Becoming a Content Warrior

Key Takeaways

I'm so excited for today it's gonna be the funnest day of work like ever but I really don't want to turn this video into like one of those productivity hacks of things you know where it's like showing you how did spend your time instead I really want to focus on something a lot more fundamental to just succeeding in a content marketing business and that is that every hour you spend on your business today is going to determine what the result is going to be a few months six months a year from now in your business because everything we do is building content that piles up over time but before we get to that Ricky gets to work later than I do and so I always am looking for ways that I can make his morning's interesting [Music] guys why are there chickens in my office yeah there's like there's like eight chickens in my office there's bleep everywhere oh so bad I knew today was gonna be a good day okay but seriously I want to show you something called click up click up is a tool that allows you to stay organized with your content plan and I have had plenty of times in my business where I was working on so many projects but I just wasn't seeing the result and every time that has happened when I look back a year what happened to your previous to that I was working on stuff but not focusing on producing a volume of high-quality content so I used to work off just an Notes app on my phone that would just you know these are the videos I'm making these are the blog posts I'm writing and this is when they're gonna publish that kind of thing and that worked okay but I would find it was too disorganized and I sometimes lost important ideas and sometimes I missed deadlines that I'd go two weeks and hadn't published a new blog post and stuff so click up is a cool tool to really keep you on track with your content calendar the way it works is with spaces when somebody has an idea for a video they can assign it to someone and send it to that person so that they can begin working on it or say hey I want to film with you this day or say hey this needs to go to the editor and you can set a priority for like hey these are my better ideas I want to work on these soon or this one can wait a little bit it's kind of an okay idea needs some refinement so just having this tool has enabled us to move way faster on our content marketing I thought we were fairly well organized until we got click up and then just realize man we're moving way faster so it's a pretty cool tool use whatever works for you Trello just a note on your phone but even if you're solo one single content creator you've got to have a good content calendar all right enough talking now it's time to actually create a piece of content I've been hearing from a lot of you who are a little bit intimidated with just the process of getting started with your website so I want to show you how exactly I'm doing that so every time I sit down to create a video write a blog post anything I'm going into click up that I mentioned before I'm not making the outline for this video I'm making the outline for the next piece of content that I create by doing that by kind of separating your brainstorming from actually writing or making a video it's just it removes the writer's block because every time I sit down I know I have a blog post already outlined and I just need to write it so I'm gonna go into a to click up and let's make a video for margin so there's me in Ricki's channel on personal finance ooh okay so I see this one called college majors to avoid if you want to have a future so it's an idea we had at some point and I'm just going to do a little bit of research I'm gonna go look on statistical sites of you know how much you make for each college major and stuff I'm also gonna put some anecdotal stuff of just oh I had a friend who did that and they had a hard time getting a job that kind of information in there and I'm just gonna make a very rough outline I never ever script the videos or the content at this point it's just like major bullet points that I want to do so I'll write this out and then once I have that I am ready for the next time but now I'm gonna go to one that's already outlined with my few bullet points here and I'm ready to go so time to go create content so I leave this camera just always set up and see if we have we got to go get a memory card so this is another part of part of the system so we have these bowls over here that we just have SD cards and micro SD cards so that they're always there if it's in the bowl it means it's used and it's ready to go and then we'll put it in a different case when it goes to the editor so I'll put in card and I'll put this in my lav mic but I can't right now because it's already recording for this video I had these tasks MDR 10 ELLs so if you want to see the exact gear we're using go to income school comm and click tools and then you'll see our recommendations for video gear buy everything everything that we're doing so I'll roll this table out and I usually just stick my notes just over here just tiny it's really only a few bullet points that I'm doing I'll put on just the light here these are cheap lights these are new were brand it costs almost nothing it just makes the video look a lot nicer like you can see wreck right now I you just kind of get weird shadows under your eyes and stuff from all the can lights in the room when you stand over here in the light it just fills in your eyes and stuff just looks a little bit nicer not so many kind of weird shadows and stuff going on so when I have the outline here I'm just gonna come up with a hook whatever money mistakes to avoid in your 20s Oh young Jim I remember when you're 20 years old young and stupid still stupid but I have learned a few things about college majors to avoid whatever and I'm gonna talk about the different things in here I'm gonna do the entire video as one take never go back if I mess something up royally I'm gonna just usually start the video over I like it to just have that flow to the whole video sometimes we'll go back a little bit to a thing but usually it's the whole take and then we'll edit things in as we go so that's our process for creating a video but now I want to show you a blog post that is going back to a video we did about a year ago if you remember the one where Ricky and I where I sent Ricky on the dirt bike chase that's really what we'll do for creating a blog post so I want you to go check out that video if you haven't already seen it it's really a process of you know getting your topic writing the answer paragraph in your subtitles and then boom boom boom filling them in you need to have a system that works for you whatever your system is so that when you are ready to create content in that one precious hour that you have before work or on your lunch break or on a Saturday where you can steal away three hours before the kids wake up however you're doing it you have to be productive and so a system like this for I know when I have on my calendar during the week Monday afternoon and I'm recording margin videos like yesterday Ricky and I boom boom boom we knocked out four or five of them and that's more than a month of content in one afternoon that's ready to go but you can only do that if you have a system all right we're heading to lunch at a place right over here I want to talk a little bit about burnout with everyone being home for extended periods of time and a lot of you just really cranking it out becoming content warriors on your websites you hear a lot about burnout I don't really burnout hardly at all because I just love creating content I love what I do but when you don't see the success yet you're just getting started that's one motivation that that's removed and then sometimes you haven't yet learned what part of content marketing you're good at and you really enjoy I found myself last week looking at the clock to see when it was time to go and I thought I can't remember the last time in ten years that I have wanted work to end and like was looking at the clock I love my home life but I love what I do here I just want to encourage you to figure out what where what your zone of genius as gay Hendricks calls it is in content marketing is it creating the videos and you hate the editing then let's outsource that is it you know doing the search analysis but you hate the writing then let's outsource that after you learn how to do it yourself you need to figure out where you are the most effective in your business and then do that thing over and over and over again so we set up a calendar that you know Monday I do this Tuesday I do this etc to make sure that I'm spending my time where I'm most valuable to the company you need to do the same thing if you want the results a year from now - look how you're hoping they'll look I want you to meet someone as two people this is Nate I say hi Nate and Anna some of you have met them on either our Instagram that Nate or the vid school channel which you guys do and I wanted to talk a little bit about which you guys should check out its vid school we're we're young right and we're young in subscribers but they're coming in fact we actually just did a challenge if you're gonna head over to our vid school YouTube channel you might want to check this out actually it's pretty cool so what we did is we made 52 videos in only 24 hours and what we wanted to do is actually make content for an entire year and put it out there one video a week to make passive income I know a lot of you bloggers out there kind of our want to stay and blogging and it's a hard transition to make it over to YouTube but we just wanted to show you that it really is possible if you go over to vid school please check that out so I wanted to talk a little bit though about just how to grow because I know a lot of you are to the point that you're at least envisioning a future of having having multiple brands and you know you start one website and you immediately want to start you want to have a portfolio of different websites or multiple YouTube channels and what I have learned over the last few years that has been painful is that you really need a mission for your company first I know that seems like a little when I hear somebody say like write your mission statement I'm like whatever get in the trenches and make a business already alright it just feels too philosophical but I learned that that actually was what was missing in our company that we were making so many different brands on who knows what a pet website Camping website oh whatever boating photography use just all over the map and eventually we said you know what we just need a company mission and then every piece of content we create should somehow be tied in to that mission and so income school's mission is to help people like you to provide well for their families by creating an online business when we wanted to expand from income school you know we created WP school WordPress cool that's Nathan's channel whose here today because that channel is all about teaching your WordPress is something that we didn't really want to cover on this channel it would be kind of weird if we did a specific WordPress tutorial on this channel but you this audience would be interested in it VIN school you know we do talk about YouTube on here a lot but a lot of you are here mostly for the blogging and so we talk about mostly that so we created vid school for that but it's all coming to that same mission of the company and so it's something that I would just really encourage you to just think about don't obsess with but just instead of creating random things and random industries that you may letter late later regret really think about what do I want my company to accomplish in the life of my audience and then let's create brands that are adjacent at least to accomplishing that same purpose I you know I want to help people beginners enjoy the outdoors who aren't from an outdoors kind of family then great let's make a hiking site focused on beginners and a fishing site and or whatever all on that mission alright I spend a lot of time out your on the couches when I'm kind of brainstorming thing but the last thing I want to talk about it just being becoming a content warrior is it having bu work-life balance every family is going to approach the work-life balance differently for me specifically I found that when I tried to really divide my life in half and I had family life and I had work-life I didn't like it very much if work isn't interesting enough that I don't bring some element of it home and I want to talk about and I'm still interested in it then work isn't that good right and if family life isn't good enough then when I come to work I don't want to talk about what I'm doing on the weekend and plans with my kids and texting during the day then my family life isn't very good and so I found like that division line was what the problem was and I needed to blur them a little bit more I'm kind of a little bit more the other way I I don't totally bill any eight between the two but what my family needs for me is when I get home to kind of shut work off because I have a natural tendency to check the email and check in on customer support stuff jump into our community and and see how people are doing and for questions throughout the evening and that pulls me away and distracts me from the family and so because I know I have that tendency of again actually working not mentally I love work and so that's what I talk about with my wife all the time there's there's that but if I don't shut off the actual work work then it bleeds way too much in the family time so I do have to delineate more so I think it makes sense for you to just kind of figure out what's healthy and what makes you happy because that's really what it comes down and you just have to get on the same page with your spouse you have to know what this whole thing is for why are you spending this time working on an online business what it's trying to accomplish what you think the returns are going to be in how long it's going to take to get there they need to know that in order to be able to support you and for my wife like one of the reasons that I blur the lines is because it's good for her like she gets she always calls it mommy brain she's you know taking care of the kids in like when I get home and I can talk about a problem at work we've really enjoyed talking through it and it's good but it's interesting like it is just different in every family and so find what works for you and speaking of family it's time to go home see you Jim [Music] some people give presents [Music]