Generating Automated Content

The ideas above will be, for the most part, personal and customized in nature. If you have 100 important connections, you can’t rely on those strategies alone for your monthly contacts, or you would be doing nothing else. Ideally, plan to keep in touch with people one to four times per month (or more if that is typical in your industry). Every couple of months, incorporate one of the love language ways to add value discussed above. For the rest of the times, you’ll need to use social networking, your blog, e-mail marketing, or other automated strategies to keep in touch. I think the best keep-in-touch marketing systems use a combination of electronic and physical methods. Most people have a newsletter, but this is not enough. I’ve gotten my best results when I’ve combined my newsletter with other methods, such as sending out cards, videos, and other things.

You’ll balance the more time-consuming personal keep-in-touch marketing with excellent automated content that goes out to everyone in the same way at the same time. We are all inundated with e-mails and other ways in which content comes to us. So the challenge in marketing with content these days is to come up with unique, high-caliber content. And we are all strapped for time and can’t spend half our week researching and writing articles, so the second challenge becomes creating content quickly. Let’s look at some strategies to create unique and quick content now.

Create unique content

People get hundreds of e-mails each day. Why should they read yours? Because you offer such unique, valuable, and compelling information that they can’t help themselves no matter how busy they are. You want to feel great about the content you put out there and be assured that people really benefit from it. You want it to stand out and for people to not hit the delete key when they see your message.

My favorite resource for generating unique content is a book by Mark Levy, Accidental Genius: Using Writing to Generate Your Best Ideas, Insight, and Content. In it he describes the process of freewriting. Freewriting, he explains, is a way to access your inner creativity and genius without your internal editor getting in the way. Typically, when our minds enter new territory, the internal editor jumps in and shuts things down. New thoughts requires work, and our bodies are designed to keep things the same (principle of homeostasis), so it can be difficult to go in different directions. The unfortunate result is we tend to rehash ideas we’ve had or heard before. Freewriting is a fast, uncensored process of taking your mind into new territories and coming up with fresh, innovative ideas and content. In Accidental Genius, Levy shares 15 powerful ways to use free-writing. Here are a couple of my favorites:

1. Use prompts to get your writing going. Prompts are open-ended beginnings. Give yourself 10 minutes to write; get started with the prompt, but feel free to go wherever the writing takes you. Don’t be roped in by the prompt. Freewriting is often a circuitous journey. Examples of prompts include:

• I’d love to learn about …

• My favorite thing about this cold weather is …

• If I knew I’d be successful I’d …

2. Don’t come up with an idea—come up with a hundred. It’s actually much more difficult to come up with one good idea than it is to come up with dozens of ideas. One idea leads to the next one, which leads to the next, and your great idea (or many great ideas) will probably be in there. It’s actually much faster and more fun this way.

3. Open up words. This creative technique Levy devised allows you to imbue personal meaning into a word that may be contrite, cliché, overused, unclear, or unspecific. The process includes four steps. First, choose a word that you want to open up. Second, write a common definition for the word. Third, write about whether you agree or disagree with this word and your reasons for doing so. Fourth, write a paragraph about your new understanding of that word.

Sandra, a life coach, wanted to be sure that her content helped her to build her credibility. She was concerned that “life coaching” had a negative connotation for some of her corporate clients, so she used Open Up Words to explore the meaning and came up with a couple of great, personal stories about her journey into life coaching and the unique approach she took. Inspired by this approach, she generated 100 article ideas, 20 of which she developed into short articles. Over the course of a few days, she created an entire year’s worth of compelling content for her e-zine (electronic newsletter). She told me that several of her new clients hired her because of the unique ideas she shared in these articles.

Create quick content

Let’s be practical. You simply don’t have dozens of hours each month to create content to send out to keep in touch with your prospects. And even if you did, some of that time might be better used by meeting with people in person—or taking a day off and going to the park. Here are five ways to create great content quickly and easily:

1. Create one long piece and edit it. Coming up with the topic and getting going is often the hardest part of creating content. Once you get going, you may have a lot to say on the topic. So spend a couple of hours creating a video or extended article. Then edit it into three to five short pieces. This process works especially well if you do something like “3 Steps to …” or “The 5 Little Known Ways to …” so each segment has a logical beginning and conclusion. It is also great if each piece can stand alone in case someone misses one. If you send your content out by e-mail, include a link to previous related pieces, and at the end, offer all of them together. I like using three to five pieces per topic because it feels easy and manageable (no one wants to learn 28 steps that they need to take), but you can go up to ten.

2. Let other people create content. The downside to sharing other people’s content is that those in your audience will not learn more about your ideas and approach as well as if the content were your own. Manage this downside by including a discussion at the end that includes your ideas or by selecting people who offer ideas that are complimentary to your own. For example, I work with small business owners and service professionals on marketing their businesses, but I do not specialize in things like organization or accounting that they and their businesses can certainly benefit from, so I frequently have guest bloggers share ideas on my blog. Don’t use other people’s content as your primary strategy. Use something like 80 percent of your own content and 20 percent of other people’s.

3. Cocreate content. An easy way to do this is by interviewing people who have great ideas that synergize with your own. Look for people who will graciously share content without being overly promotional. Offer to act as a reporter, someone who will promote their books or services for them so they don’t have to. This usually helps people to deliver better content and not have to worry about promoting themselves, and it gives a higher quality feel to the interview. You can do interviews by audio or video. You can have them transcribed for more free content or to create a paid information product.

4. Create a Top 10 list. This is different from the first technique because it is one succinct list that will go out all at once. For example, a financial planner may offer “The Top 10 Things You Can Do to Save for Your Child’s College,” or a fitness trainer can provide “The Top 10 Mistakes Most People Make When Doing Crunches.” Include tips as short bolded sentences or phrases, and include a sentence or two describing each tip. You can probably sit down and create ten Top 10 lists in an hour. Just don’t send them all out back to back. People can’t resist reading Top 10 lists because of the curiosity factor—we want to know the best things we could do or the worst things we should be avoiding.

5. Take a writing retreat. The amount of time and energy it takes to sit down and start writing in small intervals is significant. Save all of this time and energy by doing it at once. Take one day every couple of months and spend it writing. Begin your writing day by using a freewriting exercise, such as one of those described above. Maybe you could use a prompt like “My clients value …” or “People want to learn about …” or “I want to share …”

Make sure that your e-mails get read

Now that you’ve created all of this excellent automated content, we need to be sure that your e-mails get read. The first step is to do your best to ensure that your e-mails don’t end up in spam filters. Do this by using e-mail distribution services (rather than pasting dozens of e-mail addresses into the blind carbon copy field of your message) that have high deliverability rates. These change often, but at the time of this writing, some of the top ones include AWeber, MailChimp, iContact, and Constant Contact. Avoid including words in your subject lines that are likely to trigger spam filters (such as free). Be sure that you do not send spam by using opt-in only. This means that you cannot add someone’s e-mail to your list unless you have their permission to do so. There was a recent debate on a discussion list that I’m on about whether it’s okay to add someone to your e-mail list if you’ve exchanged business cards. I do not think that this is okay. You can, however, e-mail the person and include a link for a free giveaway and sign-up for your newsletter. You can also pass around sign-up sheets for people to add their names and e-mail addresses if they’d like your free giveaway.

The second thing to do is to ensure that people open your message when it arrives in their inbox. The most important consideration here is the e-mail subject line. The goal of the subject line is to get people to open the message, so the most important task is to arouse curiosity. Here are my favorite tips on creating compelling subject lines:

• Ask a question. It is hard for us to read a question and not try to think of (and want to know) the answer. Questions stimulate curiosity, which increases your open-rate.

• Use incomplete sentences … The ellipsis (three periods in a row) is powerful in the same way that a question is. People don’t like to be left hanging and are curious to find out more.

• Include numbers. Subject lines such as “The top 3 ways to jump start your weight loss plan” are compelling because, again, the mind does not like ambiguity and uncertainty. We can’t help but wonder what these three ways are. If the subject line were “Great ways to jump-start your weight loss plan,” it would be less compelling.

• Be specific. People need to know exactly what they are getting if they invest their valuable time in reading your e-mail. Something like, “Molly McCune’s Monthly E-zine” or “News from The Wellness Spa” is not going to cut it. If you want to include the name of your e-zine, do so in brackets, but include the topic of interest in that particular edition next to the name of the e-zine.

• Offer something unexpected. When something is a little bit puzzling or confusing, it stands out and makes us curious to learn more. An Internet marketer and best-selling author recently sent out an e-mail with the subject line “The Slacker’s Approach to Success.” We typically associate success with hard work, so this subject line is unexpected and powerful.

The third thing to do is to make sure that your e-mails pass the first impression test. If people see huge blocks of text, they will feel that it is too much work to wade through it. Plus people typically scan messages. So shorten paragraphs, and include bullets, boldface, and numbers to break up the text.

Now that you have some ideas about how to create great quality content, let’s consider how to get people active around your content and stimulate discussions.