Get ready for your daily dose of marketing strategies and tactics from entrepreneurs with the guile and experience to help you find success in any marketing capacity. You're listening to Marketing School with your instructors Neil Patel and Eric Sue. All right, guys, before we start, we got a special message from our sponsor. If you want to rank higher on Google, you gotta look at your page speed time. The faster website loads, the better off you are with Google's Core Vital update. That makes it super super important to optimize your site for low time. And one easy way to do it is use the host that Eric and I use, dream Hosts. So just go to dream host or Google it, find it, check it out, and it's a great way to improve your low time. Welcome to another edition of Marketing School. I'm your host, Eric Sue and I'm Neil Patel, and today we're going to be talking about how to stay consistent with content output. So my thing with content output, we've been talking about consistency. If you listen to our past episodes. When you're developing content, it's hard, especially if you're running a business. Let's say you're the owner and you have a lot of different things happening at the same time. How in the world do you stay consistent with the content output when the numbers out there show that, especially you look at Neil's numbers. If you stop blogging, stuff is going to drop. By what you said, you said when you stop blogging, what happened. Yeah, So on one of my personal blogs, quick Sprout, I decided to take a month's break because I got lazy and tried up blogging after years. The traffic not only dropped, but I blogged for three more months, and at that point, at the end of three months of blogging continually, I was then able to recuperate my lost traffic and I was back to where I started from before I stopped blogging. Right. So with that, I mean, the proof isn't in putting right there. You have to keep on top of it. And so the question is, let's just say you're first starting out, or let's say you're working at an agency or startup and you're building out your own personal brand. Right, here's the thing. Let's say I'm working a nine to five job. Well, okay, if I maybe wake up and I leave work, I leave for work at eight, that means I'm probably waking up at what seven am? Well, guess what it's time to toughen up and saddle up, wake up at six am, start writing immediately, right. You have to block out the time to make this work. If it's important to you, you're going to carve out the time to make it work. Put it in your calendar, map out the type of content that you want to create. And for me right now, even running agency right now and doing ten million things which I probably shouldn't be doing, I at least block out time for Thursdays. Thursdays are for podcasts. I have three hours for podcasts. Wednesday I'm trying to do I'm shooting a lot of videos right and Tuesday I'm writing written content. And so I'm always you know, I'm figuring out, okay, what type of content do I want to create? And also we also have and I'm going to dive into this in a little bit, Neil Neil can I'm kind of talk to this as well, But just backing up a second, let me just focus on this point. You have to block out time for content otherwise it's not going to happen. One of the issues that most people have when comes to writing consistently is they're not sure what to write on. So go to buzzsumo dot com. Type in keywords within your industry and they'll give you a lot of topic suggestion ideas. If you're also strapped for time yourself, go to jobs dot problogger dot net. Post a job posting looking for a blogger. You'll get one hundred two hundred applicants. You should be able to find some good bloggers there when you're posting your job listening. There's a few things you need to keep in mind. Tell them what industry you want your content in. Tell them that they had to come up with topic ideas you need unique content. You can have them go straight or you can have them right under their name clearly label that. Let them know that you want thousands of two thousand word articles. Ask them how much it's going to cost. Ask them for writing samples, and tell them you want them to write in a conversational tone using the words you or I. If you do that, you should get some good writers out of all the applicants, maybe like three or four good writers that you can hire on a consistent basis. They shouldn't ever charge you more than two hundred bucks for an article that's a few thousand words, and they shouldn't charge you less than fifty because if it's usually less than fifty bucks, they're probably a shitty writer. So now that you have the writing done, or now that you have writers and you have topic ideas, you want to then start scheduling out your content. So the way you do it consistently is you have all these writers submit the topic ideas to you, you approve it, You then have them outline it, You approve the outline, and then you have them write. Once you have a backlog of a week or two, then you want to start publishing the post. So that way you're consistent. If you yourself are going to be the one writing block out times early in the morning or late at night, because that's when you have the least amount of distractions, and you'll find that you're going to be the most efficient with your writing during those times. You'll also notice that it takes you forever at the beginning to write a blog post. That's okay, Eventually you'll speed up. And what I found helpful, you know, I did an exercise last quarter where I was The exercise was to write five hundred words per day, so that's about thirty seven point five k in one quarter, and you know, we actually exceeded that. And here's the thing, like you just have to think about. You have to have a content bank, right, a bank of ideas that you want to go after, and you can just pluck those ideas and just start writing immediately, because part of the battle is the ideation, right, the ideation, the headline portion, and then you just start writing immediately. And one thing I also want to talk about is, you know, Neil talked about scheduling things out. You know what we did. We did. We certainly scheduled things out, and we had a lot of different writers. But what I found in the last couple of years was that we were just you know, we're just blasting content out there, and that the blog posts would just go out there and die and die and fall into the archives. Right. So one thing we talked about earlier in past episodes was repurposing. But also at the same time, you have to have an editorial calendar. So Content Marketing Institute has good editorial calendars. I'm sure Neil's written about editorial calendars as well. You've got to have an editorial calendar, so your entire team, if you have different writers, you can see what's going on. You can see what's going to happen in the next ninety days or so. And that's not necessarily saying everything needs to be set in stone. You can definitely move things around, but people need to have an idea of what's coming also at the same time, let's use let's use Neil as an example. Here's a book launch coming out. If you have a if you have an editorial calendar, you're going to be able to figure out, Okay, well the book, the book is going to be out, you know X state while we've got to figure out we've got to start figuring out how to how to start promoting it, you know, a couple of weeks before, maybe even two months before, and start to add in things, right, you know, we have different content, we have blog posts coming out, we have audio coming out, we have video coming out. Everything should tie start tying into that launch to help boost it. Right, If you don't have an editorial calendar, you're not going to have that type of organization. And that was one thing that just kept bugging me. You know, I knew we were producing content but we're just producing content. For content's sake, you have to have some type of calendar, even if it's just for yourself. You have to know what's coming and you have to make adjustments accordingly. The beautiful part about a calendar is it not just keeps you organized, but it helps you figure out what you should be writing on. So, for example, with our software company, when we release new features, we know because of the calendar, when we should be blogging about them to get the work out and generate more setups and more customers from it. But the beautiful part about a content calendar, an editorial calendar is you can ensure that you're targeting all the right people. For example, on Neiolpatel dot com, I write about marketing, and there's so many different marketing techniques out there. Because I use an editorial calendar, I know that each week I need to write at least one SEO post, one social media post, one content marketing post, one post on paid advertising, et cetera. But if I don't have an editorial calendar, I may find myself mainly blog about SEO and neglecting all the companies that are interested in paid advertising sure paid advertising stuff won't drive as much traffic. But you know what, those companies typically have way more money to spend on marketing, So I need to make sure I'm incorporating paid content within my blog posts. So if you don't use the editorial content or editorial calendar, you're going to neglect certain audiences. Yeah, and you're probably wondering out there in the audience what tools are available for editorial calendars. What we started using recently was a tool called co schedule, So it's spell it out COEO schedule, and co schedule really helps us. From a high level view, you can actually you're able to see what social shares are scheduled, what blog posts are scheduled ahead of time. The editor is in there if you have a managing editor. Now this is assuming you have a team. You have a managing editor out there assigning posts to people, and you're going to see you can you can assign it directly within the Evernote or Google docs people are working off of that. You can reshare content that that's that's been shared a lot and in general, just people are a lot more organized, you're able to just you know, everybody, the entire team is looking at that from a high level point of view and you're able to just get organized. So that's one way to go about it. And also with WordPress, there's another tool if you're using a WordPress blog. Basically the plugin is called Editorial Calendar, and you know, you just download that and you're gonna be able to organize things with your writers when you're producing content. Also, make sure that you ramp yourself up. Don't try to start off producing content every single day, because you know what, you're setting yourself up from failure from day one. What I like doing is when I create a blog and I'm trying to write content consistently and produce it consistently, I like starting out at once a week, and once I got that down and the process is down, then I ramp up to two to three times per week. Then I go to four to five times per week, and then eventually I get to seven. I've tried to do up to fourteen or twenty one times per week. It's really hard to maintain unless you have a company with a big budget and you can hire a ton of people. Realistically, you're going to max out a roughly seven articles per week, and you've got to have a process for this. Entire thing too. When think of it this way, here's an example of a process. You can take it for what it is, but at the very beginning, the start. It starts with keyword research, right, that's keyword research, and then you write the headline, and then you have people begin to write, and then you have the editor come in and make changes to it. And then the process after that is okay, go in there and you added image to it, and then it goes out there to be published, and then you go out there and promote it. So you have to have a process to follow. That way, it's it's clockwork. And then you can also document all of this and you can hand this off to new writers that are coming in so they're aware of this entire process. And this can work like a machine that you can continue to scale out. Because for us right now, our goal for this quarter is to quadriple our content output. And if we're going to do that, we need to be a lot more organized. We need to follow a process. People kind of cringe at process, but hey, if you don't have a process, you're not going to be able to get to where you want to go. When you're creating all of this content make sure that, as Eric mentioned, with the processes, you don't make things too complex. So for me, what I end up doing is I write my content and Microsoft Word and the reason I use word it's much more efficient for me to do so than Google Docs. Then from there I upload it into WordPress and the editor will then correct things. Someone else will go and add images, make sure all the links work, open up in new windows, looks it over one more time, and then they schedule it out. Then once it gets scheduled out, I do the promotion. I email blast it out. I also schedule it on Facebook and Twitter and LinkedIn, and then we're all set and we move on to the next blog post. Love it okay, And with that we're going to wrap up this episode. If you like it, let us know what you think. Please leave a rating, review and subscribe because it helps a bunch. With that being said, we will see you in the next episode of the Marketing School. This session of Marketing School has come to a close. Be sure to subscribe for more daily marketing strategies and tactics to help you find the success you've always dreamed of. And don't forget to rate and review so we can continue to bring you the best daily content possible. We'll see you in class tomorrow right here on Marketing School

Get ready for your daily dose of marketing strategies and tactics from entrepreneurs with the guile and experience to help you find success in any marketing capacity. You're listening to Marketing School with your instructors Neil Patel and Eric Sue. All right, guys, before we start, we got a special message from our sponsor. If you want to rank higher on Google, you gotta look at your page speed time. The faster website loads, the better off you are with Google's Core Vital update. That makes it super super important to optimize your site for low time. And one easy way to do it is use the host that Eric and I use, dream Hosts. So just go to dream host or Google it, find it, check it out, and it's a great way to improve your low time. Welcome to another edition of Marketing School. I'm your host, Eric Sue and I'm Neil Patel, and today we're going to be talking about how to stay consistent with content output. So my thing with content output, we've been talking about consistency. If you listen to our past episodes. When you're developing content, it's hard, especially if you're running a business. Let's say you're the owner and you have a lot of different things happening at the same time. How in the world do you stay consistent with the content output when the numbers out there show that, especially you look at Neil's numbers. If you stop blogging, stuff is going to drop. By what you said, you said when you stop blogging, what happened. Yeah, So on one of my personal blogs, quick Sprout, I decided to take a month's break because I got lazy and tried up blogging after years. The traffic not only dropped, but I blogged for three more months, and at that point, at the end of three months of blogging continually, I was then able to recuperate my lost traffic and I was back to where I started from before I stopped blogging. Right. So with that, I mean, the proof isn't in putting right there. You have to keep on top of it. And so the question is, let's just say you're first starting out, or let's say you're working at an agency or startup and you're building out your own personal brand. Right, here's the thing. Let's say I'm working a nine to five job. Well, okay, if I maybe wake up and I leave work, I leave for work at eight, that means I'm probably waking up at what seven am? Well, guess what it's time to toughen up and saddle up, wake up at six am, start writing immediately, right. You have to block out the time to make this work. If it's important to you, you're going to carve out the time to make it work. Put it in your calendar, map out the type of content that you want to create. And for me right now, even running agency right now and doing ten million things which I probably shouldn't be doing, I at least block out time for Thursdays. Thursdays are for podcasts. I have three hours for podcasts. Wednesday I'm trying to do I'm shooting a lot of videos right and Tuesday I'm writing written content. And so I'm always you know, I'm figuring out, okay, what type of content do I want to create? And also we also have and I'm going to dive into this in a little bit, Neil Neil can I'm kind of talk to this as well, But just backing up a second, let me just focus on this point. You have to block out time for content otherwise it's not going to happen. One of the issues that most people have when comes to writing consistently is they're not sure what to write on. So go to buzzsumo dot com. Type in keywords within your industry and they'll give you a lot of topic suggestion ideas. If you're also strapped for time yourself, go to jobs dot problogger dot net. Post a job posting looking for a blogger. You'll get one hundred two hundred applicants. You should be able to find some good bloggers there when you're posting your job listening. There's a few things you need to keep in mind. Tell them what industry you want your content in. Tell them that they had to come up with topic ideas you need unique content. You can have them go straight or you can have them right under their name clearly label that. Let them know that you want thousands of two thousand word articles. Ask them how much it's going to cost. Ask them for writing samples, and tell them you want them to write in a conversational tone using the words you or I. If you do that, you should get some good writers out of all the applicants, maybe like three or four good writers that you can hire on a consistent basis. They shouldn't ever charge you more than two hundred bucks for an article that's a few thousand words, and they shouldn't charge you less than fifty because if it's usually less than fifty bucks, they're probably a shitty writer. So now that you have the writing done, or now that you have writers and you have topic ideas, you want to then start scheduling out your content. So the way you do it consistently is you have all these writers submit the topic ideas to you, you approve it, You then have them outline it, You approve the outline, and then you have them write. Once you have a backlog of a week or two, then you want to start publishing the post. So that way you're consistent. If you yourself are going to be the one writing block out times early in the morning or late at night, because that's when you have the least amount of distractions, and you'll find that you're going to be the most efficient with your writing during those times. You'll also notice that it takes you forever at the beginning to write a blog post. That's okay, Eventually you'll speed up. And what I found helpful, you know, I did an exercise last quarter where I was The exercise was to write five hundred words per day, so that's about thirty seven point five k in one quarter, and you know, we actually exceeded that. And here's the thing, like you just have to think about. You have to have a content bank, right, a bank of ideas that you want to go after, and you can just pluck those ideas and just start writing immediately, because part of the battle is the ideation, right, the ideation, the headline portion, and then you just start writing immediately. And one thing I also want to talk about is, you know, Neil talked about scheduling things out. You know what we did. We did. We certainly scheduled things out, and we had a lot of different writers. But what I found in the last couple of years was that we were just you know, we're just blasting content out there, and that the blog posts would just go out there and die and die and fall into the archives. Right. So one thing we talked about earlier in past episodes was repurposing. But also at the same time, you have to have an editorial calendar. So Content Marketing Institute has good editorial calendars. I'm sure Neil's written about editorial calendars as well. You've got to have an editorial calendar, so your entire team, if you have different writers, you can see what's going on. You can see what's going to happen in the next ninety days or so. And that's not necessarily saying everything needs to be set in stone. You can definitely move things around, but people need to have an idea of what's coming also at the same time, let's use let's use Neil as an example. Here's a book launch coming out. If you have a if you have an editorial calendar, you're going to be able to figure out, Okay, well the book, the book is going to be out, you know X state while we've got to figure out we've got to start figuring out how to how to start promoting it, you know, a couple of weeks before, maybe even two months before, and start to add in things, right, you know, we have different content, we have blog posts coming out, we have audio coming out, we have video coming out. Everything should tie start tying into that launch to help boost it. Right, If you don't have an editorial calendar, you're not going to have that type of organization. And that was one thing that just kept bugging me. You know, I knew we were producing content but we're just producing content. For content's sake, you have to have some type of calendar, even if it's just for yourself. You have to know what's coming and you have to make adjustments accordingly. The beautiful part about a calendar is it not just keeps you organized, but it helps you figure out what you should be writing on. So, for example, with our software company, when we release new features, we know because of the calendar, when we should be blogging about them to get the work out and generate more setups and more customers from it. But the beautiful part about a content calendar, an editorial calendar is you can ensure that you're targeting all the right people. For example, on Neiolpatel dot com, I write about marketing, and there's so many different marketing techniques out there. Because I use an editorial calendar, I know that each week I need to write at least one SEO post, one social media post, one content marketing post, one post on paid advertising, et cetera. But if I don't have an editorial calendar, I may find myself mainly blog about SEO and neglecting all the companies that are interested in paid advertising sure paid advertising stuff won't drive as much traffic. But you know what, those companies typically have way more money to spend on marketing, So I need to make sure I'm incorporating paid content within my blog posts. So if you don't use the editorial content or editorial calendar, you're going to neglect certain audiences. Yeah, and you're probably wondering out there in the audience what tools are available for editorial calendars. What we started using recently was a tool called co schedule, So it's spell it out COEO schedule, and co schedule really helps us. From a high level view, you can actually you're able to see what social shares are scheduled, what blog posts are scheduled ahead of time. The editor is in there if you have a managing editor. Now this is assuming you have a team. You have a managing editor out there assigning posts to people, and you're going to see you can you can assign it directly within the Evernote or Google docs people are working off of that. You can reshare content that that's that's been shared a lot and in general, just people are a lot more organized, you're able to just you know, everybody, the entire team is looking at that from a high level point of view and you're able to just get organized. So that's one way to go about it. And also with WordPress, there's another tool if you're using a WordPress blog. Basically the plugin is called Editorial Calendar, and you know, you just download that and you're gonna be able to organize things with your writers when you're producing content. Also, make sure that you ramp yourself up. Don't try to start off producing content every single day, because you know what, you're setting yourself up from failure from day one. What I like doing is when I create a blog and I'm trying to write content consistently and produce it consistently, I like starting out at once a week, and once I got that down and the process is down, then I ramp up to two to three times per week. Then I go to four to five times per week, and then eventually I get to seven. I've tried to do up to fourteen or twenty one times per week. It's really hard to maintain unless you have a company with a big budget and you can hire a ton of people. Realistically, you're going to max out a roughly seven articles per week, and you've got to have a process for this. Entire thing too. When think of it this way, here's an example of a process. You can take it for what it is, but at the very beginning, the start. It starts with keyword research, right, that's keyword research, and then you write the headline, and then you have people begin to write, and then you have the editor come in and make changes to it. And then the process after that is okay, go in there and you added image to it, and then it goes out there to be published, and then you go out there and promote it. So you have to have a process to follow. That way, it's it's clockwork. And then you can also document all of this and you can hand this off to new writers that are coming in so they're aware of this entire process. And this can work like a machine that you can continue to scale out. Because for us right now, our goal for this quarter is to quadriple our content output. And if we're going to do that, we need to be a lot more organized. We need to follow a process. People kind of cringe at process, but hey, if you don't have a process, you're not going to be able to get to where you want to go. When you're creating all of this content make sure that, as Eric mentioned, with the processes, you don't make things too complex. So for me, what I end up doing is I write my content and Microsoft Word and the reason I use word it's much more efficient for me to do so than Google Docs. Then from there I upload it into WordPress and the editor will then correct things. Someone else will go and add images, make sure all the links work, open up in new windows, looks it over one more time, and then they schedule it out. Then once it gets scheduled out, I do the promotion. I email blast it out. I also schedule it on Facebook and Twitter and LinkedIn, and then we're all set and we move on to the next blog post. Love it okay, And with that we're going to wrap up this episode. If you like it, let us know what you think. Please leave a rating, review and subscribe because it helps a bunch. With that being said, we will see you in the next episode of the Marketing School. This session of Marketing School has come to a close. Be sure to subscribe for more daily marketing strategies and tactics to help you find the success you've always dreamed of. And don't forget to rate and review so we can continue to bring you the best daily content possible. We'll see you in class tomorrow right here on Marketing School