Ari Meisel

I’ve written before about the importance of content creation to differentiate yourself in your market. It’s hard enough to plan ahead to create content (though we’ve got a process for that too) but when you add in all the possible platforms you could share your content too, the problem gets compounded.

Not only does it take time to operate within the various platforms like email, social media, live streaming video, etc… but you also have to strategize around which platform will perform best for each type of message.

What if you could just do what you do best, create the content, and then create a machine to do the rest?

The beauty of this system is that the “trigger” can be whatever kind of content is most convenient for you. If you like writing, kick it off with a blog post. If you prefer the off-the-cuff, “raw” feeling of a live streaming video, start with a Facebook Live. Still, if you like to sit in a quiet room and record an audio podcast, that works too.

Using a series of tools, automation, and potentially some outsourcing, you’re content can live on in every other medium (even Medium.com) there is for weeks or even months. For this example, I’ll start the process with Facebook Live and walk you through what happens next but remember that this process is completely customizable to your preferences.

Step 1 — Facebook Live

When I record my Facebook Live its usually based on a simple schedule we have in place for Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays based on the week of the month. So for example, the first Wednesday of every month might be a “backstage” post where I talk about some new process we are working on. The third Friday of every month could be a post about a Battle or Small Victory, very rough prompts to get my creative juices flowing. I can set up this content machine to take every single Facebook Live I do as a trigger or I can specify that it only does it when the post includes a specific hashtag, like #contentdominator for example. In addition, you can use a web app called LiveLeap to simultaneously broadcast a Facebook Live to as many Facebook Groups, Pages, and Profiles as you want.

Step 2 — Repurpose.io

The next part of the process is a wonderful tool called Repurpose.io created by fellow techpreneur Hani Mourra. Repurpose creates workflows between several of the most popular content platforms.

Step 3 — Podcast

The first thing we’ll do is create three podcasts. Two of them will be audio podcasts and one will be a video podcast, of the audio podcast…see the recirculation starting to happen? At each step, you have some choices. If you want to take the raw audio and make a podcast, Repurpose can automatically add an intro and an outro that you’ve pre-recorded and then publish it to Libsyn and Soundcloud. Libsyn will get your podcast into iTunes and most podcast players while Soundcloud has more of a community around it that shares and comments on clips. In addition, Repurpose can take the audio, add a waveform image and publish to Youtube. You can add different automated intros and outros for each platform and the argument for putting it on these various platforms is simply wider reach. You could have someone who never listens to podcasts but they have Youtube playing in the background all day while they are at work and conversely you could have that person who never looks at Youtube or Facebook videos but they listen to hours of podcasts while driving in their car. If you want to have a fully produced podcast that goes to an audio engineer and then to a show notes writer, etc… you would simply have the Facebook Live video converted to audio through Repurpose and then shared with a company like Podfly or Fullcast.

Step 4— Blog Post

Now we come back to the written word and again we have some options. If you want to just keep it raw, then you can take the video, have Repurpose strip the audio and save it to a Dropbox folder. Then you create an automation through Zapier to take that file and send it to Temi to be transcribed. At this point, you could take the raw transcript and then publish it to platforms like Medium and Slideshare or you could send it to a service like ContentFly which gives you access to on-demand writers to take your work and create an original, SEO enhanced article to post on Medium.

Step 5 — Social Videos

Now we can take the RSS feed from your new Medium article and feed that into a tool like Lumen5 which will create those catchy social media videos with the impactful images and text overlay. It will use machine learning to pick images and important points to make a video that then guests posted back on any of your social media outlets.

Step 6 — Another podcast

Using a Medium add-on called Play.ht any article that gets posted on your Medium account will be automatically turned into a spoken word podcast which will post on the article itself but also as a standalone podcast.

Step 7 — Social Media

MissingLettr sees the RSS feed from your new Medium articles and extracts salient points, adds images and schedules up to a year of social media posts for Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. Using Zapier you can expand that to other platforms like Instagram and Yammer.

Step 8 — Email Newsletter

Most of the major email platforms like ConvertKit or Mailchimp can create email newsletters to your list based on an RSS feed. You simply set up a template and then when a new article is published on Medium it can email that to your audience as a “weekly digest” to make sure that you cover all possible bases. You can also use ReLike to create a newsletter from the posts on your Facebook Page

Step 9 — The Vortex

Now keep in mind that at any point you can jump in and get more hands-on, either yourself or through outsourcing. If you want a writer to polish up your articles, or a graphic designer to keep images on brand, you just need to plug and play and swap in and out resources where needed. You can continue recirculating the content as well since each iteration will have a somewhat different bend to it. Lastly, you can build in delays to any part of this process to spread out the content, literally giving you months of activity from a few minutes of your time.

How will you use this type of content machine in your marketing efforts?

I believe that content is king when it comes to most businesses these days. Odds are there are six other people in the world who do exactly what you do, or more like six hundred. I know I’m not the only productivity guy around. I know that other people can teach you how to get to Inbox Zero or how to make yourself more replaceable in your business. However, nobody can do it the way that I do it and what makes me unique for the most part is my content. My perspectives and experiences will always add a unique flavor and texture to the particular productivity dish I serve.

So at the end of the day, it’s your content that will differentiate you from all the other “others” out there. The problem most of us have is we rarely take the time to plan our content in advance and we just end up reacting to something we hear or read, or some event of the day. More often than not, most people just throw up their hands, decide they have more important things to focus on and convince themselves that they’ll get to it next time. Sure they will….

Can I show you the easiest way to ever to pre-load content that will automatically post when and where you want it?

I’m going to go step by step so you can build out your own automated content machine. Now before we start you’ll need a Google Docs account, Zapier, and an idea of where you want the content to go. Do you want to post Slack messages to your team? Would you like to share things with a specific Facebook group? Do you use Voxer to do asynchronous voice communication with your team and want it to show up there? Maybe you just want it to show up on your Medium account. Your imagination is the limit.

If you’re wondering why you wouldn’t use one of the off the shelf tools out there like Buffer or Hootsuite it’s because those platforms won’t do things like posting to a Slack team, a Voxer group, a private WordPress blog, etc…so if you like to share your content beyond traditional social media, stay with me.https://upscri.be/6892b4?as_embed=true

Step 1 — Setup the place to load your content

I think Google Sheets is the easiest way to do this and most people are familiar with the way a spreadsheet looks and works. It also works easily on mobile devices. So I created a sheet with three very basic headers:

• Content — The text or links for what you want to share
• Date to Post — When you want to share it
• Image url — the direct link to an image you want to natively post so it shows up nice and big

That’s all it takes, now you can fill in some content items, along with the date and time you want it to post (you can set that column to automatically format as a date/time) and the image URL, if you have one. Maybe you want to post the same kind of thing every Monday and Friday, easy. If you want to use a post and it does really well so you want to post it again in a month or a year, great, go ahead and change the date on it. Stupid easy right?

Step 2 — Create the automation

Next, we have to crank up Zapier and create the automation razzmatazz that makes this all possible. Basically, you are going to create a Zap that looks for that lovely new content, understands the date, and then posts it wherever you want. Three beautiful steps….

Step 2.1 — Trigger the Zap

Tell it which spreadsheet, then which worksheet, and then let ANY COLUMN Trigger the Zap. That way, new content, as well as changing a date will start the automation.

Step 2.2 — Tell it to wait until the date you choose

You’re now going to the Delay by Zapier option to tell the automation to standby until the DATE TO POST, and then continue with the magic.

Step 2.3 — Post the content

Now you just have to decide where it’s going to go, in this example, I’ll make it go to Slack. You can have it go to as many destinations as you want.

And that’s all she wrote, or rather all you wrote

Congratulations you’ve just setup you’re very own preloaded, automated, content machine!

Want to be even cooler?

• You can create a nifty little form through Google Forms or any other form builder and then you can use that to add entries to the spreadsheet so you just get one simple clean interface to work with and never have to interact with the actual spreadsheet
• You can add a column for “Medium” and then you can choose on the fly that you want one post to go to a Facebook group, and the next one goes to Slack, and the one after that goes to Yammer. You’ll have to create a Zap with branching so it can do something different based on the different choices.
• How about you stop creating the content entirely and let a Machine Learning algorithm do it for you? I KNOW RIGHT!!! But I’m serious, that’s something we can do.

I conducted some crazy experiments in my twenties; hacking the most effective strategies for using time efficiently. These methods have grown up, stood the test of time and became the OAO Methodology I use in my company, Less Doing. The process works across every imaginable industry and in all stages of growth, but we don’t just focus on the “growth hacks” or quite honestly any framework for actively seeking growth.

We look for the constraints, the bottlenecks, the hurdles that are stopping good ideas from naturally evolving into successful and prolific organizations.

The challenge with a system that works for lots of different organizations in very different situations is that it makes it exceedingly difficult to identify your customer avatar. I work with consultants, doctors, consumer packaged goods companies, government agencies. When someone asks me who my ideal customer is, I have to quickly try and change the subject because I can’t actually answer them.

So I had a theory, what if I could show a machine learning algorithm a bunch of my current clients and it could create a model based on them to compare against any new potential lead? Would the machine be able to “pick a winner” in a way that I never could?

Spoiler Alert: It can, and it does it with 93% accuracy

Now whenever we get a new person’s email address, whether it’s during one of my speaking engagements or someone simply opt-in to our newsletter (like you can do in the box below…smooth right?)https://upscri.be/6892b4?as_embed=true

The email is enriched with a ton of publicly available data, compared against the model, and if it predicts you’ll be a good fit for one of our program, I get a Slack message like this:

At that point, I can look into their company a little, and then craft a very personal message to open a conversation. There’s nothing underhanded or secretive about this, we are simply cutting through the news for both parties. I don’t have to send general, unhelpful content to everyone, and the person on the other end who could genuinely benefit from working with us doesn’t have to wait forty-five days to navigate an email autoresponder sequence.

Would you like to build one for your business? I can show you, just sign up for my eternal continuity program for 20% of your current salary by clicking HERE

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I’m sorry I couldn’t help myself, I’ll show you the whole thing step-by-step right here, right now:

Step 1 — Get your customer data

You probably have a list of your customers somewhere, people who have actually paid you money for something. It might be in your email system (Convertkit, Mailchimp, etc…) or in your payment process (ACH, Stripe, Recurly, etc…) or maybe you have them written in a ledger in your desk drawer, doesn’t matter to me as long as you have at least ten of them. You want a list that includes as equal of a number as possible of customers and non-customers. You can just grab random ones from your newsletter for the latter group.

Step 2 — Enrich the data

I like a tool called ClearBit which can “enrich” your emails with up to 85 points of publicly available data like location, company name and size, seniority, Twitter bio, LinkedIn company description, etc…you upload your file of emails and it will return one with all the data added to it.

And we end up with a CSV that looks like this:

Step 3 — Teach the Machine

Now go to MonkeyLearn (use coupon code lessdoing for 50% off your first three months), create a new classifier, and upload the csv. It will let you choose which of the data points you want to look it. That part is up to you depending on whats most relevant to what you’re looking for. Location is probably not relevant unless you serve specific markets. Twitter followers might be relevant if you work with influencers. Seniority could be important if you need to deal with decision makers. I chose the most subjective ones I could think of, personal bio, company description, industry code. Then it’s just a matter of telling it which ones are customers and which ones aren’t.

Step 4 — Build the automation

Now that we built the classifier it’s time to do something with it. So we’re going to create a Zap using Zapier that takes any new signup to our newsletter, enriches the data with Clearbit, shows it to MonkeyLearn to tag it as a customer or not, and then if it is a customer, we need to be notified somehow.

For the classification text, you’ll have to choose whichever data points you decided to build the model based on. So at the point the image above finishes, Clearbit has pulled in all the info on the persons email but you need to tell MonkeyLearn just to look at the relevant data points.

I chose to get notified with a Slack message but you could make it and email, a text message, a Trello card, whatever works best for you.

Step 5 — Transfer Feelings

Extra Credit:

• Create an additional set of automations to continue to improve the model by comparing the models prediction against what actually ended up happening
• Automate the outreach to the person identified as a good prospect