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Powerful Ways to Easily Create Valuable Content Downloads

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Written by Luke Summerfield
    Wednesday, 25 July 2012
Powerful Ways to Easily Create Valuable Content Downloads
In the Inbound Marketing world content creation is king. The more high quality content you can produce the better. However, this poses a problem for busy business owners and marketers who don’t have a dedicated staff for content creation. In this blog we will examine a few different ways to very easily create content to offer on your website for download.

Easy Content Creation Method 1 – Record an In-Depth Discussion with an Expert
There are experts and "celebrities" in every industry or niche. Pick out a few individuals you think your target audience would love to hear some discussion from and get in contact with them. Many times these individuals would love to be a part of a discussion as long as they get some good press and link-backs on your website and social networks.

Develop an outline for a 45-minute discussion which covers a number of areas you know would be points of interest for your target audience. A good strategy is to tailor it to answer some of the points of pain that are common in your industry.

Once recorded, it's very easy to convert and upload online for download on your website. This content strategy takes a fairly low amount of development and can really produce some valuable content that your target audience will get excited about.

Easy Content Creation Method 2 – Turn Your Processes into Useful Worksheets
Each and every day you work on daily tasks and processes with your company and/or with your clients. You know the process inside and out and might even have it documented on paper. Any of these valuable processes you preform could easily be converted into very useful worksheets, how-to guides or step-by-step checklists for your target audience to download from your website.

Easy Content Creation Method 3 – Record a Webinar and Transcribe into an Ebook
Choose and interesting and engaging topic for your target audience and develop a webinar outline that you can either stream live or record. In general, webinars can be pretty quick and easy to develop and create. Once you've created a solid powerpoint deck of graphics based on your outline you'll be ready to practice your webinar and prepare to present.

A pre-recorded webinar is much easier to organize on your own time than a live stream. I would suggest if you're new to webinars and online presenting that you record it on your computer and offer the recorded webinar as your content offer. Then once you get more comfortable with the format, you can offer live webinars.

A webinar itself is a great piece of content that you can offer on your website for download. We have been successful in offer a number of webinars to our audience. However, you can also have the webinar transcribed for pretty cheap. Once in written form, organize the content and add additional content, points of interest, worksheets and graphics to help enhance the content. You could also spin the ebook a bit so it's directed at a particular niche. Then release the ebook as additional downloadable content.

Easy Content Creation Method 4 – Start a Google Doc Collab with the Entire Staff
If you are working with a good staff of people, organize them together to help with content creation. Google docs offer a great way to work on real-time collaborative content projects. Start a Google Doc and create an in-depth outline including each section, heading and general bullet points of the content you'd like to have covered. Also include any notes that may help your staff members stay on point with the content they are producing.

Once you have your outline finalized, rally your staff together and get them excited about contributing. Maybe run a team content to see if they can complete it by a certain deadline in exchange for some sort of prize.

Once the document is completed, run through it yourself and edit it for accuracy and to ensure the points you intended are getting across. Then I would suggest sending the document to a professional editor to review and help improve the flow, grammar and transitions.

This can be a very great way to both easily compile a great piece of content, but also get the team working together to create something that will give them a sense of accomplishment.

Easy Content Creation Method 5 – Recap an Expo or Conferences
All industries have some sort of events such as an expo, conferences, workshops or seminars. Depending on the content of these events, there could be a really good opportunity to create some sort of recap report that you can offer on your website.

You could create your recap in either written or video form depending on your skill level in those respective media. For content, explain the exciting things that happened, key things you learned and also include some interviews or speaker notes. Anything that you think would be valuable content that your target audience (who couldn't attend) would love to know about.

This will not only give you a quick and easy content offer, but also boost your credibility because your target audience will know that you are actively visiting industry events to help improve your knowledge base.

Easy Content Creation Method 6 – Create Important Checklists
A checklist can be an extremely easy piece of content to put together that your audience will love. Think of some activity that your target audience performs that may not be crystal clear or that they may struggle at. Then create a step-by-step checklist for them to follow in order to complete this task successfully.

Example: Savvy Panda works in the Joomla content management industry. Recently Joomla released a new version of their CMS and many companies and individuals are trying to upgrade their website to the latest version. Well upgrading can be quite a task and many people are unclear exactly how to properly upgrade. So we created a helpful Joomla 2.5 Upgrade Checklist that we've had a huge success with.

 

As a small business owner or sole marketer it can be extremely hard to devote the time towards creating big, elaborate content on a regular basis. Although it is good to have a few larger and more in-depth content offers, it's equally important to have some quick and easy to consume content offers. The above listed offers are just a few ideas, there are many other ways to pop off some valuable content for your audience.

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Luke Summerfield

Luke Summerfield

Greetings! My name is Luke, Inbound Marketing Specialist here at Savvy Panda. I love helping businesses supercharge their growth via Inbound. When i'm not working, I'm training Jiu Jitsu, Judo and Crossfit.

You can learn more about me on our team page.
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