If you run a non-profit or educational institution, you’re always working to deepen relationships with students and beneficiaries. But it’s important to also consider your constituents, those who might donate, volunteer, or spread the word about what you do.

Using blog posts or podcasts, you can easily tell people the reason you started your non-profit, the impact you’ve had, and the people you’ve helped. You can tell stories that make your constituents feel good about what you do.

Don’t assume people just get it. It’s not often someone will go to your homepage, read a bit about you and…

You hired your employees for a reason – because they’re good at their jobs. Your employees are the people who are out in the field, doing what your company gets paid to do. They may not be developing or researching the product or service, but they are talking to customers and collecting stories.

They can share stories about how your company has changed the lives of your customers for the better. “How-to” blogs definitely serve their purpose, but I think stories are one of the most convincing ways to build your customer base and deepen relationships.

And I’ve…

Proper keyword density is one of those search engine optimization terms that’s been around a long time. If our customers are looking to increase their Google ranking using the tactic, we have a surprisingly simple tip: sticky notes.

Yep. We’re suggesting a little sticky note could help you achieve proper keyword density.

At Shortcut Content, we source all of our customer’s content through interviews. When we conduct those interviews via Skype, we have our customers place a sticky note either right on the monitor or below the video camera. If they are recording a topic about “Proper Keyword…

Who does CNN call when they need a comment on huge news story? An expert in the field.

“But, Dave, why would I want to be the person they call?”  Because it builds your credibility.

There are entire PR firms that specialize in making sure news organizations know that you are the right person to call. We view people who are interviewed on the news, online, or even in a podcast, as experts.

I’ve seen a lot of business owners start up a podcast and soon run out of topics. What they end up doing is turning the microphone (&…

“But, Dave, why would I recycle an old blog post? The information is the same!”

Well, evergreen content may seem timeless to you, but your readers may see a post from 2012 and think the information is “old,” even if it’s still relevant. It’s kind of like shopping for milk at the grocery store. Which one will you grab: the one that expires in a few days or the one that expires in a few weeks?

Blog post dates can make the information in them seem outdated, even if it’s only from a year ago. I recommend repurposing them with…

This tri-fold brochure can be turned into a dozen blog posts.

If you’ve created a brochure or flyer that helps people understand what your company does, you can often take that content and easily repurpose it into one or many blogs posts.

One of my favorite charities here in Tucson is the Sonoran Glass School. And they have a six page, tri-fold brochure that was created to tell us all about what they do. The very first page is titled Make Your Own Glass Art. You can make an ornament, a tumbler, a bowl, a vase, and so…

In a previous blog post, I wrote about FDR’s Fireside Chats. They were the first kind of “podcasting” made available to us. But if you really think about audio communication, before we had the means to record and broadcast it, this type of passing stories from person-to-person has been going on throughout the ages.

Even before the written word, everything we knew as a species was passed down through storytelling – spoken word communication from one person, and generation, to the next.

If you think of a Medieval village, you can easily imagine the town crier; someone who stood on a…

If you’ve ever listened to one of my podcasts, you’ll probably know my answer to that question.

Anyone who has time to sit down and script out a podcast probably has time to write his own blog posts as well. At Shortcut Content, we cut out that step for you.

You can usually tell when a podcast has been scripted from its transcription. We don’t speak in complete thoughts or sentences. So if you see a transcription of a podcast that reads very smoothly, chances are it was scripted. It means that they actually wrote a blog post first and their…

When Franklin Delano Roosevelt needed to communicate to America at large, rather than putting out a speech and letting the newscasters pick it apart, he went on the radio for about thirty minutes and spoke. He did that thirty more times between 1933 and 1944. I affectionately refer to it as “presidential podcasting.”

Of course, it wasn’t referred to as podcasting back then, but that’s essentially all it is. A podcast is basically a radio program without the transmitter and tower. People listen to it by downloading it or streaming it right off of the Internet.

I think it…

Your podcasts are probably a bit more organized than this one.

If you’re already creating and producing audio content, it’s wise to repurpose it in as many places as you can.

Website

This one seems obvious, but a lot of podcasters don’t have a web site, or they consider their podcast as some kind of separate entity. Putting your podcast on your website is the easiest thing you can do and it can be as simple as uploading the audio. You can just plug it in to WordPress so that your audience can hit a play button and easily access it.