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Steve Wershing:
Welcome to Becoming Referrable. The podcast that shows you how to become the kind of advisor people can’t stop talking about.

I’m Steve Wershing. Thought leadership, creating original content is a powerful and crucial idea to differentiating your business and establishing your unique niche. But who has time to create content? For example, if you blog, Google gives priority to longer pieces, and that might mean 1500, 2000 or even more words.

Well, there’s no question that thought leadership takes an investment of time. But what Julie and I talk about in this episode is how you can get more mileage out of it and get more return on that investment of time. We talk about making content creation a little easier by building it one little piece at a time. But more importantly, we talk about breaking apart large pieces to use in multiple ways. Create multiple communications, so that every piece that you create gives you a lot more marketing opportunities.

We talk about where you can discover those ideas. We discuss the concept that not everything that you create has to be necessarily strictly financial. As long as your target market cares about it, and it relates to the service that you provide. We talk about making it a little bit easier by doing what comes naturally to you, whether that be writing or speaking or teaching or whatever way you can get those ideas out of your head.

We cover lots of ideas that we hope will help you get a lot more mileage out of the investment you make in creating content and how you can enjoy the benefits of the additional clients and referrals it can attract.

And so here now is my conversation with Julie about getting more mileage out of your marketing by breaking it apart.

So, Julie, recently I had a conversation with an advisor. And working through that conversation, I thought that you and I might chat a little bit about this, because I think a lot of other of our listeners would benefit from the ideas that we discussed there. And it’s all about repurposing content.

Julie Littlechild:
Yeah. Great. I’m so glad you brought this topic up because it’s so practical and sometimes we can talk about big concepts, but I’d love to dig into that idea.

Steve Wershing:
And one of the things that intimidates a lot of advisors, we talk about how content can differentiate you. But then advisors get really intimidated, reasonably enough, because creating content can be a lot of work.

And so the one advisor I was speaking to was faced with that, they have some very specific thoughts about their target clients and what kinds of things can get them ahead. And so I was describing all the different ways that they could promote content that they created out there. And the adviser stopped me in the middle of that and said, “Steve, when are we going to find the time to create all this stuff? I mean, you know, it could be an awful lot.” And I’m glad that he did that because it got me thinking about how you can efficiently utilize the content that you create so that you can get a lot more mileage out of it.

Julie Littlechild:
Yeah. Well, it’s so true. And we deal with this in our businesses too. We generate a lot of content. So I completely appreciate what this guy was going through. So when you were talking to him, just for context, what were some of the types of content that you were looking at?

Steve Wershing:
Well, he does a weekly radio interview. And then, so he has to prepare topics for that. And then I was recommending some kind of a resource that he could offer on his website. And I was also talking with him about just creating content that we might use some way or another as a way of establishing thought leadership. Because when he talks with the public, when he talks with clients, when he talks with centers of influence, he tends to talk about what he does, which is what a lot of advisors do. And he doesn’t really talk about the target client that much. And I thought if we got him thinking about creating some thought leadership pieces, then he would be in a position to talk about those kinds of solutions with clients and centers of influence. And that would be a better way to get referrals than just talking about the actual activities he does for clients.

Julie Littlechild:
Right. So content, for perspective, in this case can be anything that you’re producing. I mean, it can be webinars, it can be workshops, it can be articles, blog posts, podcasts. I mean, pretty much anything in terms of … And were there, and I want to go down this path of repurposing, but I’m also interested, do you find that there are certain types of content that are just natural for certain advisers to use as a starting point? As an initial way to filter out the ones that don’t make sense?

Steve Wershing:
Well, I think probably the easiest and most effective route to take in answering that question is to think about what you’re naturally good at and what you’re most comfortable with. So if you like to write, then a blog might be a sensible way of doing it. If you give a lot of presentations and you like public speaking, then either podcasts or videos would make more sense. So I would start there. I would start with whatever you naturally would do, because that’s going to cause you the least amount of trepidation to get into in the first place.

Julie Littlechild:
Right. Right. That makes sense. So what did you recommend to this advisor then that you were chatting with?

Steve Wershing:
Well, so there are two strategies that I was thinking that you and I could talk about today. One is to use lots of little pieces to build something larger. And then the other one is to take something large that you make and break it into smaller pieces to use it a number of different ways.

So with this adviser, he has a regular radio interview that he does on a weekly basis. And so he has to prepare content for that. And what I suggested to him was, rather than create a new idea each time, this is another secret to be able to continue generating content, is rather than coming up with something new every time. Think about a sequence of things that you could do, or a series of titles that relate to each other, so that you can create little pieces of that. And you can get ideas for creating several of those things as opposed to a new idea each time, which can be really draining and difficult.

Julie Littlechild:
So you would mean, if the topic was, well, in our world, it might be referrals for example, or for an advisor it might be helping your children become financially independent or whatever the topic is, you mean just sort of writing down all of the various questions that you could answer maybe as a starting point. And rather than trying to tackle it as a tome that you’ve written on the subject, really look at breaking that down into the sub-areas?

Steve Wershing:
Right. Or maybe even think about some time off in the future creating that tome. Which legitimately strikes terror into the hearts of people who don’t do a lot of that. But start with an outline. So if you were going to write a book for parents on making your kids financially independent, or if you were going to write a book for small business owners, or if you were going to write a guidebook, the financial planning guide for your target market, what would you put in the outline?

And ideally it would be stressing not the topics that everybody needs to know, because that’s not content that will set you apart, but specifically the issues that are customized, the issues that are unique to that kind of population. And one of the secrets may be to go beyond just the financial kinds of things into areas that are not strictly speaking financial.

So for example, if you were writing a book to help women become more financially independent, or have more confidence about it, then you might write articles or you might have thoughts in there about confidence as opposed to strictly the financial issues. How to build confidence, what kinds of things can you do to build confidence? What kinds of things can you do to acquire knowledge of your own? How should you prioritize what kind of knowledge you take on? So those are things that are not strictly speaking financial, but they are things that your target client might care about.

Julie Littlechild:
Right. Well, here’s my little secret for you. I wrote my book initially as a series of blog posts. And then I filled in the gaps. So I think that’s what you’re talking about.

Steve Wershing:            
Exactly.

Julie Littlechild:
And eventually there was a book. But there’s a hefty dose of blog posts that formed that.

Steve Wershing:
Yeah, exactly. And that’s how I wrote my last book too. It was all, I just-

Julie Littlechild:
There you go, it’s as easy as that people.

Steve Wershing:
That’s right. There it is. So thanks for joining us today. I joke that I wrote the book a blog post at a time. And actually, so a lot of people ask, “So how long did it take to write that book?” Because writing a book takes a year, year and a half, two years. And I said, “Well, from the time I got the contract, it took me four months or three and a half, four months.” Which widens people’s eyes. And I said, “But I had a year and a half of content to start with.” So thinking about that as sort of a unified idea began a year and a half before that. And I chose blog titles that would contribute, just like you did, chose blog titles that would contribute to that whole.

So before we leave it, just to build on that last point about going outside the strictly financial stuff. An example that I used to use a lot was Caroline Wilson. Who is an advisor in the Southwest of the US. And her market is divorcees, is people going through divorce. And so if you look at her website, I haven’t looked at it lately, but when I was looking at it at the time, you can find all kinds of resources on that website. And they’re things like, what to expect when you show up in court. And how to stay in touch with your kids, if you’re the non-custodial parent. Well, those aren’t financial issues, but they are issues that her target market cares desperately about.

Julie Littlechild:
Okay. So if you were going to go down this path then, could you sort of, I’m thinking visually, start with your target market at the center, maybe a hub and spoke, write down all of those issues and questions and things that they deal with. And then what? I mean, I could see taking that and then … And maybe let’s not even call it a blog post. Because even that can feel overwhelming. But maybe it’s just answering questions. So, if you were asked this question. But writing it down. It could be two or three paragraphs, as a way to start, that goes on your website. But all of a sudden, you’re starting, like you said at the beginning, you’re starting to create something that could be bigger as you go through.

Steve Wershing:
Right. And I like the way that you described that. Sounds to me like a mind map. And that can be a great way to do it. So you have the target client in the center of that mind map, and the first set of balloons that are connected to that are the main ideas that they need, the big issues that they have to deal with, or the special circumstances that they need to work themselves through.

And then from each of those, you could have maybe a number of messages that might relate to each of those. And you take it out another level or two, and each of those could be an individual concept that, like you said, you could just write a paragraph or two about. And work from there.

Julie Littlechild:
Right. So let’s imagine we’ve got some listeners who go through this process, they’ve got their target, they’ve got their issues, they’ve started to collect a series of responses. Which again, might be emailed out to people who have a question, they might be on their website, they could be links from social media, different ways to do that, or even blog posts. So let’s think about some of the ways they could bring that together then for that next level. Because you talked about sort of building into something bigger.

Steve Wershing:
Yeah. Yeah. So from each of those ideas, if you’ve written a paragraph or two about it, you might look at those and say, which of these would it be easiest to write a little bit more about? Because really a blog post, I don’t remember, Julie, how long yours tend to be, I aim for a thousand words-

Julie Littlechild:
Yeah, about the same.

Steve Wershing:
But a lot of the blogs I see are 500 words. So somewhere in between those. Well, 500 to a thousand words is three or four good paragraphs.

Julie Littlechild:
Yeah. So, now your next step is just taking some of those and creating the more fulsome article or the blog post. Combining them maybe.

Steve Wershing:
Right. Right. Yeah. Or going back to the idea we were talking about before, whatever is the most comfortable for you to do. One other thing that you and I went through when we took our speaker training with Michael Port is you can sit down and write, or you can pick up an audio recorder, I was going to say a tape recorder, because I’m from that generation. You can speak into a recorder. So some people find it a lot easier just to talk about a topic for a few minutes. And so you could sit down at the typewriter … Listen to me. You can sit down at the word processor and write.

Julie Littlechild:
I’m sorry, did you just age while we were speaking?

Steve Wershing:
What is that? Oh, I must’ve been reading Archeology Today.

Julie Littlechild:
Okay, gramps. Get up from your typewriter.

Steve Wershing:
Exactly. You can either sit at the computer and write, or you can pick up your recorder and walk around and speak.

Julie Littlechild:
Yeah. And in fact, I remember learning about one particular app at that training and it was Otter. I don’t know if you ever used it. But I found it to be a really simple app that you could use. Where you could just talk into it, it would record, you’d have snippets. It could email it to you. It’s a really great tool.

Steve Wershing:
Yeah. And I use Nuance Dragon. It used to be Dragonsoft, it’s called something different now. But it’s the Nuance Communications dictation or voice to text. And I use that constantly on my computer all day long. And so if you get the second level up version of that, you can get one that you can just download files from your audio recorder into, and it will turn it into text. We also make heavy use of a website called rev.com, R-E-V.com. When we do client advisory boards, we take the audio files. And so these are hour and a half long things, and we upload those to Rev. And then two days later we get a transcription of it.

Julie Littlechild:
Yeah, well, we do that with this podcast as well.

Steve Wershing:
We do, actually that’s true.

Julie Littlechild:
So there you go. Okay. So, now we’ve got a simple way, maybe simpler for many people, to create that content. Now we’ve gone from a series of answers to perhaps a series of blog posts. And then, are we ready for the book there? Or I wonder if there’s some interim steps that we could think about?

Steve Wershing:
Sure. Well, there are shorter things that you can do with that. So if you stitch a few blog posts together, you can edit those together and make a white paper from it. If you take a few more, you could make an ebook out of it. I figure that the typical, at least it used to be, the typical business book was about 40,000 words. 200 pages. So if you put together a few blog posts and you can put together 5,000 or 10,000 words, that’s an ebook. And so that’s a resource now that you can post on your website, you can promote it on a landing page. You could have a whole campaign around that.

Julie Littlechild:
Yeah. But so much easier to do this than thinking of more content to develop. And I think that as we’re talking, we’re also pushing more toward reinforcing credibility. The more we go from a response to a blog to a white paper, now we’ve got something that could feed into PR campaigns, that could be used in a lot of different ways.

Steve Wershing:
Right. And we’ve talked about it on this podcast, you always want to have new stuff going out. And sometimes it’s purchased and sometimes it’s curated and sometimes it’s original. And you need to have at least a portion of that be original, so that you can legitimately claim some thought leadership over the area that you’re talking about.

Julie Littlechild:
Yeah. Yeah, for sure. So, I think if someone has that in their mind, that they’d really like to get to that point, this provides a bit of a path. But I think it’s actually more valuable content because you’re building on a body of knowledge over time instead of being too scattered. But what about the other way, because we also talked about this idea that you could take things that you do and break it down into smaller chunks.

Steve Wershing:
Right. So sometimes we are called upon to do bigger projects and bigger things. And so there are lots of advisors who give presentations in front of groups, or they conduct workshops, or they teach classes or any of those kinds of things. So there are times when advisors have created a single large work.

Well, you can take that work and you can break it down and use little pieces from it to promote content. So if you do a talk or if you’ve given a presentation, that might be 30 minutes or 60 minutes long, but you could take individual pieces of that and tweet them, or pull a small section and make a blog post out of it.

You can even take a single concept from that and make a meme out of it. Put it in sort of graphic letters and then post that on its own on social media. Take a key concept, so anybody who’s given good presentations probably has a couple of hooks that they put in there. I like to say things like a niche is a need. Or own a piece of the client’s brain. Those kinds of things that sort of lend … Anything that’s borderline slogan is something you can make a meme from.

Julie Littlechild:
Yeah. Yeah. See, I love that idea, and it also just feels very structured to me. So, we’ve got a presentation. We could do that. And even, I mean, if the concept of some of these things feels a bit out there for you, if you’re still learning some of the technology, you could just identify the top three points and put it on a PowerPoint slide. And all of a sudden it’s something that you could tweet out as well. I mean, if we want to go low tech.

But you did remind me, as you were talking about sound bites, to record your presentations. I mean, these are the things we don’t think about doing at the time. Again, lots of apps out there where you can just turn your phone on. Or if it’s a bigger event, they often have a more professional recording. But be sure you grab that. And hire somebody to break it down. I mean, you can get editors who are very good who can do this for you. You don’t need to become an editor overnight.

Steve Wershing:
Right. Right. You can. I mean, if you’re going to do this on an ongoing basis, I think it’s a good idea, just like we do on this podcast, to get a relationship with somebody that you work with regularly. But if you don’t have that yet, you can go to places like Upwork and Fiverr. And if you’ve gone through an audio file or a video file and say, “Listen, I just need from this many minutes and seconds to that many minutes and seconds.” And they can cut it out, they can put a front and back on it for you. And you can post that.

One other thing we didn’t mention is if you are more comfortable speaking than writing, I know a lot of advisors who do a quick video blog, where they just … they’ll record three minutes to five minutes as often as once a week. And it doesn’t have to be fancy.

You need to have some quality to it. You need to have okay … You need to have pretty good lighting. You should get a good microphone. So it comes through clearly. If you’re not going to post it … If you’re going to post it to YouTube, make sure that closed captioning is turned on. Because a lot of people watch these in bed and don’t want to wake up their spouse. If you’re not going to post it there, have somebody closed caption it for you.

But you can simply, if you have three or four bullet points and you know that you can riff on those points for a few minutes, don’t hesitate to sit down in front of your iPhone or in front of a video camera and just talk about it for a few minutes. And that can be either transcribed or you can take little pieces of that and post it to social media or you can just post it to your website. And create content that way.

Julie Littlechild:
I wrote a blog on the sort of traps of perfectionism with these things a long time ago. Because I found I was getting caught up in not putting any video out because it wasn’t perfect. And then I realized that wasn’t the point. It was just a conversation. And it was probably more effective to do it without that level of perfection.

So thankfully for me. Okay. So yeah, I mean, if you’re presenting, if you can do these little videos. And that’s where I think things like rev.com come into play. Because having that whole presentation transcribed can be … it’s so easy to then pull out little quotes and such from that. So I think those are the little details that if you just know these little tips and tricks makes it so much easier to do.

Steve Wershing:
Yeah. And one thing I’ll add to that. We talked early on about talking with your clients about things and talking with centers of influence about things. Original content doesn’t necessarily all have to actually come out of you. You need to put it together. So one thing that you may find is you may ask clients and centers of influence, what are the biggest questions you would like me to answer? What are the biggest questions you have about this issue?

And then go out and interview people about it. So, if it’s a tax question, you might interview an accountant. If it’s an estate question, you may interview an attorney about it. And that does all kinds of things for you. First it helps you create that content. So it’s not you creating all this stuff all the time.

But the other thing is that it helps enhance that relationship with the person that you’re interviewing. And then when you post it on your website or on social media, you let them know, and they will promote it to their network as well. So, that message gets further out.

Julie Littlechild:
Yeah, I mean, that’s the magic. When you look at people with significant audiences, you’ll almost always see that particular strategy at play. And it’s a meaningful one.

So imagine on a website or wherever you’d gone and interviewed somebody on some particularly complex tax issue. Now you could have a page where at the top you’re explaining why. The kinds of clients you work with and why these questions are important. You can put a video or audio of the interview. And then you might drop in a couple of links to articles that you’ve read below that. All of a sudden, you’ve got a really good package of material. And you haven’t written a word of it. And that’s valuable to people I think.

Steve Wershing:
Yeah. And I think it enhances credibility. I can’t tell you, when I go to research something, I can’t tell you how many articles and blog posts and sources that I read where there’s no footnote and there’s no citation. There’s no quote in the text. And what you learn pretty quickly is, this is just what this person thinks. So going out and finding sources that you can then cite also makes you more credible.

Julie Littlechild:
Yeah. Yeah. So, as much as content seems to be this big complex thing, so if we go back to the advisor that you were chatting with, could you then see a clear path where he or she, I don’t know what you said there, but was able to progress and do that in a more reasonable way?

Steve Wershing:
Yeah. And so what we did was we determined, we took a look at the profile of the target client, and we determined to create a guide for people of that description to overcome the obstacles that they had. And what we did was, we spent about an hour on the phone brainstorming an outline. So if we were going to do the definitive guide for this kind of client, what would be the chapters and what would be the ideas in each chapter?

And so each of those ideas within a chapter becomes an interview that becomes a blog post that becomes a series of social media posts. And then becomes one little piece of what will ultimately be a larger guide. And at first it may be an article and then it may be an ebook and ultimately maybe it will be a book.

Julie Littlechild:
Right. Right. I love that idea. And I think it calls out for just a checklist or something that you always have in place to make sure you’re reusing. So if I write a blog post, for example, I’m back doing it, I have to say, I’ve not for a while.

Steve Wershing:
Oh good.

Julie Littlechild:
So I’m very excited to be doing that again. Because I took a break. And again, you must go through this as well. So I’ve put the effort into writing it. So now the question is, where’s it going to be posted? How am I going to do that? Am I going to schedule something because I finished it in the middle of the night, but I don’t want to tweet it out at that moment?

Steve Wershing:
Probably wisely. Nothing good happens after 1:00 AM.

Julie Littlechild:
Just saying. And so just really thinking through, am I going to email that to clients? Am I going to email it to centers of influence? Just having that checklist, then somebody else can probably manage a lot of that as well.

Steve Wershing:
Right. Yeah. Yeah. And I do that same thing. So I’ll write a blog post and then I turn it over to somebody else. And somebody else gets an illustration and writes the summary and creates the tweets and posts it to the blog. And all of that stuff is handled by somebody else. I just write it and then I move on.

Julie Littlechild:
Yep. And depending on how deep you want to go, you can learn these things. I mean, I did. I don’t need to find images, but I could tell you exactly where I’d get them. And how much it costs, Adobe and all of those things, to get images.

So what do you think about this as kind of a next step, if you wanted to go down this path, because I like this idea that you started there with of the book. What if you took an hour of time, or someone listening, took an hour of time to think about the key topic, the key theme that they’d want to write about. Bullet pointed those sections. Just took one of them, and answered a series of questions.

And if all you did was take that. And think about, okay, now what can I do with that? Just the couple of paragraphs. I’m going to send it on social media. I’m going to send it to some key clients. I’m going to share it with some centers of influence. And this is something technically you could do within an hour or 90 minutes and have already accomplished, I think, a fair bit.

Steve Wershing:
I think that’s a great idea. I think that’s terrific. My wife would refer to that as hive mind.

Julie Littlechild:
Do tell.

Steve Wershing:
Put something out there. Okay, hive mind, here’s my challenge, what do you think? And so you would put out that question and say, “How do you overcome that? How do you address this? What are some of the best ideas you’ve heard about this?” And then collect those ideas. And add your own expertise to it, and you’re off and running.

Julie Littlechild:
Yeah. So start small. Don’t let it drive you crazy thinking about the big, perfect goal. It’s just one step at a time, just like everything else. And I think this is the fun part of it frankly. This is about helping people and answering questions. So I think it’s a natural fit. But boy, once you get this down, I think it has legs more than you probably even realize. So yeah.

Steve Wershing:
Oh yeah. And in terms of referrals, I’ve believed for a long time that there is nothing more powerful than an ever expanding library of your expertise attached to your website. And so doing little bits at a time over a long period of time builds a big testament to your expertise.

Julie Littlechild:
Absolutely. Well, great talking about this. I think it was a good tactical discussion.

Steve Wershing:
Yeah. Always great to talk to you. And you and I can encourage everybody out there to do this. Because you and I both know the terror of staring at a blank page on a word processor. So just take those little steps and you’ll be there before you know it.

Julie Littlechild:
Absolutely. Thanks Steve.

Steve Wershing:
Thank you, Julie.

Julie Littlechild:
Hi, it’s Julie again, it was great to have you with us on Becoming Referrable. If you like what you’ve been hearing, please do us a favor and rate us on iTunes. It really does help. You can get all the links, show notes and other tidbits from these episodes at becomingreferrable.com. You can also get our free report, Three Referral Myths That Limit Your Growth and connect with our blogs and other resources. Thanks so much for joining us.