Hi, and welcome to the simple SEO content podcast. I'm your host, Rachel Lindteigen and today we're talking about how to save time. When you're creating content. So if you've been here, you've listened for awhile, you know, that you need to create content to really help your business. Your website or blog be found by Google so that more people can find your content, learn about your business, come to your website, consume it. And really start to get to know you and be nurtured and build that like know and trust factor so that you can grow your business. However some times. Creating content can feel like a real chore or challenge. And I know this, I know that sometimes when I talk about the benefits of search engine optimization and content marketing, and I talk about creating content and, you know, creating blog posts and things like that. You kind of want to just. Check out because in your mind, your thought is, oh my gosh, it takes so much time. And I feel like I spend my life on a content development hamster wheel and I'm making no progress. And if only it. There was a faster, easier way to do it. I get it. My friend. I totally get it. And that's what I want to teach you today is my way of creating content. That is a lot faster and a lot easier. And I continue to refine this process. I've used this process over the last decade. Creating content more than a decade now, creating content for clients. Teaching it to my students using it to create large scale amounts of content. Or weekly content either way, same process works. Great. So let's talk about how do we make content creation, less challenging, easier and faster for you so that you're excited when it's time to create your next piece of content, rather than dreading it. So, what I want you to do is start batching your content. And that's what we're going to talk about in today's lesson is a batching process to make it much easier. And when we batch content, that literally means. We're creating multiple pieces of content at the same time. And we're doing the same step multiple times. So right now I am batching my June podcast episodes. So I'm doing back-to-back recordings. I'm not editing, I'm not fixing anything. I'm not uploading. I'm not doing any of that. I'm just recording them. The last time I worked on this, I did the content planning and I did the keyword research. And I wrote out the outlines and that's what we're going to talk about today because using a process like this makes your life a lot easier. So let's talk about how do we batch content. So there are a number of steps in the process. The first thing that I like to do. Is to start with a brainstorm. I want you to think about what content you're going to create. So if you've been following me for a while, you've taken simple SEO content, you've read stuff on my blog, you know? That I recommend you choose four content pillars or four content topic areas. Each. For your content. Because in general, we've four weeks in a month. There are a few months where we have more than that, but generally speaking, we have four weeks in a month or for whatever day you publish. Okay. So four weeks in a month. Four topic areas means that one post for each topic area each month, this makes it much easier to plan. It helps you to make sure that you're really showcasing your authority on the subjects, but it also helps you to connect with your ideal customer because it's possible you have more than one ideal customer. You may have a main customer, but you probably also have some secondary customers. So my realtors, you have buyers and sellers. Most likely you may also specialize in things like move up homes or property management or investment properties, or Airbnb's. You have different areas, different consumers you want to reach. My sellers, my e-commerce businesses. Most of you have more than one product line. You may have two or three core products or four or six, your going to have different. Customers and those different customers have different needs and they ask different questions. So I want you to start out. If you do not already have four content pillars or four content topic areas. That you cover each month. I want you to start by determining what your four areas are going to be. Then I want you to brainstorm and you can brainstorm any way you want. I always tell my students have fun with it. Turn on your favorite song, use your white board. Grab your post-it. Stand up against the wall. Sit here at your computer and just type away on an Excel spreadsheet or a Google doc. It doesn't matter. Just brainstorm. There's no good ideas. There's no bad ideas. There's no judgment at this point. This is just, Hey, what do I think that my ideal customer might be interested in? If you've already got a business that's up and running and you've got customers and you've got customer data. This is a little bit easier because now. What questions do people ask you? What questions do people ask in groups? What questions do you wish people would ask you? So I want you to brainstorm. And I want you to decide if you're going to batch, I want you to start with what's batch one a month, like one month's worth of content. And then once you get comfortable with that, you can move to two months or even three months in batch a quarter at a time. I love to batch out a quarter at a time because that allows me to not touch my content for. Six to eight weeks, which is amazing to be able to have everything done and ready to go. So that I only deal with content about once every three months. But you are going to want to start smaller. You're going to want to start with a month. So. Take a look at your brainstorm list and save your brainstorm list because you're going to use that. You can reference it again. The next time you start planning your content for next month, you can start there. So take a look at your brainstorm list. Go ahead and put your ideas into the pillars. So where do those ideas fit within your four pillars? From there, you can either do a little bit of keyword research. So go into your keyword research tool and look to see. Is there search volume for a term related to this topic? Is there something that I can find that I can use? Because if, so, this shows that there's a better SEO potential for you. And then I want you to quickly take a look at Google, put in whatever title you're thinking about using whatever keyword you're thinking about using, and just take a look and see who's ranking on page one. Are they sites that are similar to you? Are they really giant sites? Because let's be honest if they're really super giant sites. Then you might want to refine what you're doing a little bit, because you're probably not going to rank and I don't want you to do it and not get results because that's nothing short of incredibly frustrating. Right? So let's not do that. So I want you to take a look and just see. Who's ranking. And how similar are they to your website and really get an idea for, is this a potential where I could. Probably show up and get some traffic for this word. So now you've got a good idea. Your keyword, a good idea of your topic. I want you to do that and choose four topics and four keywords and you can be done for today. That's your first step. You've done your brainstorm. You've identified your keywords. You've identified your topics. You've done the prep work and that's great. So give yourself a little pat on the back. Take a breather. The next time you come in, I want you to write your content. So I want you to write four blog posts. If you can do these all four in one session. Awesome. If you can't that's okay. Break it into two sessions or four sessions, whatever you need. Work on your content, right? It don't worry about editing yet. My friend, just write your content, just tell the story. And I want you to focus in this step. Focus on your ideal customer. Provide value to them. Don't worry about the search engine. Don't worry about editing. Don't worry about anything else. Just focus on telling your ideal customer what they need to know about this topic. Provide value, give them insights, share anecdotes, really show. How you can help them because this is going to help you connect with your ideal customer. Your content is going to help to build that. Trust factor and turn them hopefully from a visitor to a buyer. But it's also going to help Google learn to trust your website or blog more because Google is going to be able to tell the difference, especially in today's world. Post chat, GPT launch. Google's going to be able to tell if you wrote this content or if chat, GPT wrote the content and if chat GPT wrote the content, they're not going to rank you as high because it's not as good. As a person. You need to be involved in this process. You need to write the content. Add your anecdotes, add in the stories, the examples, all the things that showcase. You and how you are an expert, how you are part of the solution, your product is a solution, your services, a solution, whatever it is, stay focused on your ideal customer and how you can serve them. And you're going to get better results. Do not under any circumstances. Right. With a keyword density score in mind, you may see blog posts out there about the ideal keyword density score is one to 3%. It's bull. Okay. It's people who don't follow the rules because Google has specifically said. There is no keyword density score. We don't want you to write to a keyword density score. We want you to provide content that is helpful to your ideal customer. So don't worry about how many times you use your keyword at this step. Because you're going to naturally use it because your content is about your keyword. So just because on your ideal customer, Create content that's super helpful. Google's latest algorithm update is literally called the helpful content algorithm. That is what they want you to create content that is helpful, that provides value, that answers questions, and anticipates them and shows how you can help your ideal customer. So just focus on them. At this point. You can be done once you've written your four posts or you've written, if you. You're still taking time. It's a little harder for you to write. Maybe you've set aside 30 minutes or an hour, whatever it is. As you get used to doing this more, it will get faster generally. So at the end of your session, save your files, put them in a folder, make it easy for yourself. And then the next time you come in, if you've written all your posts, you're ready to go on to editing. If you've not finished your posts, then you want to have a second session. For writing so that you can finish up the next set of posts. Now for editing. You can edit it yourself. Absolutely. A hundred percent. I'm going to be really honest. I use Grammarly. Grammarly is fantastic. You can plug it into your, like, you. You pay for it? I have the paid version you pay for it. It's I don't know, a hundred, 150 bucks a year. It's not super expensive. It has a plugin. It shows up in every screen. It's on my blog. It's on my word. It's on everything. Grammarly will correct your grammar for you and it'll make it easier. I just use Grammarly for my editing. I'm an excellent writer. I'm not an excellent editor. And I went to journalism school and more than 20 years ago. Dr. Bill told me. Girl, you are really good writer. Editing is not your strength. Stop worrying about it. There's always going to be an editor to work with. There's going to be somebody who's better at that than you. So don't worry about it today. It's Grammarly. And I'm happy to. Use it and pay for it. So don't worry about it. I always, I always forget to add. Enough commas or I put them where I don't need them. And it's just, it might nine times out of 10. My mistake has something to do with a comma. So I don't even worry about it anymore. Just use Grammarly and you're set. So make it easy on yourself. You literally, it takes a few minutes. You go through, you accept the changes and you're like, yeah, that looks cool. Let's go. At this point, you've got your content. It's written, it's edited now you're ready to optimize it. So now you're going to go back to the key word that you chose originally. And you're going to write a title. You're going to make sure your keyword is in your title. It should be already because your post is about that. That keyword. So you shouldn't have to make any edits there. Then you're going to look and see. Is it in my head or tax. Did you use header tags? Do you even know what header tags are? Header tags are the big pieces, like the big bold words. That kind of break up the sections on your blog post. So if you look at the blog post that goes with this podcast episode on my website, Or almost any blog post on my website, you're going to see big text. Um, if it's a newer blog post it's bright pink. If it's an older blog post, it's probably in the blue because my branding changed and I'm working on updating everything. But if there's big, bright pink text and it's like, Giant font compared to regular. That's a header tag. Your H two tag. So H two. Is like your subject. So if you have three. Points, let's say your post is three tips. Tip one, two, and three are going to be an H two tags, because those are your subheads. If you are breaking down 0.1 and you have like two or three bullet points under 0.1, you're going to use an H two tag for each of those separate smaller bullet points or separate smaller subjects. You're going to use an H three for those smaller ones and H two for the bigger ones. Your overall page topic is an H one tag. In many of your website builders, the page name is automatically going to be the H one tags. So you generally don't have to change that it's usually done for you. The reason this matters is these are some of the elements that Google is going to look at to understand what your page is about. So Google is going to check your header tags, H one, two and three, to understand. So each time Google sees a key word in one of those tags. It's just like another check. Oh, Hey, this page is about X. Okay. I see that this keyword has been used six times. This is what this page is about. It's the same as it goes through at read your copy. It also looks at the URL. So if you're setting a URL like for a blog post, go ahead and use your keyword in your URL. Save it in your image file name rather than uploading like image, you know, you got a picture you took on your camp on your phone. Right. And it's image 6, 7, 8, 9. Don't upload it that way. Just go ahead and edit it. So edit the file name and optimize it and use your key word. So if your keyword is. Let's say sparkle phone case. We'll just make it easy. Sparkle dash phone dash case sparkle phone case, the dash that you want to use. This the one that looks the little one, the one that looks like the minus sign, rather than the underscore, because Google reads the minus sign as a space. So we'd understands that these are words that are independent of each other, but they go together. So sparkle phone case, there you go. Not probably a good keyword to use because I'm not going to rank for that term, but it's an easy example to show you. So now you've optimized. Then. You need to create your image. So make sure you're using that optimization. Like we just talked about, if you don't have pictures that you're using and you're creating an image like in canvas or something, Go ahead and update that image file name. Add the alt text when you're adding in your image. That's it. Like just go through the process. Step-by-step so do brainstorm, choose four topics. Then do keyword research for those four posts at once. Then write four posts, then edit four posts, then optimize for posts. Then create images for four posts. If you need to create images, then upload four posts to your blog or your website, whatever CMS you're using, whatever I'm website builder. Go ahead and upload. Go ahead. Put them in there, format them, add your photos, add your opt-ins. You want to build your email list? Make sure you've got an opt in on these pages. These blog posts that are designed to drive people to your website. We got to make sure we capture their email address if they're interested. So add your. Your opt-in. And then schedule them to go live once a week. And now you don't have to worry about creating content for a couple of weeks because you've done your blog posts or you've created, you can use the same process. To batch out your podcast episodes or your videos for YouTube or whatever you want. The steps you can go beyond there is to then create your social media content. Use your initial blog post that you wrote. Use those as your guide and create social media for right now, what's working right now with social media. Um, videos on YouTube shorts. Um, shorts for YouTube. Pinterest Instagram. Facebook, you know, little quick, quick tidbit shorts. Um, on Instagram, carousels are working really well with a little more information, like adding your points, but create your social content. And then also go ahead and create your email. So go ahead and go into your email service provider and craft your email that goes with this blog post. And now your cross-channel content is done. You've batched it for the month and you've probably done it realistically. In a day or a day and a half, and now you can breathe. And you can plan out your social media content. You can repurpose. Each blog post into multiple pieces of social media content. And it's up to you, how frequently you want to post. I've been posting like to instant Facebook, five times a week. I'm actually reducing that and going to three a week with more focus on the optimization as a test, just to see how it works. So I'll let you know what I find out. I'm making that transition. Just, I just barely started that transition in June. So. We're going to see how it works. I'll let you know. Um, but that gives me a chance. I'm going to do a reel. I'm going to do a carousel and I'm going to do a static image posts. That way I can really test the three that are working the best on Instagram. Then on YouTube, I do one a week and it's generally the edited video version of the podcast. The rest of it. I just repurpose. I should be better about Pinterest, but I'll be honest. It's not been a priority recently. At some point I'll probably get better about pinning again. But for right now, my main channels are my blog. YouTube and Instagram. All right. If you have any questions about how to do this, What to do, how to make it work for you. Um, how to organize it. I actually share some insights into how I organize the content in my batching process in the blog post that goes along with this, I'll make sure that I have that post in the notes for you. If you're ready to learn more, you want to really dig into this. I teach exactly how to do this in more detail inside of simple SEO content. Make sure you listen for the next time that it's open for enrollment. And join me in class and I'll make your life a whole lot easier and I'll help you get a lot more traffic to your website and blog. All right. If you have any questions, you know how to find me at etched marketing academy on Instagram. Thanks for being here. I'll see you next week.