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Power Your Business with a Content Engine
One of the best ways to make the most of your marketing time is by building a content engine. You want to power your engine with your content and drive people throughout your various platforms and spaces online (and your offers!). Essentially, you can think of a content engine as repurposing with strategy. Allowing you to make a bigger impact in less time.
Links and Resources Mentioned in This Episode:
- If you want your business to grow, effective marketing is crucial. But that doesn’t mean you have to spend a ton of time on your marketing – even if you’re a solopreneur. Do you dream of business growth, but aren’t gaining traction? Does the thought of tackling your marketing feel daunting? Or, do you understand the importance of effective marketing, but simply don’t have the time to get it done? There’s good news! Marketing doesn’t have to be so overwhelming, confusing, and complicated. Say goodbye to the confusion and complexity that has held you back, and say hello to a clear, actionable roadmap for business growth. In my book, Chasing Simple Marketing, I’ll take you on a journey to demystify marketing with simplicity as your guiding principle. You’ll walk away with a clear, concise, and personalized marketing strategy designed specifically for your entrepreneurial journey. You don’t need a Masters of Business Administration (MBA) or a background in business to tackle your marketing head-on thanks to the strategies and techniques in this book that deliver real results. No longer will marketing feel like an insurmountable mountain; instead, it will become an easily manageable and integral part of your business. Take your content from non-existent or inconsistent, to a true tool to grow your business by Chasing Simple Marketing. You can grab your own copy by heading to Amazon and searching for Chasing Simple Marketing, or you can hop over to amandawarfield.com/book to learn more about buying it for yourself.
- This week’s action step: When creating your next content plan, focus on your long-form content and then use that content to create your full content engine.
- This week’s book recommendation: All the Ways We Said Goodbye by Beatriz Williams
- Find me on Instagram and tell me you completed this week’s action step: @mrsamandawarfield
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Rather Read? – Here’s the Transcript!
*Just a heads up – the provided transcript is likely to not be 100% accurate
One of the best ways to make the most of your marketing time is by building a content engine. You want to power your engine with your content and drive people throughout your various platforms and spaces online and your offers. And essentially, you can think of a content engine as repurposing with strategy, allowing you to make a bigger impact in less time. You’re listening to episode 219 of The Chasing Simple Podcast, and I’m your host, Amanda Warfield. This episode was brought to you by my book, Chasing Simple Marketing, and you can grab your own at amandawarfield.com / book.
How do I find time to create content without overwhelming myself? Where should I even be showing up in my marketing? How do I come up with fresh content ideas? Where should I be focusing my marketing efforts? What is lead generation anyways, and how do I do it? Are launches still a thing? And most importantly, how do I put it all together to market my business strategically?
Can I really grow my business without spending all of my time marketing? These are some of the questions that float around in your head when you think of marketing. Welcome, friend. This is Chasing Simple, where practical marketing strategy meets simplicity. I’m your host, Amanda Warfield, simplicity focused content marketing and launch strategist, speaker, educator, and author of Chasing Simple Marketing.
I traded in my classroom lesson plans for helping creative entrepreneurs sustainably fit marketing into their business without it taking over their business. So that they have time to grow their business, take time off, and live the life they dreamed about when they first decided to go out on their own.
When I’m working, you can find me working with one on one clients, such as The Contract Shop and Rebecca Rice Photography on their marketing strategy and copywriting, or helping my students simplify their marketing and launches. And when I’m not, you can find me spending time outside with my husband, Russell.
Reading in our hammock, watching GameCock Sports, traveling, or forcing our cats to snuggle me. If you feel overwhelmed by marketing, you aren’t alone. Many entrepreneurs find marketing frustrating, overwhelming, and simply an obligation. They know they need it, but they don’t enjoy how easily it can suck up their time when what they really want to be doing, is the thing that they started their business to do.
Which is why I’m here. To help make marketing simple and less time consuming. So that you can spend less time on your marketing and more time growing your business and doing what you love. Each week I’ll bring you transparent conversations, actionable steps, and judgment free community to encourage and equip you.
So grab yourself a cup of coffee or whatever your drink of choice is and meet me here each week for love, support, practical tips, and advice on uncomplicating your marketing and business. Let’s do this entrepreneurship thing together, shall we? Want even more help simplifying your marketing and business?
Love the Chasing Simple podcast? If so, I want to invite you to join me on Monday evenings at 4pm Pacific Time, 7pm Eastern Time for my weekly YouTube lives. Each week, I’ll have a topic for the week, but after my short 5 minute teaching, you’ll have the chance to ask me questions about your marketing and get an answer from me in real time.
Until now, the only way to get this kind of access to me was through my membership, courses, or one on one services. But now, all you have to do is show up live with me on Mondays. You can find my channel by searching for my handle on YouTube, at Mrs. Amanda Warfield, or by heading to amandawarfield. com / YouTube.
I hope to see you Monday! So today we are going to chat about building a content engine. So when it comes to a marketing strategy, I’ve talked about this in a couple of videos already. When it comes to a marketing strategy, every marketing strategy should have two parts to it. So you have your nurture strategy and you also have your growth strategy.
Now your nurture strategy is what you’re doing It’s typically your content strategy, right? It’s what you’re doing to nurture the people that are already in your audience. And your growth strategy is what you’re doing to bring in new people to your audience. But what can happen a lot of times is we get so caught up in that nurture strategy that we don’t have time for the growth strategy, right?
We don’t have time to go be on Podcast and speak at things and be part of summits and bundles and do what we don’t have time for the growth marketing because we get so caught up in the nurture marketing that content strategy. So what a content engine does is it allows us to cycle through some of that content that we’re creating with our nurture strategy so that we don’t have to constantly be creating new content, new nurture content, right?
We don’t have to constantly be creating that new content and be stuck on that content creation hamster wheel, which no one wants to be on, right? So if you are looking at your nurture strategy, you’re looking at your content strategy, the entirety of your nurture strategy should be your content engine.
And the engine is essentially what makes your nurture strategy run. And realistically, what makes your marketing as a whole run. Because what you’ll do is, as you go out to these different growth strategies that you’re working on, As you go out and perform these different growth marketing strategies, you then send people into that engine, and then they’re being nurtured while you are able to focus more so on the growth marketing and less on the nurture marketing, without ghosting your people, because that’s what we don’t want to do, right?
We want to make sure that we’re, we’re not on that content creation hamster wheel, but we’re also not ghosting our audience at the same time. That’s a basic overview of what the purpose of a content engine is and how it works within the overall marketing strategy of your business, right? It’s part of your nurture strategy and you take that, your growth strategies and you fill them into the nurture strategies so that they can then, psh, into that engine.
Once they’re in the engine, I don’t really know how engines work, I’m going to be really honest with you. This metaphor, analogy, whatever you want to call it, Make sense in my brain? Hopefully it’ll make sense in yours too, because I don’t know anything about engines. So, once they get into the engine, then you’ve got all of this content in different areas that they can find, they may or may not find, but it’s there for them.
So, what I mean by that is, for a content engine, you realistically want three parts of your content strategy. You want your long form content, you want your short form content, and then you want your email newsletters. When it comes to your long form content, that typically is a podcast, YouTube, or blog post.
You may be thinking that sounds great. I’m a solopreneur. I don’t have time to create YouTube every week or to create a podcast every week or to write a blog post every week, to which I want to say, you don’t have to do it every week to be consistent, but also realistically, if you, I’m such a fan of knowing your limits and knowing what you truly can and cannot handle.
So if you know that you truly cannot handle creating a blog or YouTube video or podcast, and you know that once a month is just. Even that’s not realistic. Okay, so realistically let’s focus on your email marketing being your long form content And try to keep up with that if that is going to be your long form content, though I really would suggest at least every other week if not every week Um, you can work your way up to it and start every other week but You want to be able to make sure you’re staying top of mind with your people and social media is just not going to cut It for you for that.
So with that content engine I guess you’ve got that long form, which is probably YouTube blog or podcast, but maybe it’s your email marketing and you’ve got your email marketing, or maybe that’s your long form. And then you’ve also got your short form marketing. This is social media. Basically choose one social media platform.
And if you’re struggling with staying consistent, I would choose. One type of content within that one platform. So for example, with Instagram, you’ve got reels, you’ve got live, you’ve got feed posts, you’ve got stories. You know, you’ve got four different ways that you can show up on Instagram at minimum.
So choose one to start with, and then you can add on later, but maybe you really love creating graphics and carousel posts or how you’re going to show up and you’re just going to do a bunch of carousel posts and reshuffle them to your stories. Maybe you really like stories and you’re just going to have a static grid.
Okay. And it has all the information you need and you just say, okay, great. I’m going to show up on stories, and if you go look at my page, here’s information to know that, yeah, I’m still active. I just don’t post to the feed. There’s all kinds of different ways that you can do that, right? So, you’ll choose one.
Then, you’ve got all the components of your content engine, and you want to put them together. So, by doing that, you want to make sure that you have all the pieces working together cohesively. Because if your engine’s not working together, it’s not working. The car is not going to work, or the tractor, or whatever you want the engine to be in, I don’t know.
Again, we’re not getting too deep with this metaphor. But, you’ve got to have all the pieces, and they’ve got to work cohesively. What I mean by that is that you have to make sure that you are taking your long form content, whether that is blog, podcast, YouTube, or email, you’re taking that and you’re repurposing it into these other pieces.
So you want to take your long form content and you want to then create it and you’re going to take it and you’re going to repurpose it into an email if the email is not your long form content. And then you’re going to repurpose it into live. Social media posts, if you’re going to reverse it into two emails, maybe you’re going to repurpose it into as general.
I rule of thumb is generally 2 emails and then 5 social media posts, but that way you’re not spending hours and hours and hours. Writing all of these blogs and recording all of these podcasts and all of these YouTubes and then also writing all of these emails and then also creating all of these social media posts.
Instead, you’re able to take what you’ve already created once and just tweak it a little bit for each place. And it can literally be as simple as copy paste. For example, for a really long time, what I did with my podcast, that was my main type of long form content. I decided to do YouTube just because I wanted to be able to interact and say hi.
But I took my introduction to every podcast episode, I literally copy and pasted that introduction into an email. I took away the beginning, like I, I took away the like, you’re listening to episode whatever whatever, you know, all of those things. But I made sure that I wrote a great introduction. I wrote one great thing one time.
And then, I was able to copy paste that into an email, and I was able to just tweak it a little bit, maybe add a little more to it, and then add the link to the podcast episode to encourage people to go listen to it. So, someone who maybe hasn’t found my podcast yet, but has joined my email list by some other freebie, well, they’re able to then go, oh, she’s got a podcast as well, let me go listen to it.
And then they may be interested. You know, download the podcast, follow it, subscribe, whatever the new Apple term is, because they change it all the time. They’re able to then say, Oh, I’m going to go listen to this. And so I was able to send people from the email back to the podcast. Also from the podcast, I’m able to say, go download this freebie, go check out this product I have, go whatever.
And that gets people on my email list, whether they’re opting into a freebie, or they buy something from my shop. They’re able to go, oh, well now I’m on her email list and now I’m getting not only the information about the podcast each week and I can decide whether or not I want to listen, I’m also occasionally getting tips and tricks, I’m getting news about sales, all of those things, right?
And so I’m staying in the know by being on the email list. And so the podcast sends people the email list. So you can literally copy paste. When it comes to repurposing, you can take the main points, the main like, hey, here’s what happens in this. piece of content. Go watch, listen, read, or you can take main points.
So let’s say you’ve got, I mean, in this, I’ve got the three parts of a content engine, right? Long form, short form, and email newsletters. I could create a three different emails based off of each of those things and just an email out what long form content is and you know about what email marketing is and how to use it and so on and so forth.
And so you can take chunks of your main points essentially and write. That information up for an email and then the same goes with the social media post and you can take those main points and you can a send them back to the long form content be send them to an opt in to then get them on your email list, right?
Or see, add engagement calls to actions to encourage people to engage with you. So you show up in their feet more. You can take one piece of content, spread it out through all of your different parts of your nurture marketing strategy. And also be sending people back to the different parts of the engine as well.
So they’re not just going straight through it. It’s, it’s a cycle. It, so you’re going from long form content to, Oh, don’t forget to follow me on Instagram or Facebook or Twitter or wherever, or X or wherever you’re showing up, right? And then they go check out your social media and then they follow you on social media and you share about an opt in and they go to the email list.
Or they start in your email list and they follow you. You’re welcome sequences. Hey, follow me on this place. And so they follow you there. And then they learn about your long form content. You see how it kind of flows and you use all of your platforms to send people to all of the platforms using the same content that you used with the long form content, so your content engine, that’s what it is.
And as you, you create your content, hopefully you’re batching your content once a month. And so you’re able to just. Create that content for the next month, and then you’ve got three weeks to work on your growth marketing strategies Focusing on those things and then as you’re focusing on those and you’re sending people back from the growth into the nurture strategy They’re moving through your content engine And they’re beginning to know I can trust you.
They’re growing how much they trust you. They’re growing how much they, um, listen to what you’re doing, or they decide that you’re not a good fit. And that’s okay, too, because we want people to say, yes, I’m all in, or no, I don’t care what you have to say. We don’t want people to sit on the fence in our marketing and in our audience.
So you use those growth strategies. You work on them for three weeks, and You send them into that content engine and the people flow through the content engine without you having to focus on it for three weeks out of the month. And you just focus on the growth strategy so that you can send people into that content engine.
So that is how you build a content engine. A quick side note, or one last tip, I guess I should say, a great way to move people from whatever your growth strategies are into that nurture. Funnel is a either have a piece of long form content in mind that you’re going to send people to so if you have a piece of long form content that performed really well that you’ve gotten great feedback on that is like a core pillar of your business.
That’s a great piece of content to say, Hey, now that you watch this webinar, you viewed this summit presentation, you downloaded this thing that I put in a bundle, so on and so forth. You know, there are different strategies that work best for different growth strategies and different calls to actions that work best for different growth strategies, but in general, as you’re getting started, especially with those growth marketing strategies, a really great thing that you can do, especially if you’re doing like guest blog posting or something like that, or you’re just doing marketing.
Yeah. Especially if you’re just doing, like, lives on Instagram with people and you’re collaborating that way with growth strategies. A really great thing to have in your back pocket is one or two pieces of core content, pillar content you might say, to drive people back to. So if you have a blog post, or a YouTube video, or a podcast episode that people have loved that you’ve gotten a ton of listens or downloads or watches like, you know, it’s something that people are really interested in.
That’s a great thing to send people to because it gets them inside of that content engine. And the other thing is a freebie as well. Any freebie you have that you’ve created that leads to an offer, because It’s a day we want to make sure that we’re leading people to offers so that we’re eventually leading them to sales, which I talk about in another episode about the purpose of marketing and the sales precipice, but another episode, another podcast, but having a freebie that leads to your sales, having a couple of core pieces of content that you can lead people to, to get them inside of that content engine from those sort of things that that’s a great way to easily move them in.
And it’s a really great low pressure way, especially if you haven’t the ability to link to it. Have That’s just one bonus pro tip. So your action step for this week is that when you’re creating your next content plan, whether it’s this week or next or whenever, I want you to focus on your long form content and then use that content that you have planned and strategized for your long form content.
Use that to create your full content engine so that you’re spending The majority of your time, which is hopefully a lot less, of your marketing time on that really intentional strategic long form content, and you’re able to just simply repurpose that really intentionally throughout your other content.
Now, your book recommendation for this week is All the Ways We Said Goodbye by Beatrice Williams. I think I recently recommended another one of her books. I just am always, just obsessed with everything that she puts out. This one, if you can’t tell by the title, spoiler, doesn’t have a super happy ending.
It’s pretty, uh, honestly like the, not, it’s not, it’s pretty depressing. And I’m normally someone who cannot stand a book that ends. Without being a happy ending like the world is sad enough I want happy endings and everything I read like if I’m gonna be reading fiction give me fiction, you know but even with the sad ending I Adored this book.
I mean it like I even I walked away going man. That’s so sad But also like wow, that was so good. So highly recommend all the ways we said goodbye by Beatrice Williams I’ll link to that in the show notes for you if you want to check it out And until next time, I hope you’ll go out and uncomplicate your marketing and business.
Thank you so much for joining me here today, friend. You can find this episode show notes as well as all of the resources you need to simplify your marketing over@amandawarfield.com. If you liked what you heard here today, be sure to subscribe to the podcast so that you’ve never missed an episode. And if you could take a moment to leave a rating and review, it would truly mean the world to me.
Ratings and reviews are the number one way that you can support a podcast. And ensure that it sticks around for many more episodes to come. I’ll see you next time. Now go out and uncomplicate your marketing and business.
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