What is the easiest way to create content?
Peter Brissette • March 10, 2020
All right. Good morning Peter Brissette here at Digital Marketing Dude. And we are doing another Q and A call. So a question that I had come up, I will share with you here in a second. So the first thing I wanted to share with you was how we're going to do categorizing content a little bit going forward. So we have eight main categories that are part of our marketing blueprint. So if you go to the homepage of our website, you can access our full marketing blueprint. And in there are eight categories: strategy, websites, content, social media, email marketing, reviews, funnels and paid advertising.
This month we are on content and talking about content. So this is our call number 10 here that we're doing. And the question is, what is the easiest way to create content? And so it's pretty simple really. Number one is make a video. There's lots of ways to make a video. You can make a video with your phone and do it that way. That's the primary method, I would say, of making your videos. These phones that we have make amazing video.
Now you can add a lapel microphone. So if you go to Amazon, you can order a lavalier microphone. They're 10 or 15 dollars. It has a cord that you can plug into your cell phone. You just got to make sure you get the kind that will work specifically with the cell phone, because the tip on the end is a little bit different, so that you get really good audio with it. And you make a video and you can talk about anything that you want. You can make videos the way that I'm making a video right here, right now. I'm using Zoom, I'm recording my screen, I've got a little video of my face in it as well in making this video.
Once you have that video, regardless of where you made it, you want to go to rev.com, and on rev.com you can then transcribe that video. Now if the audio is really super good quality, you can upload it and it will do a really basic transcription for less than this. Right now it's $1.25 per minute. So they just recently had a price increase. Still super reasonable with that, but once you're logged into this... I'll just let you into the back here so you can see what this is like.
When I'm done with this video, I will be uploading it. So when I place a new order, I can also choose automated transcription, which if the quality is good enough, an automated transcription is pretty cheap. So is the background noise free? Are speakers close to the mic? Is conversation clear without over-talk? Do speakers have clear accents? So we say yes to all of those. You can upload a video. So in this case it's only 10 cents per minute. So instead of the $1.25 per minute, it is 10 cents per minute. So that's a pretty cheap way to do, so if you have a longer file or something like that that you want to upload and get transcribed, but you know the audio is pretty clear, then this is a good way to do it.
And once you do that, they have a pretty cool tool that helps you if you want to clean that audio up from there. So here's this video and the transcription, and I can hit play and listen to the transcription. I can see it highlights where the text is there. And then if I see things I want to change, I can come in here and change the text and then when I'm ready to download it, I can download it as a Word doc. And I've got all the text from that. So this is what we do with our blog and our videos. So last month was "What's A Meta Tag?" So there's the video that we did, I upload it to YouTube and embed it there. And then this is the text that I pulled from Zoom. I'll make a few edits, but very minor edits. I really don't go and try to change a whole lot in the text.
Now you've got a video which you can upload to Facebook. You can upload it to YouTube. You have text. You could break that text up into social media posts with the picture, with the image. You could have different images and pull different text at different times. So you have a whole lot of text and content now available to you off of a five minute video. A pretty simple thing to do, and you can pull out quotations out of the text and emphasize those and then link back to the blog posts that you created from them.
So for me, I think that's one of the easiest ways to create content, and content that can be used in multiple ways, is find a way to make a simple video. It can be one minute long, it can be three minutes long, it can be 10 minutes long. There's all kinds of different opinions about length of video. But make it appropriate to the content that you're creating and get it transcribed, upload it, and then break that up and use it in a lot of different places.
That's our Q and A for this month on ways to create content. If you want some more ideas on that, please reach out to us. We'll be happy to talk to you about more ideas on creating content. I frequently say I have a lot of ideas. Some of them are good. You have to decide which ones are the good ideas. So until next month, signing off. Peter Brissette, Digital Marketing Dude. Thank you.
Learn the many benefits of a strong learning system on the backend of a speaking, coaching, consulting business.
Read our latest blog post on Mastering the Marketing A’s: Understanding Your Audience for Better Results.
The last question that should we follow our competitors on social media? Sure, why not. You know, you want to see what they're doing and see what's happening there. You know if you're going to be active and you're really trying to use social to build your business then having a good idea what's what your competition is up to is probably important. And you know sometimes what I find with so called competitors is that we you know often times find people that we can collaborate with. It doesn't necessarily mean they are competitors so we work with a number of other marketing agencies and provides some services for them for their clients that they don't necessarily do, but they hire us to do it for them. So like I work with other marketing agencies, so they're not necessarily, you know, your competitor and everything. So but yeah, see what's going on you know, investigate, read up on them, see what they're doing, check out their websites, see what they're ranking for. You know, the more you understand the competitive landscape, the more you know what you should be doing and what you need to do.
And the last question that we have is, can you say more about running a test on TikTok yeah, I so I'm not on TikTok I'm not using tiktok. I wind up watching a lot of TikTok videos on Facebook and the Facebook reels. I think it's fascinating. I find it very interesting. But it's not a platform that I've taken the time to jump on at this point. Again, based on where I'm at with strategy and so forth, it's not a fit for me. But anytime you're using any platform, if you're going to do something, you want to come up with some means of measurement. How am I going to measure success? What does success look like? Is it I, you know, posted a video and I got a thousand views. Is that success you know or is it actually driving traffic and are you tracking how much traffic and then are you tracking what happened to that traffic? Did they fill out a form, did they make a phone call? Like what's the, where do you want that to go? So we really need to step back and think about that whole process. Of creating content, I'm pushing this through to, you know, to my website. And this is what I want to have happen. This is what I wanted the results to be. And then how am I going to track it? How am I going to measure it and do that so anytime you're spending, anytime you're doing something new in particular. Or you're spending any money you need to track it all the way through. All the way through.
The next question that we have is if you have a GoDaddy web page already and are having some issues, are you able to switch over somehow? You can build your website on any other platform and then just you just change the domain where the domain points. So yeah, you can do that anytime. Thank you, Peter.
Next question is how powerful are paid plans to things like Google Adwords or whatever it is called now regarding driving traffic, how can you possibly compete when you don't have the cash to put towards such programs? Yeah, so that's where you gotta get creative. So again we're small businesses and we don't have you know, unlimited funds to you know, just throw a bunch of ads up and you know compete with some other big companies so. Again, this goes back to what are the things I can really do better, because chances are your website is getting some traffic and it could be getting good traffic, but if your messaging isn't clear on your website, you're not getting them to take the next step. They're not making a phone call or filling out a form. So where I can put energy and effort is in that messaging and that and being very clear about who I'm working with, the problem I solve, how I solve it. So that whoever does come across my radar, I have a much higher chance of converting that person then someone else. So you know it's not the best product that always wins, it's who's the best communicator. And so that's why I talk about what you own and what you can't can control and making sure that is dialed in. And doing what it's supposed to do so that if you do go I, if I'm dialed in and I know everything is working well with my website and it's communicating clearly now, I can spend a small amount on ads and drive a small amount of traffic knowing that I'm probably going to get a decent amount of conversions because my messaging's on point and so I don't have to spend as much as the big guy. But I can be more effective because I've spent time working on the stuff that really matters. Thanks, Peter.
The next question is, we have a couple more here. What is your choice for a website hosting platform? So if you're going to host WordPress, my number one choice would be sitegroundsiteground.com That would be my top choice for WordPress hosting that, great support and all that. And again, you can have your. Domain on GoDaddy and it can point to wherever. It can point to Squarespace. It can point to site ground wherever it needs to go. But yeah, for WordPress site ground would be my top choice.
The next question is, can other businesses similar to mine attach to my website and then their ads show up on their Facebook page? No, I don't see how that can happen. Thank you.
The next question that we have is I used to utilize local provider gizmo to be able to personally update my website due to its ease of use. If you knew word you could do gizmo. Do you know of a website editing platform that would be as simple. I don't need an online store so our website just needs to be simple clean design that I can update content. So any of those platforms we talked about we believe with Squarespace can do that. Our platform that I mentioned can do that as well. So that's something that I know someone that was asking about that, I'll just give you my contact info. You guys you know can provide my contact info. If you're interested in looking at that, we can we can talk about that one-on-one Thanks, Peter.
Will there be an alternative to Twitter?