we use in our content agency to help other people create their content. I'll share those. And as I said, at the end, we can certainly open it up for questions and answers. And if you've got any questions that come up in between, just pop them in the chat if that's easier for you. So what I wanted to do is to share these principles that actually make content repurposing easy.

Sally Curtis is a content repurposing whiz. She is privileged to work with modern-day superheroes who are on a quest to serve and impact the world. An outside-of-the-box thinker who loves leverage with a naughty personality, and some say she is bossy, but it's really passion shining through. Sally is fast-paced, so be ready to take notes and ask questions. As an agency, we work with experts to amplify their brilliance and engage their audience through the power of bite-sized content. We are best known for turning books into 2 years' worth of social media posts. This is what we mean when we say visual graphics, tiles, stories, carousels, and videos. We're a content partner on streaming TV network. Sally's Success Secrets Exposed podcast is ranked number 20 by Feedspot. She is a professional speaker. a single mother of Rory and well-trained by her dog, Honey. We work with changemakers, media, and publishing houses across the globe. She has worked with incredible business leaders, filling their events with exceptionally high conversion rates in some amazing locations. Going on to do this for herself, coach others, she discovered the secret to standing out was visual content and human conversations. We're here to share your wisdom so you are sought after and sold out with the lifestyle you love.

I did forget that that video was gonna automatically play, but that does give you a bit of an idea. And that's the type of, I suppose, content that we create and even using some of the AI tools that are available as well, which is often a conversation around creating content. So one of the key things that we find makes a huge difference in the content's profitability is understanding your target audience very, very intimately. So What that means is creating content that resonates with your audience. So it's what your audience needs to help them have forward movement, and it actually provides value to them. So it helps to generally educate them, give them forward movement steps, share a teachable moment, or it's a story that helps to create an aha moment in your audience. If you create an aha moment or a shift in thinking, then that is often deemed valuable to your target market. And it keeps them coming back for more content, especially if you're creating bite-sized content. One of the other areas to really make sure your content is as profitable as it can be is to define your own goals. And what that just simply means is, are you trying to sell a book like Peter's just launching a new book? Are you selling into a workshop? Are you just wanting to get some thought leadership out there? If you know what it is that you want to achieve in a 90 We work on 90-day runs in a 90-day period. Then that helps you to form and create the right sort of content to create a successful outcome for yourself as well as your clients. One of the key things for those people that have already created a lot of content, and it's been in my experience that most of us have lots and lots of content sitting around us that we don't even realize we've actually got hidden on USBs or in Google Drives or in notes, et cetera, in notebooks and things. Because we sit already on a mountain of content that would be gold for our audience, and it's a great way to repurpose content, it's very important to sort and evaluate not only your current content but also your past content as well, making sure that it's relevant to your audience. And then it will become an effective tool to help you refine and improve your outcomes depending on what your outcomes or goals are for the quarter or for the 90-day period. And we generally talk about sorting it and evaluating it based on your big topic word and then your underlying or subtopics, as well as a bit of a methodology as to how to go about sorting it, et cetera. Then the next thing to save time to make content creation and/or repurposing things simple for yourself and make it very easy or a breeze is to develop systems and templates that help support you do more with less or do more in less time. So that's what we mean by streamlining your workflows so you can ensure that you're consistent in what you're creating. But it also helps you be consistent in posting because you don't get sort of stuck in the weeds when you're trying to create something. If you haven't created some templates and those sorts of things, you can spend an awful lot of time going down a rabbit warren creating one single post versus getting multiple posts ready in one go. So this will explain that a little bit more. Most people these days have heard of Canva. Many of you are on it. When you've used Canva, Canva for a while, you'll fall in love with it. It does enable you to create these sorts of content pieces that we've used. We've created the slide deck in Canva, and it really helps you create a recognizable brand like we've done here for Gary. We've just created some assets here and there. They all look similar, but they help him stand out on his chosen platform, for example, which is LinkedIn. You can also leverage Canva's pre-designed templates so you can actually help yourself by creating Canva templates to help you get your content out quicker. And of course, one of the features on Canva is you can actually schedule your content to go out onto your social media on Canva as well. And it's a relatively inexpensive tool to utilize. And I know Peter loves it. One of the areas that most people fall in a hole when it comes to creating content is the time trap of finding images or spending hours looking through images for that one post that they're creating that day. One of our super hacks for saving time and making content creation really easy for yourself is to gather images in advance and just store them in a string in Canva, and then you can copy and paste them across to your templates, et cetera. But definitely build a library of high-quality images, and you can do that in Canva. And all of the images, et cetera, are free within Canva depending on whether you've got the free version or the paid version. Ultimately, it's a much more cost-effective way of utilizing elements. And Peter knows that this is one of my big nags. One of the tips when it comes to creating content is educate, educate, educate. So in other words, educate your audience by educating, as I mentioned before, insights, aha moments, changing in thinking is all perceived as highly valuable by your audience. And if you're educating them on an ongoing basis, you become highly valued and highly prized. The reason I say this and why I've got it as educate, educate, educate is for many years I've had an influence diagnostic that I've taken my clients through. And over the last 5+ years, when we've looked at the data from those diagnostics, the one thing that has tripped people's level of influence up in their marketplace as it relates to creating content has been the limitation of what they were delivering in educational content. In other words, they haven't educated or provided value to their audience, so their audience will often switch off and won't be as engaged and consume them in a high manner. So that's how you absolutely increase your influence in a marketplace and create profitable content is by educating your audience. Simple growth strategies, something that we do as an agency and specialize in incredibly is helping your audience envision their transformation. So if you're a coach or you're a consultant or you're changing the marketplace's thinking like Peter's doing with his book, a number of our other clients are doing with their thought leadership books, when people are grasping hold of a new idea, they need to be able to see the steps as to how you can help them or your content or your program or your workshop can help them transform from where they currently are to where they really want wanting to be. And a great, uh, description or a great example of how you can share that visually is, um, the, the chrysalis to the butterfly. And if you have a look on the, um, on the image here, and let me just move that box out of the way, um, the— obviously we haven't got a picture of the caterpillar, but we can imagine the little caterpillars here. And then the caterpillar transforms. So it can— you can envision the transformation that the caterpillar becomes the chrysalis. You can then understand that the chrysalis then starts to transform where the butterfly starts to grow in it and it starts to look like a butterfly fly instead of just a green caterpillar. And then you know that the butterfly will emerge from the chrysalis and then eventually when it's dried its wings, it will actually be able to fly off as a butterfly. If you can demonstrate through visuals what your audience will do as far as a transformation, in other words, you can take them from this step to this step to this step to this step, and you can demonstrate that visually. That really is a great way to showcase your expertise and create, again, content that really works for you and becomes a profitable outcome. And it makes your content production very easy. When you master this, you can minimize the amount of content that you actually need to put out depending on your the hunger of your audience. We have one client that was Gary, which I mentioned his name in an earlier slide. He just posts 2 times a week, one during the week and once on a Sunday, because he knows when his marketplace is online and he provides good quality content that enables his audience to continue consuming and learning. So you don't necessarily have to produce content every single day. Big, big tip. Stop selling and start helping. Most content problems are overselling or overpromoting, which feels like this to your audience. They feel like you're shouting at them. Like we all got to understand that too many capital letters is yelling in an email. Too much overpromoting or overselling feels uncomfortable to your audience and does tend to make them turn off or look for other sources of thought leadership, et cetera. So you build trust with your audience by generally generously helping them have forward movement without you. And then you do very much become their preferred and the obvious choice and their obvious expert for you, for them, sorry. Next tip, embrace that 90-day runs. Most people get a bit freaked out by creating a 90-day plan. Because generally they overcomplicate it. It basically is the methodology, as it says here, is the secret of getting ahead is actually just getting started. And we just do really, really simple content plans because Sally's very old school. I'm just gonna quickly share them up against the screen. So we've just printed off a month calendar there. And a different version there. And we've just literally plotted out some content planning for our clients. So it doesn't need to be any more complicated than scribbled notes on a printed calendar. And that's a great way to create a 90-day plan for what you're doing with your content. And it helps you sort of prioritize what you need to be saying and how you need to be saying it and when you need to talk about filling your events or workshops or whatever it is you might be selling or trying to promote, as well as adding value you with your educational elements in there as well. One of the big things to making content easy for yourself and content creation easier for yourself is actually spending some time unpacking your thought ideas or your content. I tend to go— these are some of my examples here where I was actually unpacking an idea for a a keynote presentation that I was doing on creating strategic joint ventures, and I've just started to map out different elements or ideas that I had. Post-it notes and a glass window or a glass sliding door are a great way to unpack ideas so you get them out of your head so you can actually see them on paper, and then you can move the Post-it notes around so you could sort of see and refine your thinking. If you do it that way versus trying to do it in of a computer, you actually save a lot more time and you're often in a much more inspired state because it feels a little bit more creative.

There's color coding in that too, usually.

Yep. So in the color coding, yeah, great, Peter. So color, in this instance, I do color code things as I'm thinking of them or when I'm rewriting them. In this example, the blue ones here are current stories or case studies that I've got of where where I created a Russian ski resort deal and Zambrero's story. Then the green, as it says there, is just an everyday relatable everyday person's story. So these are my high-level stories. These are everyday stories to make it understandable, to create the context. And these pink lines are things that I think I want to say, So, you know, I've got a bit of an idea going there and then I've got a, and the reason for this is, but I'm stuck. I don't know what that reason is. So that's why that Post-it note's blank. So they're all just brain dumps. Some people use mind maps. I love Post-it notes. Does that help, Peter?

Yep. Thanks. There's a, there was a reason for the different colors. That's good.

Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Isn't there always?

It's just that you get, like, when you buy those things, they're always in a whole range of colors anyway. So yeah, you make use of it. Yep.

Yep. Perfect. And this one's a big one. This is where I find people get really bogged down on the marketeers saying you need to have lots and lots of content going out every day, all day, every day of the week, et cetera. But the reality of it is you just need to find your own consistency rhythm. And you could still be a sold-out expert, et cetera. And it helps you maintain your consistency with your content scheduling and maintaining that, et cetera. So that's just a quick overview of some content principles that we use in our agency that we suggest our clients do to help them make content easy. And if you're wanting to have a look at those or get a copy of those slides, the slide deck, then you can just very simply go to this URL and you'll be able to get a free copy of that slide deck. Alternately, you've also got another option there which will take you through to my Linktree, which is a platform where I've got all of my links all in one spot. And we do have a couple of free ebooks in there and plenty of other free resources that you can also take as free options to help you make your content creation that much easier. Thank you very much.