According to the CDC, every 40 seconds an American will have a heart attack. The biggest culprit behind all these heart attacks is blockage of the arteries by cholesterol. LDL, known as “bad cholesterol,” collects in the walls of your blood vessels and raises your chance of heart failure. It's no wonder people are scared senseless of cholesterol.
Did you know all cholesterol isn't bad? HDL is known as the “good cholesterol.” In addition to helping your body get rid of the bad stuff, HDL is also key to a properly functioning brain. HDL helps with mood regulation, learning, and memory. In essence, having the right amount of HDL could raise your IQ.
Just like cholesterol, there are good and bad types of content. Too much of the bad type and your business will have major problems. If we want a healthy content strategy we need to raise our content IQ.
Today we'll discuss how to use The (HDL) Method to raise your content IQ
(H) Harvest Ideas
(D) Deploy Content
(L) Listen for feedback
Harvest: The reason ideas fail
One of the first lessons we teach copywriters joining our team is to stop thinking. Since they're new, they almost always want to prove themselves. They think their job is to come up with awesome new ideas that'll knock our socks off. The problem with their new ideas is, they're usually terrible. These terrible ideas fail to make a connection with their readers.
This is a hard pill for our junior writers to swallow. But the truth is, people like their own ideas most. That's why we teach our writers to pull ideas straight from our clients, rather than thinking up their own. It's exactly the same when planning our content. Check out this example.
What a great idea
When Doberman Dan and I started working together on his second podcast he was looking for a new name. His first show was called “The Doberman Dan Show For Renegade Entrepreneurs.” After interviewing him and going through his website I proposed the name, “Doberman Dan's Off The Chain Show.”
He immediately fell in love with the name, so we used it. He gave me credit for coming up with an awesome name. The truth is, I didn't come up with this idea. I took it from some copy he had written. It was his idea. All I did was harvest the idea from him and he thought I was brilliant.
Before moving on, a quick warning.
Ideas are a worthless without execution
Some people believe that ideas alone are valuable. They're wrong. If Steve Jobs simply came up with the idea for the iPhone and did nothing with it, we'd still be triple tapping text messages to one another on our Nokias. An idea only becomes valuable once it is used to create something.
When we're harvesting ideas from our audience, we can't just sit on them and hope they hatch. It's our job to take the idea and turn it into a valuable piece of content.
Now that we know the best place to harvest ideas, let's look at the second step to raising our content IQ.
Deploy: Put your new ideas into the world
Once we have a solid idea for content, we have test it out. We want our audience to get their hands on it to see if it resonates with them. The quickest way I've found to get my newly harvested ideas into the world is using stories on IG or Facebook. In less than two minutes you can share a new idea with your audience.
One of the biggest mistakes I see content creators make is going “all in” with an idea before testing it. By using a quick story to share the idea we can find out if people are actually interested in it. Once we know they're interested, we can move on the the final step of raising our content IQ.
Listen: The quicker we share ideas the sooner we'll know if they're good
Once we've shared our new ideas using stories we can figure out if our idea is worth pursuing. If no one engages with the idea we can rework it and try again. If our audience likes the idea, we can build onto it.
- Here's a content flow I like to use:
- Get an idea from client or audience
- Record a short story on IG or Facebook and share
- If people don't engage, rework and try again. If people engage move to step 4
- Take the idea and create a short outline
- Write an article or record a podcast based on your outline
- Share again
- If people don't engage, rework and try again. If people engage move to step 8
- Now the topic is proven, add to your website and autoresponder
Each time we deploy our content and listen for feedback it raises our content IQ. This method makes our audience feel like we're so smart because we're answering their questions before they ask them.
We covered a lot here, so let's do a quick recap before we finish up.
Our content is like our brain
Much like our brain needs HDL to improve memory and learning. Our content needs HDL to improve our ideas and connection with our audience. To raise our content IQ we need only follow these 3 steps:
(H) Harvest ideas from our audience
(D) Deploy content to get feedback
(L) Listen to the feedback and improve our content
Today we discussed The (HDL) Method for content creation
This concept is powered by our clients. When we listen to our clients and create content for them, they love us. For some more ideas on how to make your clients love you, checkout this short audio training – Make Your Clients Love You 4eva https://thepodcastfactory.com/dwp021/
And when you're ready to add a high IQ podcast to your marketing mix, we should talk. In a short 30 minute call I can show you how to implement this system into your business using our proven framework. Book your call at https://thepodcastfactory.com/start/
