Hey, it's Samantha Hartley of the Profitable Joyful Consulting podcast. This season, we've been talking about marketing and over the last few episodes I've been talking about content marketing in particular. Today, I'm concluding that series.

So we talked about strategy, like why we do content marketing in the first place, planning how basically we set out what we're going to write about to make it simpler to do so. And today I'm going to talk about content creation, like how you actually generate those posts and videos or whatever is it going to be that content? And we want to make it as easy as possible and as effective as possible.

So first, I wanted to ask you, have you ever written a post that got a client that generated a client for you? I wrote a post years ago, really early on, and I just was shocked and amazed because this had just never happened. I wrote the post about a mentor contacting me. It was in the form of a two step organic, which means that you say within the post, if you want to know more about this, put this word in the comments and I got just tons of responses in the comments. And I was really thrilled because the people who were responding to this post were at a very high level, so I was thrilled with that and then from those responses, I actually got clients. And that was really amazing for me because I think that was probably the first time I could trace social content back to getting clients. I had gotten clients through email and other, you know, other ways that my content had generated but that one was the first one that came from a social post and I thought, well, this is just crazy good and easy, so let's do this all day long, so if you have gotten clients through your social posts or videos, then congratulations and if you have it yet, then I'm going to talk to you today about how we can make that easier to do and with posting that is less effort.

So in general, in content creation, I always like to think back to the intention of what we're doing. Yes, the number one intention is to get clients, the second intention is to build your brand like I talked about with the analogy of the tiles and the mosaic, you're taking some tiles and you're building a larger picture, each piece of content is a tile that teaches your audience who you are and why they need to know you, you're creating a larger picture of your brand.

The third thing that your content does is it gives value to your audience and that's what I really love about it. It's your chance to share your expertise, and people can be transformed by that that you'll never know about and never meet, you'll never know that it worked for them, it's just a really benevolent thing that we do with the content creation. So those are our top three goals, Get clients, build your brand, give value. And the immediate thing that we're looking for from each post that we create is engagement, you want to have engagement meaning people like, comment, share and they respond. So in some cases you just want a private message, direct message, something like that. So some kind of a response to what we create. And if that has been difficult or if you've done well but you want to do better, then these are the things that I think are really key.

So the first one is to have a ‘you’ orientation, you remember in the episode on the most powerful word in marketing, it's you. So we need to focus all of our marketing on who we're talking to. And a lot of times in posts you can see that they're doing a lot of talking about themselves or they're talking about a process or they're talking about something that just does not feel relevant and interesting to the reader. The other thing that they can do is focus too broadly on too many, you know that I love for you to write to one person.

And the reason I like to write to one person is because you can make certain assumptions, like if you're working with brand new beginners, then you're going to spell out everything. You're going to define terms, you're going to lay out processes that are very clear, you're going to acknowledge that they're new and everything, scary and unknown. That's a way to target a single specific target audience. If, however, you work with people who are not new and they have a certain level of knowledge, then your content can reflect that. So you might not define any terms you might write, speaking to problems that they have at a totally different level, you can use acronyms or jargon that you can assume. So I love knowing that there are assumptions I can make about the person I'm writing to with this ‘you’ orientation.

My perfect prospect, for example, is not brand new. Her business is at a certain level of sophistication. So she's not only not just thinking about getting clients, she's thinking about getting the right clients in many cases next level clients. I don't have to talk to her about why it's better to sell a $100,000 engagement than a $25,000 engagement. She's sold on that idea, so she's thinking like, how do I do that? Where do I find these clients and how do I do a better job? So take a look at the assumptions that you can make and those are again the kind of topics that you can write on. But specifically, as you're writing the way your writing style or, you know the qualities in it will be different. Remember to always ask yourself, like, what's in it for them? Why would someone read this?

Now, the next three points that I'm making are about actually the structure of the post itself. So we want to start with a hookey opening right, so think about a hook, it grabs you and in copywriting, it's just this classic aphorism that they always say, which is the job of the first sentence of anything, is to get you to read the second sentence of the job, of the second sentence, to get your third sentence, et cetera right. So the job of the first thing that they see in your post or the opening of your video is to get them to keep consuming, Keep reading, keep watching. So the opening is the most important part and I'm going to give you some ideas for how to open, but I'd love for you to keep your ears up and your reader up as you read posts over the next few days and start to notice hookey openings that grab you because it's not going to be the same for everyone. Something's going to grab you that doesn't grab another person but you want to begin to see what grabs your audience, right? You want to think about how do I get their attention right off the bat. In formatting, you'll sometimes notice that in social posts people will almost write like a little title at the top of their post, whether it's in brackets or bold or something.

So that's kind of imitating the idea that this post has a title that's obviously going to be a certain kind of posT. If you just have a, you know, a three liner, you're not going to have a title on there necessarily, you might just have a few pieces of something. So especially in email, the job of that subject line, this is where it's the hooky opener, right? You're going to have a subject line whose job it is to get that email opened and even though it's open, you get a first line in there that has to get them to read everything else. And, you know, people skim so they might not be reading the first line, the second line, the third line, which is why you want to create that content so that it kind of directs them, it's easily skimmable. I like to say the eyes absorb it like you look at it and your eyes have absorbed it before you've even really read the words, that's my favorite kind of writing to read.

So hooky openings are key. And now let's talk about that kind of structure. To me, the pro tip here is it's easier to create content when you're working with some kind of a format, a framework, a template. I think a lot of times people get tripped up is when they sit down and they're like ok, I got to write a post, where do I start? What am I going to say? Well, that to me is, you know, that blank sheet of paper thing can make it really difficult to write a post. I think what's best is for you to have some kind of an outline.

Now, a fun thing to do is to take someone else's post that you loved and write it line by line in your version. So if they say, ever wonder how things are going in the yada yada industry, you can say, ever wonder how things are going in my industry? Or have you ever noticed something with these kinds of clients? You could say, have you ever noticed that with my kinds of clients? So I like to assign that as an exercise because you can do a one to one modeling of that original one without copying it, especially if it's a really good post from another industry. But I love to sit down with the framework and I have two of them to share with you. There are a zillion frameworks so you can go out there and just Google, you know, templates for kinds of posts to write or whatever but the ones that I wanted to share are the ones that I love, first of all. And I think they're fun to write and simple to write and you can add them to your roster so that you're constantly rotating certain kinds of posts. So there's two of them here, one is a story post and one is a teaching post. Now, there can be a story in your teaching post and teaching in your story posts so, you know, nothing is that finite and in creative things, there's a lot of gray area and creativity.

But let's first talk about a story post. This is a post in which you basically tell a story and then it can lead to a teaching point, a takeaway, a lesson, something like that. So it begins with a hooky opening, of course, because everything does and then there's the story itself, stories have a beginning, middle and end. And then like here's the thing to take away from this and then some sort of a call to action, of course. So I think what's really super helpful about this kind of thing is that we encounter stories all the time in our work. You're going to see them, you know, you're working with so you may come off a call and say, wow, I just want to call my client and here's what was happening with her, she had to fire a difficult client and here's what we discussed and the takeaway for you is this teaching point.

I love to read stories, well told stories, not crapply told stories, I love to read well told stories and what I can tell you is the most powerful post that I personally have put out or my case study posts where I'm like this one, this one, this one is what happened. You've heard me talk about that I'll have what she's having case studies episode, when people read about the success you got with someone else, they want to get that success to and want to become your client, so a case study post is a kind of a story post. How to open these, my favorite one that I wrote was about a client and it began, ‘James was in a pickle’, that was the first line and i's like, I don't know why I wrote that, but it was just funny to me in that post did amazingly as an email. I recycled it later and used it as a social post and it also did well there. So I went on to tell what kind of a pickle, what was the situation that had come up and then what we did to make things better for James and his family. So that is the you know, there's many ways to do story posts that kind of gives you an idea of what they can look like.

So teaching posts are super easy to write because you sit down, you write a hooky opening, you write a teaching point with three little sub points that support the teaching point, maximum of three. A call to action, a lesson, something like that and that's the complete post. So how do you begin a teaching post? I like to start it these ways. The first thing is with a story, right? You don't have to have an entire long story. You can start with a James was in a pickle or a two line story and then that you use at the beginning and then you wrap it up at the end, so a short story with teaching points in it so that the whole thing isn't a story.

I also love to start with a question. Did you ever wonder how to yada yada, or would you like to triple your revenues? Whatever is that question, it leads them into your content or your teaching. Have you ever struggled to answer the question, what do you do? And then you teach how to do that in the content. So a question is a super way to do it, I have so many things that are ghostwritten by my team for my clients, come across my desk and a lot of times the opening is a boring opening. Well, many times we find that blah, blah, blah, or I've noticed lately that blah, blah, blah ok, those are not hooky openings that we want to read, so what I'll just do is I'll immediately just turn it around and write a short question or better yet ask my team to turn that around and turn that into a question.

So story shorts, very short stories, and teaching. I mean, a question and then the other one is a quote or a fact. And it can be like a famous quote or a statistic that that effect can be like a statistic from your industry or something like that can be a famous quote, can also be a client quote. So there's all kinds of quotes and facts, you know, facts 97% of blah, blah, blah or fact if you keep doing so and so you're going to get yada yada. You don't have to say facts in front of it, but you know, you can just make a big point that way. So those are ways that I love to begin posts because again they're the hooky opening that is going to lead you into the rest of the content. Most of my videos will begin when I make little two minute videos, they'll begin with a question. Sometimes and actually on these podcasts more often, I'll begin with a story.

Ok so, we have our hooky opening, you've got some content in the middle and then as I've mentioned already, what you need is a call to action. Call to action does not only have to come at the end, but a call to action is vital to include in every post. why? Because you want that engagement, we are seeking engagement because the more engaged people are, the more they're expressing interest in what you do. So, call to action can be anything like, so click the link below like, comment and share on this video. So how about you? Have you found that something, something is asking them a question is a call to action, let me know in a comment below.

You want to lead them to the next action so leaders lead and at the end of your content with calls to action, you're going to lead people to the next right action for them. I taught a group recently and they said, do you have to have a call to action in everything? Because if you'll start to feel sales, say when you're posting every single day, you're going to call me or, you know, palmier go fill out this form. So the answer is no you don't have to have a sales call to action every single time. Sometimes you want to have an engagement call to action, what's been your experience? Let me know in a comment below that kind of engagement call to action makes it to where you're not constantly having sales, your promotional or promoting your thing that you want someone to take action on but it does move them to engage, so every post needs to have a call to action. In an email, you might want to repeat your call to action, a call to action does not have to come only at the end, you can see it earlier and then repeat it again at the end. So be judicious, but encourage action like court action to happen, that's what we want to have happen as a result of our content.

OK, so that's the structure of our posts and the last thing that I want to leave you with. Sometimes I have heard from expert writers who say I've studied other experts and I read their work, and when I sit down to write, it feels like a regurgitation of my favorite expert. So it can be difficult to find your own voice. And one of the examples that I often use, my husband and I love reading these spiritual teachers like Eckhart Tolle and people like that. But the truth for me is that I cannot read that work in the original. So when I read Eckhart Tolle or Carolyn Mays or other spiritual teachers, I just start to trance out and get sleepy.

However, I want to hear their work, so I said to my husband, would you read that and tell me what it says? So it's not that I can't understand it, like I'm on a, you know, reading level, it's that it won't go into my brain and honestly, I just want to hear what the person who I respect would tell me about the work and another person who is doing financial coaching and consulting and said, here's some books that I recommend you read and I said, I'm not going to read any of those books super, super incentivized. I'm not going to read any of those books. What I want is for you to tell me what those books say.

So keep in mind, your audience wants to hear your point of view. They don't want to read all the other experts they can, you know, information is a dime a dozen on the Internet, there's tons of it out there. I don't want to go read that your people want to hear it from you. So when you sit down and you feel like, well, so-and-so has said this better, I feel like I'm just rewriting this post, you know, you're not regurgitating a single expert read several in the breadth of your knowledge and understanding, expertize you've been exposed to tons of teachers. But we want to hear that in your voice and as you write it, I want you to be yourself. So if yourself means that you rant and you rail against the system and everyone who's wrong, I want to hear that from you, I want to hear that you're mad about that and you're fired up. If you are somebody who uses a lot of emojis or tells dad jokes, I want to read that in your work. I want to hear that unique voice, you want to be the use you, you can be, especially in writing, we read so much stuff it's so hard for any of that to stand out or to differentiate itself from anything else. What we really want is to get to know you through your writing, through video, through any medium that you care to bring to us and so being the you-est you you can be in doing that is the best way for us to learn you as a brand, to get a feel for that brand personality. And if you're working with large organizations and you feel like, well, my clients are incorporations, guess what? Corporations are made up of people and people there are going to be interested in you and that you have cats or that you play softball on the weekends or that you are, you know, do extreme sports, they're going to be interested in the person and the expertise, not just the expertise.

So I hope that what we have talked about today has given you some ideas and some inspiration to get creating, writing, creating videos, whatever is your medium of creating that content so that your people can find you and find you faster. And next time I have an amazing guest who is a social media influencer, you're not going to believe the viral work that she has done and the content that she's created and I think it's going to be amazing for informing you in your work.

So stay tuned for next time and until then, crank out those articles and social posts and also, I'm wishing you a profitable and joyful consulting business.