Lessons
Class Introduction
06:31 2Why You Need to be a Content Creator
08:50 3Discover What Content Your Audience Craves
05:30 4Uncovering Your Voice
09:42 5How to Never Run Out of Content Ideas
21:07 6Using Screenwriting Techniques to Create Content
09:38 7Create a Thriving Content-Creation Process
05:53 8How to Write Sizzling Headlines
05:21Lesson Info
Uncovering Your Voice
So let's talk about uncovering your voice. So, I like to always have all of my clients create what I call a content persona. This is a nice swirl of things. It is about your personality, it is about your professional skills of course, that goes without saying, and then your passions and guilty pleasures, some of those are interchangeable, not everyone will set them up, but the cool thing is that no one's gonna have this combination as you. So no one in the world is gonna have the same professional skills, personality, passions and guilty pleasures. Absolutely not. So if you aim from this, this is who I am as a whole person and I'm gonna show up this way in my whole content, then you have no competition. Bye competition, so we don't even have to have that talk. Alright so here's just a couple of simple examples. So let's say that you're a jewelry designer, and you love vintage things, especially the roaring 20's, so you might use 1920's slang. Remember slang is okay in your content. So ...
you may use things like, bees knees, or cats pajamas, or dolled up, right and that would make it really really fun because you're obsessed with this era. That's a passion of yours, perhaps even a guilty pleasure. You watch movies from that era, you read novels from that era, and then, you don't actually have any of that in your work, but it's a fun way to kind of bring all of that together. It's gonna make work and content so much more fun for you. They could also give advice maybe on working vintage into modern style, so given that this person is a jewelry designer, a great piece of content, or multiple pieces of content they might wanna share, is around styling, you wanna tell people how they can use your product in their world. So she can educate people on here's how to incorporate my jewelry even if her jewelry's not vintage roaring 20s. She can still talk about here's some cool vintage things, that you can work in or how you can wear things in a vintage way or style yourself in a vintage way. And then incorporate her jewelry in that. So you wanna hit them from all different points. Now here's another one, so this is basically me. A marketing consultant who loves romance novels, might use terms like goosebump-inducing, feverish, and wildest dreams, and might teach marketing concepts based around titillating romance novel techniques. So basically this is me, like I said. I love using romance novel words are great for all of us. I don't care if your business is not sexy, I don't even care if you like romance novels or not. All of you need to pick up a couple of romance novels or at least read the book jackets of them. No one is a better content creator than romance novels. Just read the back. First of all, you'll laugh hysterically, so it's fun. But second of all, you'll start to understand how they weave the copy, it's great. So I want everyone to do that as an exercise and homework. Also there are all these cool really cheap books on Kindle that are for romance writers, and it's just a bunch of word swaps basically, one of them is called the SexThaurus I think it is, I use that book more than any other book I've ever bought in my life for business. Because it's not about writing sex scenes for your business I mean unless that's what you do, but it is about using these kinds of words. These words are exciting, they're way more exciting than saying, I felt good, things were great. There's nothing exciting about that. I dreamt about it, wildest dreams is way more fun. So you wanna have these exciting, vivid words. I know that's silly, and I imagine that most of the room today are not huge romance novel fans, so I'm not saying you have to become one, but just using the terms and kind of understanding how they weave the narrative, is really fun for content. And even just swapping a few words like that. Okay, here's another one, an accountant who doubles as a tennis enthusiast, might look for ways to use tennis terms in their content. They might use the words ace, or smash or spin. They might write a playbook for clients explaining complicated tax issues. So I actually had a client do this before. So if that's your passion, you have a sport in your life, or some other passion, is there a way that you can use this? Tennis has nothing to do with accounting. That's wildly different. But look how much more fun that's gonna be for that person. Who's passionate about tennis, but does numbers for a living and how they can use some really fun language, that are tennis terms or things that might be in tennis magazine or these on the US Open, and then also thinking about, how am I gonna educate my clients on all these crazy tax issues that are happening right now, or happening in the future, and every client wants to know that, how to better manage their money and what they can do better, how they can invest more. So they can use those and just put them in terms of what would be the playbook for a tennis player, a playbook for football players, or whatever it is, right. And that could be a fun way to spin everything, so that it's easier for your clients to understand when they don't understand complex accounting terminology. And super fun for you to create. Alright, so, now we're gonna talk about creating the business Thesaurus which stems off of what we just talked about. It's really about conjuring up those exciting words for your business that come from your passions, your interests, your guilty pleasures. Just like the tennis person did, just like I do with romance novels, and all of you will do too, cause I'm gonna check. Just kidding. Alright, so, first thin you wanna do is collect words that describe your brand. What are some words that you can think of off the top of your head that describe your brand? That's a good place to start. You can also jot down phrases that describe the spirit of your business. And FYI, if either of these feel tough to you, like I'm not sure what my brand, what would describe it, I have no idea, just think about what your brand is. What does it evoke? If it's a luxury brand, then you may wanna look at other non-competing luxury brands. If you're a travel, you book luxury travel vacations for people, then you would look at other luxury brands outside of the travel industry. Jewelry, cars, and see how they're phrasing things. That can help inspire you as to how you wanna write about this. Are you about speed and mobility? Do you get things done fast for your clients? Is that what they come to you for? Cause your quick on your feet. So then you would look at other brands that are all about that, speed and agility, or how National Geographic would describe a panther in the wild or something. So you can just start to think about, where is this cropping up elsewhere that I can take some inspiration. This is an ongoing document by the way, you'll never stop creating content, so you will never stop adding to your business thesaurus. Just use this start here, and then you will be adding to it. At first it might have three words, cause you're like I don't know, I did my thesaurus, this is all I could come up with. Fine, then you add to it. So don't feel pressured that you need to create and 80 page thesaurus right off the bat. Also rummaging through your best writing. All our hidden gold is often in our past content. If you're starting completely from scratch and have never written a piece of content in your life, then obviously you're not gonna do this tip. But most of us have some pieces of content we've created in the past, and we know which ones are our favorite. And you can also see which ones are your clients favorites because you can look at statistics. Or it doesn't even have to be statistic based. Sometimes you write something, maybe you write a newsletter, and then you get emails back. So it's not that it was necessarily this massive open write, it's that you noticed that all these people were writing to you and saying wow, that made a difference in my day. Or thank you for saying that I don't feel as alone. And so, always put a little check mark, or keep it in a journal, I don't care, however you wanna organize that, but just jot down what is your best writing, and then you can always revisit that, and pull out words and phrases and figure out what connected in that. And you can add that to your business thesaurus so you're reusing those words and phrases again. And then also what do you overhear your clients saying? So like I said, we're all stalking our clients. In a non-creepy way, and we wanna see, what are you overhearing from them? So not necessarily what are they telling you, but what are they saying when no one's listening or they think no one's listening or it's just a conversation amongst their peers. Let's say in a Facebook group or something where people just kinda talk about our own challenges and then you're like oh yeah that's great. Or you're just listening at a workshop, hanging out at lunch in a coffee shop, listening to crazy neighbors, whatever it is. But you're overhearing things.
Class Materials
Bonus Materials with Purchase
Ratings and Reviews
Lauren Dusing
I'm only on Lesson 7, but I just felt the need to stop and write a review, even though I haven't finished the entire class yet. This class has sooooo much great content. I completely agree with the woman in the live audience that said she was having so many "light bulb" & "a-ha" moments during the class. I've always wanted to create a months worth of content for social media so that my posts had meaning and I didn't have to stress last minute about having to find something to post about, but when I would start to brainstorm ideas etc. I just wasn't excited about what I would come up with and it felt like such a struggle, I would eventually have to stop because my ideas were minimal and the process was so unenjoyable, like painful haha. But after 7 lessons in this course I feel so excited about generating content and my mind is filled with so many ideas already. I actually feel like creating a months worth of content ideas is not only totally doable, but could actually be enjoyable and by using what i've learned in this class, I feel like the content I create will actually be effective and I'll be proud and excited to post it. This course is totally worth it, hands down. buy it!
Chris Louis
Extremely helpful and practical tips on how to get the ball rolling on creating meaningful content! Highly recommend this easy and user friendly class
Toluwase Olawoyin
Right from the first lesson, I was already addicted to listening to Melissa. OMG!!! This woman is so good. This is absolutely the best content-writing creation course I've taken. The training is concise and straightforward, and the video recording is high-quality. You can rest assured you'll get value for your money. This course will blow your mind. I'm ready to make some magic for any company that comes my way, and of course, you are welcome to read my review!!!