Crowd Sourcing For Content Creation

Are you staring at blank walls wondering what to write for your blog or post to social media?
 
 In this episode, we will talk about how to gather ideas through crowd-sourcing.
 
 Full show notes & links to resources mentioned: https://rachelbrenke.com/epi2/

Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):

Welcome to the Business Bites podcast, the podcast for busy entrepreneurs. Whether you're an online entrepreneur or seeking after brick and mortar success, this podcast brings you quick bites of content so you can learn and grow anywhere you are. Now, here's your host, Rachel Brain Key.

Speaker 2 (00:17):

Welcome to today's episode of the Business podcast. I am your host, Rachel Brinke, and I want to talk to you a little bit about content creation when you have absolutely no idea what to write about, I know that there's many of you listening that are from all sorts of industries and having a blog or creating content may not be readily apparent. Or even if you're someone that creates content for a living, you may be running into feeling like you're well as dry on ideas. So I want to give you guys some easy, cheap, free ways that I come up with my content that is super simple, easy. In fact, it's so easy. That's how I ended up with this podcast because a lot of the questions that I receive through various mediums or things that I see online I'm going to share with you guys.

(01:06):

Now, social media and the internet can be a cesspool of a lot of crazy things. We know all sorts of things go on out there, but the great thing about it is if you dig through the muck, you will end up with some really good nuggets of information. And right away in most groups online or just on people's random feeds, you're going to find all sorts of questions and of those yearning for specific content. So I want you to start in a couple of different places depending on the industry. Again, this depends on all what yours is about. So you may have a huge one, you may have super small, but either way, there are pretty much Facebook groups, Facebook pages, Twitter posts, hashtags, all sorts of places on the web. Those are the main ones I just gave you guys exactly where I go to.

(01:58):

But there are all sorts of ones that will be connected to your industry that you're able to search through and find the information that people are seeking. Now, if you are a content creator who's trying to set yourself apart, this may be a little bit more difficult because you may feel like, oh, this has already been blogged about a hundred times, or other people have beaten us to a dead horse. Or maybe as a topic you don't really want to touch on. Anytime that you see a repeated question coming up in these groups in Twitter, in your inbox, even if you already have an audience that is connected to you, pay attention to the top questions that are asked. I know for myself specifically my brands, each of them has their own Facebook group on top of our email inbox and our newsletter and evaluating our Google analytics of what the top pages and posts are.

(02:52):

The groups are actually a great resource for multiple reasons. I can develop the community. I'm able to tackle specific product questions that people may have since I have online and physical products, I'm able to answer directly right there, and it helps to clean out the email a little bit and the support chat and other people can see the answers as well, which is really super awesome. If someone has a question about something that they can safeguard their business, since I am in the legal industry and I provide the legal services, other people may not have thought of a specific inquiry, and then when they read it from someone else in the Facebook group, then they realize, Ooh, I maybe do need this product. And the great thing about that is people will start chiming in, they'll start asking questions. I try to facilitate a very conversational, as opposed to just a knowledge base slash customer chat support and getting talking about what do you really need?

(03:50):

What is it that you're seeking after? Because some people may think one piece of information or product and it actually goes another direction. And within that thread, I pull from it. I'm able to shape sales pages, I'm able to shape email blast and or follow up content emails after someone has purchased or engaged in a service with me. And I'm also able to produce content creation, which could be a blog post, it could be a podcast like this, or it could be an email newsletter. It could be a lead magnet ebook that I'm going to distribute whatever format that you want to look at. Maybe you've been thinking, huh, I want to create a lead magnet, but what do I need to do to get these people on my email list? What are their top questions? I go right to the Facebook group. And now I do want to note here, it's really important.

(04:40):

I don't want you ripping off other people's ideas and other people's content. I'm merely wanting you to dig into these avenues to get inspired into see what the top questions are. Now, the fact that I have a Facebook group of almost 20,000 individuals at the time of this recording, it's really good because most of the time their questions are for me. They're wanting to get that information directly from me anyways. But I'm in a lot of industry groups across a Facebook and I even check out Reddit sometimes. I'm able to see these top questions that I'm able to add to my editorial calendar list that I'm going to pull from When I'm ready to sit down and whip up a blog post or a podcast, we just simply tally it. It's not something highly sophisticated. We just have a running Excel sheet. We say what the question was, and then if there's any context notes that go with it, the date that we saw the person request it, as well as we go along, we do little tick marks of how many people have asked related questions or that exact same question, so we know how important that question truly is.

(05:47):

For me, since I have online products and I reach out to the majority of even my in-person service clients through online mediums, I know that a lot of times I'm able to track to make sure once this content's created, it's going to be delivered in a digital format. I can see if it's really being utilized because sometimes you can be off base, you can see a lot of questions, and it may have just been a trend of something that was going around in your industry and it may kind of fall off. So that's why it's important for you to follow up with any blog posts or content that you do that you try to capture the emails as much as possible so that you can continue feeding these individuals content. But I just know that for myself, I'm able to have a running list all the time of blog posts and emails, and if I want to create a new lead magnet, I can whip one up just by simply pulling up my Excel spreadsheet that I keep in my Dropbox and I'm able to formulate it.

(06:44):

Now, I have one of these running for each of my brands, and it's really important that we always make sure what the source was, the individual that has posted it. I also like to do a little covert research into who they are and what they do, because sometimes the question can just be a one-off. It's not something that people necessarily are that really interested in. And while you may be interested in as the person creating the content, you really want to make sure that they are even in your industry because there's people that pop in and out of groups or on pages and ask questions all the time, but don't really have any skin in the game, so to speak. And so whenever I see that question, I think it's an awesome question that I can create content off of. I'll click in research them on social media.

(07:27):

I'll cross-reference it over into my email list as well to see if I can find them there. And the great thing about that is, and this is a total nice little bonus for this podcast, even though we were talking about content creation, we can cross over to customer service. I'm able to directly email these individuals if they're on my email list as well, and do a lot more of a follow-up and an in-depth discussion with them. I've actually created a lot of good business networks this way by reaching out, getting the customer service for them. They probably buy into the product or service, but then we're able to also facilitate more of a symbiotic relationship, especially if they align with what I'm doing or they have a good product or service that would really compliment what I offer to my audience. So I mean, this just sounds like common sense for you guys, but just take my method.

(08:19):

I just explained. Look at maybe three to five of the top places where you see a lot of questions within your industry. And by places I mean like Facebook groups, the Twitter, Reddit, Facebook pages, even your own friends list. You can crowdsource and ask questions and get questions from other individuals. And then I go from there and keep that running list. Again, that top information is the person who posted it when they did what method. Any follow-up questions, the context of whether or not they're in the industry, or maybe they're a purchaser of the industry, which is really important. Lemme give you an example on that. One of the industries that I am involved in is the photography industry. I am a lawyer and business consultant for photographers as well as a photographer myself. And one of the big things is I find that photographers, while I service them and I'm feeding them information, they get lots of questions from their clients as well.

(09:15):

And so not only am I able to serve and create a post or a guide on maybe copyright law and what exactly that means to the photographer and what exactly that means to the photographer's client, not only will it educate the photographer themselves, but also gives a photographer a tool to be able to give to their client. It's just super awesome. I've got a couple of freebies and lead magnets out there that they can use for that. And it's great resource because I'm serving multiple industries, I'm sorry, multiple individuals within one industry, within one action that I've taken. And all of it has derived back to some of the top questions that I've seen in my Facebook group and on my page. I'm going to flip over real quick here before we end our bite session for today. If you are unable to find this information, you're in a really small niche or you don't have a group yourself, just ask around. Ask your friends.

(10:13):

Look at what other people are being asked. Again, don't copy verbatim exactly what people are asking or the content, is it being put out there, but maybe another little spin that you can put on it. That's how my brands actually came about. I was seeing a lot of legal questions coming out of the woodwork, and I was like, well, I could be a general legal person, or I can narrow into this niche. And one of the things I saw was that photographers really needed help, and I've been able to cast my net very deep as opposed to very shallow and wide. And it was simply just by keeping my ear to the ground, my eyes on social media and to see what the top questions were in my industry at the time. And I thought my industry was just legal. And it ended up becoming, one of my brands was in the photography and creative arts industries, and that's how I found it was simply by social media and listening to those around me.

(11:03):

And so don't be surprised if you're digging into this content drilling, so to speak, and you're trying to find this information, if you feel like your vision may be shifting a bit, your brand identity may change because if you see a need, you need to take it and you can't see a need. You can't develop content if you dunno what people are actually requesting. And one last thing to leave with you guys while you are creating this content, I kind of mentioned this previously, make sure you're watching all your analytics, that these posts are actually getting any traction. You're sharing them on social media and that if they're not working well, and maybe you need to reformat them, repackage them in a way, or maybe you need to kill them and pull 'em from your blog. And this is why it's really important to keep track of the demand of questions and not just to write one-off questions. Those are really better for emails. Just one-to-one to the person who asked, reach out to them and talk to them directly. You want things on your blog or what you're creating or what you're putting out to reach the most amount of people, but also the most amount of people are going to actually consume it, not just have it fill up your blog or your website, because then it's just going to be filler and it's going to make it harder for those that are seeking information from you to actually find it.

Speaker 1 (12:12):

Thanks for joining Rachel on this episode of The Business Bytes. For show notes, a list of recommended tools or referenced episodes, you can find them@businessbytespodcast.com. Until next time.