Hey guys, Robert Plank here from DailySeminar.com, and I hope you’re in a good mood today because I’m in a good mood because you’re watching my video about how to create lots of content quickly.
For years I’ve just been able to make great content a little bit faster and a little bit faster, and now I’m just at the point where I have all these little tips and tricks to share with you.
And if you get up to my level, then all of the tips which might seem kind of weird and wacky to you become kind of common sense; they become built in, so you don’t even have to think about what’s involved in creating a lot of content. You just sit down; you bang it all out, and it’s done.
Just like this video you’re watching I recorded in January ’09, and you might be seeing it for the first time months and months later. One month when I wanted to try doing a bunch of article marketing and a bunch of video marketing, I sat down, wrote a hundred articles in a little over a week, recorded PowerPoint videos for all of those, and I had a hundred articles to submit and a hundred videos to submit, and it brought me in lots of traffic.
And whenever I make an info product, it never takes me longer than seven part-time working days. So sometimes I’ll drag my feet, but I’ve never labored over a product for longer than a couple of weeks. I might put it aside for a week or two to get a different project, a more high priority project done. But a lot of my products, which some of them contain six hours of video training and a one hundred page e-book and seven PHP scripts all take me about a week to do.
So how do you create lots of content quickly?
The first five things I want to tell you is to get in a super creative mood, create content in small blocks, use that confidence to generate more small blocks, schedule the creation of those blocks, and have a partner keep track of those tasks.
So getting in a super creative mood you just have to take note of what are you thinking about; what are you doing of those times that you get in a super creative mood? And what do you do to psyche yourself up and to feel good about yourself? Because it’s very important that you’re in a good mood, that you feel creative when you are creating content just because if you’re in a good mood, then you just won’t be thinking so much about how much your presentation sucks. And you’ll be able to go off on tangents and make little jokes here and there and just lots of little things that make your videos and your content a lot easier to read.
Create your content in small blocks. So when I made my articles I wrote down a bunch of article titles, a bunch of questions that I wanted to answer, but then I didn’t go out and have a hundred half-finished articles. I said, “OK, first I want to make the first week of articles.” So I only focused on writing the first seven articles, so out of that big list of questions I picked seven of those questions and I sat down and answered them. And I’m pretty sure that if I sat down and answered a hundred articles at a time I would have just been overwhelmed, and I would’ve given up. So if you create content in small blocks like that, like you say, “I need to write seven quick articles just to fill up this one week.”
And for the Daily Seminar, Jason and I each record one video per week on our own. So I’ll say, “I need to record the videos for August 2009,” and that means I have five videos or, “I need to record the videos for July 2009,” and that means I have four videos. So just having to record four videos or five videos is not as scary as having to record like 30 or 40, right?
So you knock out one of those blocks with the attitude that once that’s knocked out, you don’t have to think about that block of content ever again. So if I record all my videos for August 2009, then I don’t have to think ever again about recording videos for August 2009. I can think about September 2009.
So you get a block started and finished – and a block of content I would consider that something you could finish in if not a day maybe a day and a half; preferably in one sitting but that’s not always possible, but just a small block. A block does not take you a week to do; a block should take you about a day at the most.
So you knock out a block of content on Monday, and then on Tuesday you’re like, “Wow, I didn’t realize that I could record five videos back-to-back on Monday.” And so now recording five videos or recording four videos on Tuesday should be a piece of cake; so use that confidence to generate more blocks. And you keep track of how long that took you just so that you don’t Parkinson’s Law yourself, which means that if you are really motivated on Monday, you’re super creative and you’re in a good mood and you notice that it takes you from 9am to noon to record those videos. And all you do is record those videos. You don’t check your e-mail; you don’t talk on the phone; you don’t work on other e-books. You’re only focused on that one task, so that on Tuesday you can say, “OK, I’m going to give myself from 9am to 12pm again to record the videos.” And maybe you bring up a countdown timer or some other way of keeping track of when the videos should be done. So you say, “OK, the first video should be done at 9:30, and the next should be done at 10 o’clock, and the next should be done at 10:30.” Because it’s so easy to – because it’s one thing to have confidence, but it’s another thing to be full of yourself and to have a hyper-inflated ego and say, “All right, well I recorded the videos on Monday and so now I can just goof off on Tuesday and record the videos no sweat.” And then you end up taking the whole entire day to record the videos when you should’ve had it done in just one morning.
So you have to schedule a time to generate that content and you’ll be able to – once you get the hang of making these small blocks completed, you will have a better idea of how long it’ll take; so you’ll have a more accurate schedule.
And then have an accountability partner to keep track of those tasks. So at the beginning of every day you tell them, “This is the stuff I have to do,” and at the end of the day you say, “This is the stuff I actually did,” so you can stay accountable and actually make do on your promises and finish the things you say that you’ll do.
So what content can you generate quickly? You can make articles, blog posts…So many people will post stuff to their blog live, and I’m like, “No, you can sit down and bang out four or five quick blog posts in not that much longer than it would take for you to write one blog post.” And schedule them all to post on a certain day, and then go over to your autoresponder and schedule a bunch of quick e-mails and line up those days. So on Monday you send an e-mail to your list saying, “Hey guys, I just made this blog post. Go over here and comment on it.” Then on Thursday you say, “Hey, here’s the Thursday blog post. Go over here and comment on it.”
So you sit down and crank out a bunch of really quick blog posts; sit down and you crank out a bunch of really quick e-mails and you line them up. You can crank out the e-mails without the blog posts. So if you’re pre-launching a product, you sit down and you think of maybe three solid things to say about your latest product. And if you were dumb you would fit it all into one big, long e-mail, but if you’re smart you split it up into three different e-mails so that people get notified on three different days.
You can generate forum posts quickly, too, because forum posts are pretty much articles, but the trick is you can’t make it look like an article. I’ve seen people do this all the time. They take their actual articles and post them as forum posts, and they’re super long. So a forum post, if you write it beforehand, needs to look like I just thought of this idea; it needs to look raw; so it needs to look very short, less than a page; because most people do not go to a forum and type out a five-page post. It just doesn’t happen unless they either have really bad time management or they’re recycling their articles. So you don’t want to look like you’re recycling your articles.
So if you want to write a bunch of forum posts quickly, keep it short. But writing forum posts is not really a good use of your time unless you can just bang out ten or twenty of them.
But definitely articles, blog posts, and e-mails – I’d probably say e-mails is the number one kind of content that is worth your while; and then comes blog posts because that means you’re building up content on to your own site; and then after that probably articles because they get you traffic but you’re building up somebody else’s site.
And then videos are really easy to make in an assembly line format, especially if you have PowerPoint videos. And then you do the same thing like with the blog posts. If you have a video submission service like Traffic Geyser you can upload it and say, “I want to submit it on this day,” and then you don’t have to think about it.
And same thing with solo ads. A solo ad is a mix between a sales letter and an e-mail where you’re selling them something, trying to get them to click on a URL, and it’s more of a hard sell than just a regular pre-launch e-mail.
And then product reviews. So instead of being real careful about your product reviews and taking all day to learn stuff, you just sit down with one product and you flip through it and you find the three biggest takeaways, and then that’s what you review. You don’t have to review the whole book. And then once that’s done you take another product, you find the three biggest takeaways, and then you write your review.
One time I was at a seminar and we met this guy who knew time management stuff. And he had some time management book, and he gave it to my friend to read. And he’s like, “Oh yeah, sure I’ll read it.” Then we got back to our hotel room later that night, and he’s like, ”You know what? I’m over here at the seminar. I flew thousands of miles to be here. We have a limited amount of time. I’m not going to spend it in my hotel room reading a book.” So he flipped through it and he found the three biggest takeaways. And it took him just a few minutes to do, and then the next day or maybe later in the day he came back to the guy and talked to him, and they had a whole conversation about the book because he got his takeaways so he had something to contribute to the conversation, but he didn’t waste all this time reading the whole book. So when you do product reviews all you need are takeaways. All you need is your unique viewpoint on stuff. You don’t need to be a parrot.
What content can’t you generate quickly? You can’t do joint ventures, customer support, nothing that’s really maintenance. That’s going to be the stuff that goes really slow. And you really can’t generate customer support days or weeks in advance. You have to take care of it as it rolls, so that’s unfortunate. That’s just what I would not focus on.
If you were trying to generate content quickly I would focus on writing the articles, blog posts, e-mails, forum posts, videos, product reviews; but the joint ventures, the customer support, that’s stuff that you need to deal with on a day-to-day basis.
Here’s how to double your article output. This is something I’ve been trying lately. I have a lot of different things I do to get myself motivated and in a creative mood to write articles. But this is what I’ve been trying lately; it’s my latest tactic. I take a walk and describe words you see aloud. So if you’re walking around and you see a sidewalk you just say to yourself, “sidewalk.” And if you see a bench you say, “bench.” And you might have noticed that you tend to use much of the same words every day. So you might use words like “morning,” “afternoon,” “driving,” and so on. But then if you use words, if you say words aloud that you don’t normally say like “fence” or “bench” or “clouds” – I don’t know what it does but it just activates different parts of your brain that you don’t normally have turned on, and you keep track of what you visualize when you’re productive.
So me, personally, one day I was just in a really productive mood, and I was in a goofy productive mood and it was really awesome. And when I wrote my e-books that I was working on that day, I used all kinds of jokes. And they were lame jokes, but they were just really funny jokes. They were the “I don’t care” type of jokes. And when I recorded videos and I did some interviews that day I did all kinds of weird, funny, on-the-spot jokes. And they were stupid, but they kind of lightened the mood. And I really liked that mind state and I was not in that mind state very often.
So I made sure to keep track of what I visualized when I was productive and, more importantly, what I thought of when I visualized myself being productive. So what the image was, it was me sitting at a computer and the angle that I saw myself was I saw myself from the back and it was like the security camera angle. So it was way off to the right side and way up on the ceiling and like looking down as if a security camera was looking at me. There’s no security camera in my office, but that was the angle.
And then I noticed that the proportion of everything was kind of small. So I was sitting at a little desk working at a little tiny computer. And for whatever reason the screen was off. And then that image was kind of overlaid, so there was a transparent image on top of that. It was a close-up of the computer screen, and I was typing into a Word document.
And ever since then every time I want to be creative or I’m in kind of a slump, I’ll spend about a minute trying to visualize really hard myself at the computer with everything surrounding it, the security camera angle with the overlay of the word document. And I don’t understand it, but for whatever reason it seems to work.
And finally to increase your article output, always do something every day. So if you don’t feel like writing articles, just write one. And then you turn it into, “I’m writing one article today instead of ten.” So you’re training your brain to think that a small number of articles – so on a bad day you write only one or two articles only whereas many people on a good day they’ll write one or two articles. So for you on a good day you’ll write five to ten, but on a bad day you’ll write one to two. So even if you don’t really feel like writing articles you’ll still write 365 articles a year. So always do something every day, even if you’re only going to put 10 minutes into writing one article; always do something.
Produce content in small blocks like we were saying. Never say, “I’ll make 200 videos,“ because you’ll never finish. Even I can’t do that. Instead say, “I’m going to make the next week’s worth of videos,” and that’s seven videos. So the goal that you’re trying to put in your head is that if you make seven videos now, then that takes care of a week’s worth of videos if you’re making a video every day. And that means you don’t have to think about videos for the rest of the week after that. You can totally put it out of your mind because you can record the videos and upload them and schedule them, and it’s done.
Here’s how I make my membership content. The goal with the membership, for Daily Seminar at least, is to create content for the entire year. So I work on recording four 20-minute videos for January. And then I just go full-speed, and all I’m thinking about is filling up those four videos, because then I can say January is filled up. And then once January is totally filled up and all done then I can go to work on February, because it’s all about one block at a time. You don’t want to have a bunch of videos open. You want to say, “OK, I’ve got January done; locked down, finished. Don’t have to think about it,” because your brain can only handle a handful of things at a time.
So sure you remember things like your name and the color of your car and all that stuff, but just as far as memorizing things you can only have a few things in your head at a time. So I don’t want to have to think about, “Oh, I’ve still got to finish this January video and that March video, and this February.” I want to say, “January, done. Right now I’m on February, and February is the only thing that matters.” One block at a time.
And then after a while you figure out how much each block takes, not just how long it takes when you drag your feet but how long it really takes. And then you can say I’ll have the videos for March done by Tuesday if I dedicate one hour per day to this from 2pm to 3pm. Strict deadlines are very helpful because Parkinson’s Law says that the complexity of a task will balloon up to fill the amount of time you’ve allotted for it. So if a task really takes you one hour and you allot four hours to do it, it’s really going to take you four hours even though it could have taken one hour if only you’d set the right deadline.
It helps if someone else is helping you to create the content. So just like with the Daily Seminar videos, I’m recording a video for every week and so is Jason. And then Jason and I sometimes have a competitive spirit, not for betting or for money or anything but just for ego purposes. Sometimes we’ll plan both to record three videos that day, and I’ll sneak in a fourth one so then I can say, “Well, you only recorded three videos today but I did four. That makes me better.” And of course we’re just joking and we’re just doing a little bit of a friendly competition but it really helps.
And one person can also helpfully motivate if the other is stuck. So if one person’s like, “Man, I can’t get started. I can’t record one video,” and the other guy’s like, “Well, that’s easy. I sat down, and I just recorded two videos in the last half hour. So if I can do it, so can you.”
Writing lots of blog posts is easier than articles because blog posts should be shorter. You can take an article with three ideas and turn it into three blog posts. So write three blog posts, post them one week apart, and schedule them in the autoresponder; and that means you don’t have to think about blogging for a month. And this kind of a task, writing three blog posts and scheduling them in an autoresponder, it’ll take you what? Half an hour? 45 minutes? So why not do that if it means that you done have to think about blogging for the next 30 days.
If you want to write lots of e-mails, don’t write them in a Word document. Just write them in whatever interface you use to schedule them, like the web interface, and that means you have to finish. If you have a message half-way typed, then you can’t close the window; you can’t click on other stuff; you have to finish it. And don’t overload people with information. If you got eight tips, just share one tip per e-mail and that gives you eight e-mails.
If you don’t know what types of e-mails to send I’ve got the PAINT method. So this list here: Polls, Action, Ideas, News, and Tips. You choose one of them, and then that means that’s the kind of e-mail you’re going to send. So it’s a lot easier to first categorize the e-mail you’re going to send before you do it. So you could send a poll, you could say, “Here’s this idea I just had. What do you think of it?”
You could send an action e-mail. You can say, “Did you do this? I just gave you this advice the other day about how to write a bunch of blog posts, how to write a bunch of e-mails. Did you apply it yet? Did you spend half an hour and write a bunch of e-mails?” Or if it’s a post-sale follow-up list you say, “You bought my product on this day. By now you should be at page ten. So did you do this? Did you check out this one checklist yet? And if not, go do it now.”
You can have an idea. You can say, “Here’s this crazy idea I just had today for this new product. What do you think about it?”
Or you could have news. You could say, “I just heard about this. This one guy is launching this new product, and I want to know what you think so please let me know.”
Or tips, so “Here’s something you can do in 60 seconds without even trying. So here’s a way that you can come up with ten article ideas in the next 60 seconds.”
So let’s go over each type of these e-mails so that you can get an idea of, “Ooh, this is an e-mail that sounds like something I’d like to send right now.” So the goal here is I want you to think of an e-mail you want to send right now. As soon as this video is over you can type out a quick e-mail to your list and send it.
So first step in the PAINT method is the poll e-mail. So you could ask, “What project should I work on next?” So you’re stuck about what you want to do; maybe you have two or three ideas; ask your list what you should work on next. Or you ask your list, “What’s your biggest bottleneck with this niche? What’s your biggest bottleneck with kite flying?” And maybe people have an issue with just getting it off the ground, and then you want to write a report about getting it off the ground. “What did you think of this product? What did you think of my product about how to make a kite?”
Action e-mails. “Did you have a chance to download this yet?” So if I was watching this video and I just wanted the easiest possible e-mail to write, it’d be the action e-mail. And all you have to do is if you have a list where you capture buyers after they buy your product, just set up a follow-up after three days and say, “Hey, did you have a chance to download this yet? You paid for it; you should use it. Here’s the download URL one more time.” And that will cut down on people e-mailing you later on who have lost the download URL because they have one more copy of it.
Or after seven days you can say, “You had seven days to check out this product. Can you give me a quick review? Can you send me a quick testimonial so I can add you to my sales letter?”
Or you can say, “Did you apply the knowledge from my previous e-mail yet? So yesterday I gave you two easy tips about how to record videos more easily, so did you record a test video to see if those things worked?”
You could send an idea e-mail, so you can say, “I just have this one idea about how to construct kites in a certain way using this other kind of material. What do you think about it?” or “This guy has a way to create very light metal kites and he does it already but I think he’s wrong because I don’t think a metal kite will ever fly and here’s my reasons why,” or “Should I do this thing or shouldn’t I? Should I create this report about how to make a kite out of cardboard?”
You could have news. “So I’ve got this product coming out soon about how to create giant kites; how to create 20-foot long kites with $5 worth of material which takes you under 30 minutes to make, so be ready for it.” You can send a couple of e-mails like that and the next e-mail you could say, “It’s crazy to think that you can make a 20-foot long kite in 30 minutes, but it’s possible and here’s one way to do it.” And you just share like one little tip and you say, “By the way, if you want more of these tips I’ve got a product coming out at the end of this week about how to do this from start to finish so be ready for it,“ or ”This guy is launching this product about how to make little tiny baby kites, and here’s why you should buy it; because it’s easy to use, and it’s actually something you can give to a member of your family who’s not a kite expert. I tried it and I really liked it,“ or “Here’s what I’m going to be sending you tomorrow. I’m going to be sending you five quick tips on how to make your kites fly in the air longer, so get ready for it,” or “I just made this blog post about a couple of cool designs you can add to your kite so check it out here. Here’s the URL.”
And then finally you can send tip e-mails. “So here’s something you can do today in 60 seconds. You can try cutting this one slit in your kite in the dorsal fin.” I don’t know even know what a dorsal fin is but it sound impressive, right? You can just say, “You can make this one incision, this one slit in your kite, and it will make it fly ten feet higher. You can do that today in 60 seconds,” or “Here’s a quick tactic that I learned from John Doe who’s an expert on kite flying from this URL, from johndoefliesreallycoolkites.com. And he says that if you get off to a running start before you lift up your kite you can get it to fly faster,“ or “Here’s a hint of what you get when you buy my home study course. You learn how to make kites from start to finish, how to make kites for other people, how to fly them better, how to troubleshoot if they don’t fly correctly, and so on. So here’s a couple of things you can check if your kite doesn’t fly. First maybe you cut it wrong, or maybe the triangle pattern is wrong, and you can really easily check that. So if my kite doesn’t fly I first check those two things and 9 times out of 10 that fixes it. So that’s just a hint of what you get when you buy my kite creating home study course.”
And those are all of the PAINT e-mails. You can either send a poll, ask your list something; have an action, tell your list to do something; share with your list an idea; share with your list some recent news item; or give them a tip. I rarely send e-mails live; I almost always schedule a ton in advance. I’ll sit down and write four or five.
How to write a lot of forum posts. You can only schedule new threads, threads you create; because obviously you can’t go in and predict what people are going to post and write a bunch of replies to those posts in advance.
Writing forum posts is not as worthwhile because forum posts and replies get buried very quickly. So you’ll have a post that’s maybe on the front page, but in a couple of days it might be on the third or fourth page.
So what you can do is have the same mentality that you’re writing an article or a blog post; but remember, keep it very short and that’s how you make new threads. But if you want to reply to a bunch of posts quickly, you have to do it live. And by the way, when I say “do it live” I keep thinking of – I don’t know if you’ve seen the Bill O’Reilly freaking out videos and there’s remixes and he says, “We’ll do it live.” And he gets pissed off, “The teleprompter’s broken. We’ll do it live.”
Anyway, so if you want to do it live and answer forum posts live, you just go to a forum; you look at their first couple pages; you choose five questions to answer; open them in new tabs; and then close the original forum so you can’t click around anymore. And you time yourself three minutes or less to answer them. Open up five tabs and you go to the first tab; open up a countdown timer, set it to three minutes, and then you answer it immediately.
And sometimes you’ll find that you can’t answer a question in three minutes and that means you should just close the tab. So then you just knock out the first tab; click on the next one; set it to three minutes, answer it, and so on. You knock out all five. And the trick to answering a lot of forum posts quickly is you only answer things you know immediately. Don’t answer things that require research.
How do you mass produce videos? The same idea as articles, in small chunks. You plan seven or so and then record seven, and you’re done with that week’s worth of videos forever. I prefer Camtasia PowerPoints instead of talking head videos, because you can easily pause them, and they’re just better for mass production. It’s a lot easier to recover from screwing up in a Camtasia – in a screen capture than it is for a talking head.
Never take a break after just one video; record two or three unless they’re over 30 minutes. But I’ve found that if I record one video, if I just did all that work and then I have to go take a break, then I only get one video recorded. But if I record two videos back-to-back, then it’s only a little bit more work because I’ve already got the momentum. I’m already in the mood of recording videos instead of having to wind down, decompress, and then psych myself back up. I’m already in the mood to record videos, so why not record two or three instead of just one?
The key to producing videos fast is it’s OK to be average. It’s OK if you flubbed a line or had a typo on a PowerPoint slide. If you started over the whole video after making a mistake you wouldn’t be mass producing; you’d be trying to get it perfect and you’d have 20 or 30 takes on a video, and it would take you eight hours to record a 10 minute video. And you don’t want that. It’s OK to screw up.
So definitely mass produce videos because you won’t always be in the mood to start. Pretend you’re presenting live so you don’t have do-overs. So I always just pretend that I’m presenting at a live seminar that costs $5,000 per seat and if I screw it up so what? It’s not the end of the world, and most people won’t even notice.
So here’s how you create lots of content quickly.
You schedule small blocks of content. So you’re recording one week of content first or you’re writing one week of articles first.
If I’m writing blog posts I use the formula, which I didn’t share here but it’s the same idea with the e-mails. You choose which category you’re going to write first and then you write it. So for a blog post you can do a rant on a subject or you can do an affiliate promotion or you can do a tutorial explaining how to do something; or you could do a guest survey, ask what your blog leaders think about something. You could use your user feedback and if somebody had a really good comment in a previous blog post, you could make it into a totally new post; or you could do a monthly summary so you explain what you’ve been doing in the past 30 days.
And then for e-mails use the PAINT formula. So you could poll your list and ask them to think about something; you could give them an action item, so give them something to do. And action items don’t work as well on blogs. They work much better on mailing lists. You can share an idea with them, and ideas don’t work as well on blogs because you don’t want to have it out in the open for people to poach. You can share a news item, which again doesn’t work as well on blogs because on blogs stuff gets out-of-date. And then people come to your site a year later and you’re talking about – say 800 gig hard drives are brand new, and then a year later the 1 terabyte hard drives are brand new, and people are like, “Why are you talking about 800 gig hard drives? That’s so last year.” So that kind of timeliness stuff is better for e-mails. And then you can share with them a quick tip. So you can say, “Here’s something you can understand or here’s something you can do in less time than it actually takes to read this e-mail.”
And then for forum replies just take three minutes to reply to something. If it takes longer than three minutes to reply to something then either you’re making it too complicated or it’s not worth your time to reply.
And record videos as if they’re live; because if they were live you wouldn’t get a second chance, and it’s OK to screw up once or twice because you’re trying to get a lot of content out fast. You’re not trying to make the perfect video. And even if you do, no one’s going to care because there’s so much content out there. There’s so many videos out there. So your best bet is to be average and to record a bunch of average videos and write average articles because over time it’s really going to add up.
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