The internet is all about content.

One of the best ways for your business to get found is by creating great content and using it over and over again in different ways.

Helpful content for your prospect is a form of advertising… like an advertorial.

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An advertorial is defined as a newspaper or magazine advertisement giving information about a product in the style of an editorial or journalistic article.

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(Tweet this:) Creating great content consistently is how your online business gets found.

Yet, we are now officially OVERLOADED with content.

To really catch your prospect’s interest, you’ve got to get great at creating unique content that helps them.

You can’t get away with just a list of facts anymore.

You can’t get away with half-baked content anymore.

When creating your content, you want to try to do one or more of the following:

• inform
• entertain
• inspire
• motivate your content consumer to take action of some kind – this can be a call to action to visit a webpage to optin to your email list community

Some of the good news for online business owners is that online content consumption has grown and is continuing to grow at an incredibly fast rate.

While other types of media consumption have gone down, internet media consumption rose in the last 5 years by 105%.
(Source: ZenithOptimedia)

To continue the good news, a lot of the content out there is not so good.

This is a HUGE opportunity for you to make your content better and shine by comparison.

And attract 100% of your perfect prospects and turn them into your subscribers and customers.

When you can create great content that educates and inspires your prospects, the likelihood that they will want to become part of your email list or purchase your products or services increases.

You don’t want your content to be dry, like an academic paper, make your content fun, easy to consume and conversational.

Some content creation examples:

• If you’re selling supplements, create content on how each supplement works, who they are for, who they are not for, tell stories of how they’ve benefited your customers.

• If you’re a tennis pro and you want to fill your calendar, create content about the benefits of tennis at different ages, the how and why of certain tennis moves, the different mistakes people make with their swing, tell stories of your clients and specifically how they’ve improved with your help.

• If you coach women getting over a divorce, you can create a map for the different stages of the recovery process. What happens in each stage, what to expect, stories of women you’ve coached to healing and recovery.

Many of my regular readers, subscribers and clients ask me all the time how the heck I write and create original content in several different niches. For example, my recent 30 Days of Law of Attraction for Entrepreneurs series was original content for 30 days.

For those of you who may have just found me (hello there and welcome!), I just did 30 days of original content as a podcast and blog post series for the 30 Days of Law of Attraction for Entrepreneurs series.

The truth is I could do this year-round.

Creating great content does not have to be difficult when you’re a content expert or a passionate content curator. (Like a Larry King, Oprah or Napoleon Hill – someone who interviews content experts and, through experience and research, becomes a content expert themselves over time)

For several years, I wrote 2 syndicated columns a week for the McClatchy-Tribune information service. That experience forced me to get really good at consistently writing great content.

If it wasn’t great, I’d hear from my editor.

What Can Stop You From Creating Epic Content?

Before we get into the 4 content creation strategies, here are 2 things that can stop you from creating your content and getting it out there.

You don’t even start OR you get discouraged way too easily. It’s easy and hey, it happens to me sometimes too.

It can feel difficult when you plop yourself in front of your computer screen and stare at blinking cursor, stamping it’s little foot -and all you hear it saying is “C’mon, c’mon gimme something good already…!” and then, it turns into writers block.  

The fact is EVERYONE gets doubtful or feels discouraged about sharing their voice sometimes. Why, I even heard Oprah herself talking about this recently. She said “Will I have anything to say that they haven’t ALREADY heard?”

You do. We all have a unique way of communicating that YOUR perfect prospects and customers will love…

DON’T KEEP THEM WAITING.

(Sorry for raising my voice there… but it’s IMPORTANT.)

Or you’re suffering from “Perfectionism Gravitas”. I actually first discovered this disease in myself. Do not allow “perfectionism” to stop you from sharing your ideas and gifts with the world.

There is no such thing as perfect. There is such a thing as great, imperfect content that helps people AND promotes your business.

(Tweet this:) To be successful in anything, you must let go of perfectionism because perfect does not exist and you must become a recovering perfectionist. The more you do this, the better and better and better you’ll get.

You and your content are imperfect – you and your content are more than ENOUGH.

Here are 4 strategies for becoming a content creation machine:

1. Idea tickler file.

As you begin to create more content, you’ll start finding great ideas for content all the time. Including when you aren’t in front of your computer where you could easily capture your latest great idea.

You’re not going to be able to take action on all your ideas the moment you have them.

What to do?

I’ve created an Idea Tickler File which is a file folder where I save all my ideas. In it, there are post it notes, magazine cut-outs, and more. I also have a file folder on my desktop where I can save images that give me great content ideas or any statistics I run across online so they’re ready when I need them.

For the times when I get an idea and I’m not sitting conveniently at my desk, I use the voice memos and note app on my smartphone. When I see something that sparks an idea, whenever I have a great idea I speak it, jot it down, screenshot it and make my notes as soon as I can.

If you don’t, your great idea might float away as quickly as you got it – then when it comes time to sit and create content, you have a bunch of ideas ready to go.

Every once in a while, as a brain builder, I’ll go into one of the folders and start fleshing one of the ideas out a little more – for example, if I have to wait in a doctors office or the airport.

2. Use content creation prompts.

You can either buy content creation prompts or create them yourself as you become a content creation machine. I’ve created these for myself as I’ve been creating content for so long – I saw there were patterns to the process so I created my own “fill-in-the-blank” templates to make it easier each time I went to create content.

Just like anything else in your business, if you follow systems you can create things more quickly and easily.

Instead of reinventing the wheel each time, when you fill-in-the-blanks with templates creating content becomes a much quicker process. 

Click here to download one of my easy “fill-in-the-blanks” Content Prompts to make it super easy to start creating your content.

3. Speak your content.

Still getting stuck creating your content?

Try speaking it. No one ever got speaker’s block…

Take a list or a very short outline with all your relevant points and any stories you want to include and start talking.

It will be important to remember your “best friend avatar” (from Easy Online Marketing podcast episode 4 – 7 Email List Building tips) – so speak it as if you were helping a real, live person who needs your information.

Record your information in audio form, get it transcribed, make a few edits and you’re content is done.

There are now phone apps that transcribe your voice memos, or you can use a service, like CopyTalk.com which I’ve used for years – it is a paid service but for me it made total sense.

However there are now all kinds of low-cost or free options you can use. Here are a few options:

Rev Transcription
Fiverr Transcriptionists (make sure you check out their ratings & reviews)

Your smartphone (most phones now have a dictation mode). I’ve used my Google Drive app on my phone to speak content and it gives me a quick and easy transcription.

4. Repurpose and recycle every bit of it.

If you think you have to create great content until the end of time, don’t worry, you don’t.

As long as you have a few EPIC pieces of incredible content that should be enough.

Re-use your content.

Recycle your content.

Put the same piece of content on different platforms on the web.

Recreate the content into different mediums. For example, if your original content piece is in text, recreate it into an audio or video.

Sometimes when I’ve taught this, business owners say: “Well, I already did a blog post about that subject… I can’t create more content about it”

This is what I call the “field of broken dreams illusion” – This is when entrepreneurs think that because you put something online a lot of people will see it. If you put the same piece of content online in different forms or recycle it on social media

Again, there is so much info-overload that you actually must repurpose and recycle as much info as you can. If you don’t, you are wasting a huge opportunity to get your content in front of the people you could most help with your products and services.

Put it in as many formats as possible so that it can drive traffic to the most important pages in your business. What pages are those you ask?

Your list building pages, of course.

And tomorrow on the 30 Days of Law of Attraction for Entrepreneurs “Are You Addicted to People Pleasing?  3 Tips to Recovery”