How Can I Get Weekly Content from a Monthly Meeting?

This podcast audio served as the source for the blog post “Get Weekly Content from a Monthly Meeting.”

The transcript was rewritten to produce the blog post, which is the cornerstone of the Shortcut Content system.

Shayla: Thanks for joining us today for the Shortcut Content podcast. I’m talking with founder Dave Young. Dave, how can we get weekly content from a monthly meeting?

Dave: So that’s one of the challenges of being a blogger, of being a chief marketing officer is you at least want to have content that goes out regularly and, typically, that’s, hey, let’s publish something new every Tuesday or every Thursday, but at least once a week. And the problem with that is then every Monday, you have this to-do item staring at you that says “write another blog post.” A new week has begun- let’s get something else going. And so if you’re writer, if that’s your natural state, if that’s who you are, then that’s a cool thing, because you’ve always got something to write, but if you’re primary job isn’t that you write, it’s that you are tactical about the things that you’re putting out and your job is to make sure that these things get spread out the right way, and that it’s content from experts and that it’s thought out and well written, or you just don’t have the chops to be the writer for the company, we have a technique that we use, and it’s kind of evil genius in a way.

Once you have a list of topics and you know the things that you want to write, and now you just have this giant task in front of you, right? You’ve got fifty topics that you want to write about. What if you just took four or five of those, enough for one post a week for the next month, and you knocked them all out in one sitting. Now if you are just going to sit down and write them, you’re probably looking at several hours of work, depending on the type of writer you are, it might mean several days of work. I know people that are incredibly picky wordsmiths that spend twenty hours a week on a once a month piece of writing. If that’s you, that’s okay, and that’s what you like to do, then do that. I’m not like that.

So what I like to do is schedule about a one-hour meeting, and get on Skype. We use Zoom sometimes. In this case, I’m recording live in the studio, but we’re also recording in Raleigh, North Carolina where the audio is being recorded and will be transcribed and turned into a blog post. So what happens is I spend about an hour doing this once a month. And what I get from that hour is a weekly blog post, a weekly podcast, a weekly video. And I’ve got all these things that I can now use to spend my time spreading them out and engaging with people on social media, instead of spending my time, head down, at my keyboard writing. And so that’s what I mean. We can actually create weekly content for you with a one-hour, usually less than an hour, recording session over Skype.
Shayla: What is your process, after this hour recording, are you hands-off for the rest of that content? How does that get created?

Dave: For Shortcut Content, yeah, I’m pretty hands-off. That’s kind of your job, isn’t it?

Shayla: Exactly.
Dave: If you think of me as the client, I stand here in front of the camera, in front of the microphone, and I talk about the things that I wanted to talk about, instead of writing about the things that I want to write about. And our staff in the background, takes these videos, the audio recordings, and transcribes them, works their editing magic on them, take out all the bad scenes in the video, take out all the burps and the coughs from the podcast audio and cleans up the transcription and turns it into a well written blog post.
Shayla: And if you don’t have a CMO at your company, or you don’t have a social media manager, are there options where people can even have this content loaded in their sites and scheduled so they don’t even touch it after the interview?

Dave: Yeah, absolutely. We also offer the options of actually taking that content after we’ve produced it and putting it on your WordPress site, uploading it to your YouTube channel. Getting the audio put in in your podcasting hosting system. So that you really don’t have a lot of work to do. And we rarely have an occasion where our day-to-day clients asks us to go back and change something, because the only words that we use are the words that came out of your mouth. So we don’t go back and do additional research. I think one of the only times we ever had to change it is when one of our clients said, “Oh yeah, we’ve got thousands and thousands and thousands.” And we used that phrase, but he was really probably talking about probably dozens or hundreds. So we had to go back and edit that, but that was no big deal. He was just a little bit excited about the numbers, I think.

Shayla: So if you’re listening and you need some content for your website, your social media, whatever the case may be, reach out to Dave and the team. You can find them pretty easily at shortcutcontent.com