Finding Clients as a Freelancer

Re-posting Content

Paul Boag

Paul Boag

Boagworld
Finding Clients as a Freelancer

Check out a free preview of the full Finding Clients as a Freelancer course

The "Re-posting Content" Lesson is part of the full, Finding Clients as a Freelancer course featured in this preview video. Here's what you'd learn in this lesson:

Paul stresses the importance of re-posting the content from the report. Re-posting can include guest blog posts, webinars, and social media posts. Tools like CoSchedule can be used to automate posting on social media.

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Transcript from the "Re-posting Content" Lesson

[00:00:00]
>> We have put an immense amount of work into this so far, right? We have created an email course. We've created a report. We've audited a load of sites. We've made a load of contacts. We've done a lot of work, right? Now, I'm inherently lazy, okay? And I can't remember who said it, but somebody said about the best coders are lazy coders, cuz they reuse their code, right, and they write it in a modular way.

[00:00:33]
Well, I'm exactly the same with content, right? We've put so much effort into all this content. We are gonna now squeeze that content till every drop has come out of it and we've got every piece of value. Because, let's be honest, we're not gonna wanna be recreating this amount of content on a regular basis.

[00:00:53]
So now we've kind of exhausted that initial list of influencers and companies. We've contacted them as much as we can. If they've signed up, great. If they haven't, the moment has passed. But there are many, many more people we want to reach. So now we're gonna start to use some more traditional techniques of content marketing to achieve that.

[00:01:17]
But we're gonna reuse and recycle the content that we've already created to generate that content for content marketing, right? Does that sentence makes sense? So we're gonna use everything that's in the emails and the report, and we are going to turn them into blog posts. We're gonna turn them into webinars.

[00:01:43]
We're gonna turn them into social media updates. We're gonna turn them into guest speaking slots. We're gonna turn them into podcast interviews. We're gonna turn them into anything we can possibly think of. We are gonna dine out on that content for as long as we possibly can just as a frame of reference, right?

[00:02:01]
Brad Frost, you guys probably know Brad Frost, the guy that came up with atomic design and really popularized design systems. Amazing guy, very talented. He dined out on atomic design for years, right? That was what he was hired for. That was what he was known for. Hey, I've done the same thing.

[00:02:23]
Every time I write a book, that's it for four years. That's enough to keep me going, just saying the same thing in slightly different ways in slightly different mediums. So that is exactly what you guys are gonna do now. You're not gonna have to constantly come up with new stuff.

[00:02:36]
We're just gonna take those things, and we're gonna repurpose them. So for example, we're gonna turn our report into posts. So ideally, we wanna take our content, right, that we've created in the report and turn them into guest posts on other people's sites, right? So all those influencers we were reaching out to, all those publications, we're gonna say, hey, we've got this amazing report.

[00:03:02]
It would be wonderful if you promoted it. But if you'd like, I'll quite happily write you a guest post around some of the report's key findings, right? Brilliant, that's superb. So all you need to do, take the content, take one of the topics, or take the report as a whole, whatever you wanna do.

[00:03:22]
Write a guest post. You've done all the hard work already. It will come together really quickly with no effort. However, failing that, if you can't get guest posts, then what we're gonna do is we're gonna research into some keyword phrases using a tool like kwfinder.com. Which allows you to research into different questions, maybe, that people ask.

[00:03:43]
And we'll then create keyword-optimized blog posts designed to rank well on those different keywords, right? So these guest posts based on a report are really easy to create. You decide on a question that you answered in your report, and you use that question as the basis of your content.

[00:04:04]
You write a post with using exactly the same editorial process I already talked about. You remember the write drunk, edit sober approach. And this is the critical bit, and where people often go wrong. You include a clear call to action in the post to signup for the report and email course.

[00:04:28]
I started off by criticizing content marketing, right? And the big problem that I see with most people's content marketing approaches, most agencies and freelancers, is they write a blog post, they shove it on their website. They've written it about whatever popped into their head. Nobody reads it, cuz nobody visits their website.

[00:04:52]
And even those people that do read it, they then go away and go, that was nice, and never think about it again. So instead, what we're doing, is we are creating articles specifically for our target audience. We're trying to get them shown or published on blogs where we know our audience are reading.

[00:05:14]
And we're having a clear call to action at the end of it to try and encourage them to give us their email address so that we can keep in contact with them. And that is the underlying principle. Whatever you do, whether you run a webinar, whether you run a course, whether you do a social media update, whether you write a blog post, whatever you do, it needs to have a clear call to action.

[00:05:40]
Otherwise there's no point of doing it, right? If there's not a value that's coming out of it, I mean, if you're speaking at a conference for free, or going to a local meetup, or doing any of these stuff, and you don't try and capture someone's email, there's very little value in it compared to this.

[00:06:00]
And then, of course, whatever that post is, you're gonna promote it on social media. But you can also turn your report into a webinar. So considering running a webinar based on your report. But I'll wait for that until maybe you've built up a bit of a following on social, or on your mailing list, because obviously, otherwise no one's gonna come to the webinar, right?

[00:06:25]
The thing about a webinar, the reason that it's something worth considering, is because up until this point, we haven't had any face-to-face contact with our potential audience, right? And webinars are a great way of engaging with your audience in a kind of personalized way. So you could have read a course on this.

[00:06:50]
It could have been a written course, right, where you read all of the instructions I've shared with you today. But you wouldn't felt like you got to know me like you have from listening to me, right? You wouldn't have got a sense of my sense of humor, or maybe my pragmatic nature, or my Britishness, or whatever it is.

[00:07:08]
All of those things are the kinds of things that influence your decision of whether to hire someone or not. So a webinar is actually a really good way of beginning to make that kinda connection with people. But then, maybe don't do that on day one, but it's certainly worth considering.

[00:07:25]
If you're gonna do it, it only needs to be about 40 minutes, along with maybe 20 minutes for questions. Cover maybe three of the key findings in the report. That's probably all you need to cover. So again, all the contents written for you. Add the webinar to your landing page where the report is.

[00:07:44]
Once you've done it, you can record it, put it on their landing page. It actually adds credibility to the landing page. And then consider maybe approaching some meetups in your areas or conferences in your areas and saying look, here's a webinar I did online. Would you like me to come and do it for your group?

[00:08:04]
So then you can start getting in front of audiences and talking about some of this stuff. Now you might think that all sounds very scary. And public speaking's not for everybody. And if it really terrifies you, by all means, don't do it. There are other opportunities that are available to you.

[00:08:24]
But I think you'll be surprised how you feel once you've finished the report, because you'll be very confident in the material, right? You'll know exactly what you're talking about. You'll have statistics, and quotes, and all these kinds of things that will make it so much easier to do.

[00:08:41]
So yeah, have a think about that. And then, of course, you need to be promoting your course and your report on social media. But again, even this is so much easier, because you've got all this material to work with. So you can take the material from your report and your email course, pull out snippets, turn them into pictures and put them on Instagram, turn them into text and put them on Twitter.

[00:09:12]
So for example, there's all kinds of things that come straight out of that report that you can just regurgitate and people will love to share. Things like statistics, we've got statistics from the survey. Everybody likes sharing statistics. It makes them look clever. Did you know that people only read an average of 25% of the content on a web page?

[00:09:33]
Well, that's true. Jacob Nielsen did research on this. So now you think how intelligent Paul is. That could just trip off that fact, that figure isn't actually right. I think it's 24%, but anyway. So statistics are a really good thing to share. You've got great quotes from people within the industry, right?

[00:09:55]
Because hopefully you've spoken to a few people by this stage, put that in the report. And now you can quote that on social media. And of course, if people were mentioned on social media, what do they do? They reshare it, they retweet it, so that spreads it further.

[00:10:13]
Then also, you can share little practical actions and advice that help people. So you made little recommendations in the report, so you can rechurn those and put those into social media updates. I would recommend where possible, use some video and audio. You can take bits maybe from the webinar if you did that.

[00:10:35]
Or you can create little audio grams which are tiny little kind of audio snippets. Quotes in the report can be shown as nice images. There's some great tools out there to make them look fancier. Tableau is just one, but there are others. And then of course, critically, whenever you do any of these things, you end with and for more information, see our report, and you link through to the landing page.

[00:11:03]
Also throw in a few relevant hashtags, just for good measure for those people that follow such things, and mention influences where relevant. Now, you might be thinking, okay, I'm Paul, hang on a minute. You said that once we were done with the big heavy lifting at the beginning that I only had to do to one email every two weeks, right?

[00:11:27]
And now you've thrown in social media on top of this. Don't think I haven't noticed, you liar. Well, I'm not actually lying, because my entire social media feed is automated. I don't write my social updates. I mean, obviously I wrote them once the first time, but I don't send them out individually.

[00:11:48]
Instead I use a tool called CoSchedule, which has got two really good features that make life so much easier, and mean that I don't have to keep thinking of social media updates. First is that I can schedule updates through an editorial calendar. So for example, it plugs into WordPress.

[00:12:08]
So every time I release a blog post, I then have said, okay, when this blog post is released, send out this post. A day after it's been released, send out this post. A day after that, send out this post. A week after that, send this one. A month after that, send this one.

[00:12:27]
So I line up a whole load that are associated with any particular post that I put out or announcement. And then the other feature that its got, which is really nice, is it will then fill in the gaps, right? So between those ones that are very small specifically scheduled, I've also got a whole bank of these quotes and statistics, and stuff like that, that I've taken out my reports, and my books, and various things over the years.

[00:12:57]
And I've literally got hundreds of them that have built up over the years. They're in a massive big bank, and basically CoSchedule goes in, picks them out, fills in the gaps, and shoves them out. And it will monitor which ones perform best and put those out more often.

[00:13:12]
And it will ensure that you don't have the same one going out more than x amount of time, and all of these kinds of things you can set up. So it means you can automate your whole social media feed based off of your single report, right? Wow, that's social media done, okay?

[00:13:30]
And obviously, it posts across different platforms as well. So let's recap. We're beginning to build our mailing lists. We're establishing contact. How are we doing that? We're doing that by writing an email course around the report findings. We're gonna create a landing page that sells that report and that email course.

[00:13:51]
We're gonna email our cold email group, the initial audience with our report. We're gonna reach out to our influences. And then we're gonna recycle the heck out of our content in two kinds of different formats to attract a bigger audience over time. And we're gonna automate our social media to avoid it becoming a pain in the neck.

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