Tearing your hair out creating content? Sometimes it feels like everyone else is winning with content except you. As you scroll you’ll see posts from competitors with more reactions, comments and shares and get annoyed thinking, why isn’t this happening for me? Well, I’m going to walk you through my approach to content. I’m not primarily looking for big views, reactions and comments. Here’s the secret to getting leads from LinkedIn Posts.
If you’re not getting leads and clients, you will assume that more likes and comments will solve it, you know what? It won’t.
I’ve met people with 20 million impressions a year and getting zilch.
I’ve had clients with hardly any engagement but getting leads.
I’m going to walk you through my process, so you can do the same, even if you don’t have a big following or time to spend hours creating content.
First off, content has three objectives…
Most people aren’t thinking this way about content. They just post what they think or feel, but the three purposes of content are to attract your ideal clients, nurture them and then bring them to the point where they reach out for help (become a lead).
Now, where people go wrong is they focus on the last part, they are so eager to convert they blast out promotional content hoping to get some bites.
Reality check. That doesn’t work.
The other side of the coin is the people who push out attractional content, it draws a crowd but nobody buys.😵 I’ve met a lot of influencers in that boat.
Likes don’t pay the bills.
Clients do.
So, it is about having a mix of all three pieces to really make your content work.
Below, I’ve categorised out posts by their purpose…
Now comes the hard part.
Coming up with ideas.
Many people will sit there for hours and write content which never sees the light of day. That is soul-destroying and just a totally inefficient way to create content.
We don’t remember everything we know. So, trying to make content on the fly is not going to make great use of your time AND it’s not going to get you the results.
If I want inbound enquiries, I need to be doing the right mix of attraction (40%), nurturing (40%) and Converting (20%) Content. If I don’t, I’ll over-promote or have a lot of people paying attention and not building the trust to buy.
So this is where I built my own ContentLab for LinkedIn.
The lack of structure in coming up with ideas and turning those ideas into content was costing me time and wasn’t working for me.
So I broke my ContentLab into three parts…
My Topic
First, off the bat, I knew I had an issue, you have this issue too. There are so many content ideas we have, but in a crunch moment we go blank. If we try to write without structure we can create content which isn’t focused and goes all over the place.
Having a clear focus and breaking down your topic(s) can open up your eyes to how much content you can really produce.
One of my challenges was drifting into big heady topics which didn’t deliver much value. It also felt like I didn’t do them justice because there wasn’t enough space.
So, I broke down my Topics into Subtopics and Specifics.
For example, LinkedIn is a topic, Content is a subtopic and PDF posts is specific.
I brain-dumped everything into my ContentLab.
As I looked, just on my LinkedIn topic, I had more than 50 different specifics within LinkedIn (and I’d missed off a lot).
Suddenly the ideas were not a problem.
Tip: Breaking down your content in this way will stop you from forgetting what to talk about and give you different ways to talk about the same topic and not repeat yourself.
Populating this is not an everyday thing but it’s not quite once and done. I get new ideas and so I’m constantly adding to the Lab. I maybe look at my topic lab once a month.
My Purposes
Now I had to translate my topics into three different purposes. So I made a second part to my ContentLab to help me drop topics, sub-topics, promos, and specifics into the Lab. I also added some other personal components so people could get to know me as a behind-the-scenes of who I am.
It’s important people know, like and trust you, so showing your human side can help you connect with your network too.
Content is about attracting a crowd, nurturing a core audience and converting them into clients – that means every piece of content is intentional, not an afterthought.
I populated my matrix dropping cross-referencing my topic with my purposes.
Out pops more than 100 content pieces I can put together.
All unique with different angles and perspectives.
It took me some time to create the structure, but once I did that, I could get more than 100 ideas really fast.
Why?
Because I’d built a framework to produce content.
My purposes section of the Lab, I work on daily. I’m not a batch creator, I like to make posts on the day or the night before. So, I use this section all the time.
My Structure
Now comes the final bit.
Creating a content structure that made it easy to write.
So, I built that too.
All my content follows the same structure, this means I can drop the content idea in, add the value points and within 5-minutes I had a post.
Content is a skill that you get better at the more you do it. But if you don’t put some structure in place, what takes you an hour right now, will take you an hour in 3 months time.
Structure is the key to getting better, faster and winning clients.
I follow a simple method and you’ll see below, my posts follow a similar format.
This means I can create unique ideas quickly, turn them into content ideas and write them really fast.
Having a structure like this is about remembering the goal.
We want to attract our ideal clients, build our personal brand and win clients.
To get consistent results…. you need a consistent approach.
I’m serving content, not because I am the world’s best writer or video producer. I’m producing it because it helps me close business.
Content can help you to do the same thing too. You can build your own Content Lab which will focus your energy and efforts into outputting content more quickly and producing content which will bring you clients.