I’m going to come back to this later and add an article explaining the points I made in this video. I’ll do this for all the people who don’t have time to watch videos. 🙂 My fellow skimmers will understand. UPDATE: Okay, I’m back! Scroll for the dirty details!
So you wanted to know how to create tons of profit-producing content by riffing on ONE Facebook comment. Here’s the short of it. Let’s say you’re an expert, and you have a Facebook business page OR you share tips on your personal page or whatever you have going on. Suppose your specialty is gardening.
Here’s how to turn ONE Facebook comment into profit-producing content to use in ALL your selling platforms online.
So, someone pops up on your FB page and asks you a question, let’s say it’s about how to prevent blight on your tomato plants– because you are a gardening expert in this made-up scenario. (If that doesn’t work for you, fill in your actual profession and expertise.)
So they ask you a question – and you’re in the mood to write. So you tap out a nice, detailed answer as an FB reply to their comment. Keeping with the tomato theme, you tell the person to trim away dead leaves, keep the soil acidic, prune the lower branches so that nothing touches the ground, and avoid watering at night.
This simple piece of advice that you gave a friend off the top of your head can become content marketing profit for you. Here’s how. Start thinking of EVERY bit of advice that you offer to other people as another bit of content to squirrel away. Your content IS money, so treat it as such.
Sock Away the Content Like You Would if It Were Money… Because It Is.
You know where to keep written content on your device, you store it in Word docs or on Google docs if you’re mobile. Of course. So, next time you have nothing going on, head back to that FB post, snap up that content by doing a control-A to highlight-all, and a Control-C to copy all. (If you’re a mac person, I think you can just hold your finger on the post to highlight all). Start a new document and then hit control-V which pastes. Or you can use your mouse, it doesn’t matter to me.
Name your document. Something about tomato blight. If you have organized folders on your computer or remote storage, even better. Put the file inside of the Gardening Tips folder if you have one. Or whatever you have.
Later on, this ONE piece of content becomes FOUR potential money makers, and here’s how. Open up the document where you pasted the tips. Take a look at it and expand on each thought. You can do it.
Example: Keep the soil acidic. Well, how do you do that? You add coffee grounds and eggshells. Now you’ve expanded on your tip a bit.
Do this for all of the tips you included. Hit return after each “tip” or step, to spread it out like it would appear in an actual article.
Tack on a title and intro. “Banish Blight So You Can Enjoy Juicy Homegrown Tomatoes All Summer”. Make up something snazzy. Write the lead-in.
“Wondering if there’s a way to stop tomato blight from destroying your precious crop this summer? Banishing blight is easier than you might think . For a list of suggestions from our seasoned gardening experts, read on.”
It doesn’t have be complicated, this is web content and you should be as direct as possible. Add a conclusion if you want (you don’t even have to). Put in a promotional message at the very end.
Let’s say you sell tomato cages on your website, or you offer garden bed delivery services. Write a closing sentence or two about that and add your link which goes to the product that you’re trying to sell.
Every product you sell must live on a web page, right? So link to that page. Boom! Done.
Add a heading for each tip or step that you wrote. That’s another way to stretch the content. We’re expanding and condensing information as needed. This is what we do.
Okay, so now you have TWO pieces of content. One was the FB post. Now, in addition to that, you have a little mini article all ready to go.
Where do you put it? On your website. It’s part of your plan to feed the search engines with your knowledge and dominate your niche.
Turn Your FB Comment into a Web Article
Log into your website platform. If you’ve got a blog-based site that you can manage on your own, this is easy. WordPress, Wix, Square Space and SixApart are all blog-based programs that give the “layman” full control of his or her business or niche website.
It’s just like writing an email or social media post, adding a picture and a link and then hitting publish. I can show you more about this if you want to know.
What you’ll do next is create a new post OR page. Most likely it will be a post. Title the post. Pick up the title that you used in your Word or Google doc.
That’s what the search engines will munch on when they come by, so they can index you. (This is why it’s so important to publish frequently, and stay focused on your niche.)
Add an image to your new post about the tomato blight. Grab a tomato pic from a free stock image site like Pexels.com. Or if you’re a tomato picture-taker, upload one of yours from your computer.
Make sure it’s a small file. Should be about 500 pixels or less. If it’s a big file your site will take forever to load. No one sticks around for that. So get a small, web-friendly file size.
Fix up your links. Make sure that any links you include, such as to a product page on your site, work correctly and lead to the right place.
If it’s an affiliate link to someone else’s tomato product, look at the HTML code and make sure the link will open in a new window so your reader won’t click off your site and never come back.
Turn Your Web Article into an Email to Send to Your List.
Okay, so we made TWO pieces of content. Let’s try for three. Take the SAME article that you posted on your website. Open up your email marketing program that you use. I recommend Aweber.
A lot of people use Mail Chimp but personally I think their user platform is clunky. If that’s your platform and you like it, no biggie. It works just fine.
So, assuming you’ve been collecting subscribers to your email list via a form that you posted on your website (again, the form comes from your list manager aka Aweber, do NOT use your personal email – it’s just bad all around.) — start a new broadcast that you’ll send specifically to the list of people who signed up for gardening tips.
Are you still with me here? Of course YOUR list will not be gardening fans – this is a hypothetical to try and illustrate the story in a way that you can somewhat relate).
Again, do a Highlight-All (control-A) and Copy (control-C) of the entire article. Put it into an email. Add a brief greeting, but watch out for spam words like “Greetings!”
Just stick with hi or “Dear (name)” and you can fill in the name field so the person’s name actually shows up).”
Tell them about this great free piece of advice you have for them covering avoidance of tomato blight. Leave a space. Paste in the entire article, including the promo that you added at the end. Hit send.
BAM! Another piece of content… so that’s THREE of them that were born from ONE little FB comment that you made.
Also share the intro and link to your website article on your FB Business Page.
OH, but let’s not forget that you want to fill up your Facebook business page, too. Keep funneling new readers in from there to your blog to your sign-up form so you can put them in your list. Future friends! Sooo cool. They want to know what you know. Remember this!
So take the entire article, again, and do a control-A of… let’s say the first two or three paragraphs. Control-V into a new FB post. Also grab the link to the article on your blog.
For that you’ll have to open a new browser window and boogey on over to the EXACT post that you published on your blog about the tomatoes. Not the general URL of your site, but the link to THAT specific post or page.
Paste that link in just after the intro sentences that you had already pasted in. Hit publish on the post. Yeahh! That’s FOUR! You’re like a content producing machine.
Yes, you can also start creating an entire ebook to sell based on this article – the very first in your future series!
Should you go for five pieces of content? Of course you should. You want to sell an ebook or maybe even a real book, don’t you? You can do that in MS Word.
Create a folder for yourself right now that’s labeled Ultimate Gardening Crash Course or whatever you plan to call it. This is where you’ll start your collection of different tips and articles that you share with your readers, just like the one you turned into four pieces of content.
Navigate back to the Word or Google doc on tomatoes. Do a save-as, and store that file in your folder that’s labeled Gardening Crash Course.
You just created Article 1 of your future ebook that you sell. Your ebook will produce residual income for years to come.
For your ebook, you can edit your articles and expand on them later in any way you like. You can add many more articles over time, covering topics like prepping your garden beds, fertilizing, watering, pest control and the list goes on and on.
This is how you create an abundance of useful, niche-specific info which showcases your expertise (in that case, YOUR specialty, whatever it may be.
Making pinewood derby cars that win every time? Quitting smoking? Transforming your post-pregnancy bod?
Whatever your niche is, go all in with it. Don’t make it generic. Generic is boring, and people don’t “see themselves” in your general, “everybody fits in one category” website.
What Tech Do You Need to Sell an Ebook?
How do you sell an ebook? Well, you should have a business PayPal account to start. If you don’t, get one.
You also need a membership to a site like e-junkie or gumroad.com. Not expensive by any means.
Those sites are the conduit that gets your ebook order sent out automatically. It’s all hands off.
Customer places the order, payment goes through, ebook link or download arrives by email once you set up the PDF document of the ebook as a product inside of your e-junkie or other account and do all the steps.
Does this take time? Sure! But once you do your project, you’ll have a bangin’ ebook that you can run sales on and announce to new subscribers to your list, season after season, year after year. Residual income is awesome!
Dina Knows a Lot About Content Marketing
Hire her (meaning me) to assist you in any web-based or print advertising based capacity. Email info@healthyhappynj.com for a quote today.