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In this episode of the GradBlogger podcast, we start the series on content machines. We discuss what a content creation machine is and why this way of thinking is helpful for your business. We also talk about the starting point for many people- random topic blogging- and how it performs compared to other content machines available.
Disclosure: Some of the links in the podcast show notes and transcripts are affiliate links (indicated with [Affiliate] in front). If you choose to make a purchase through these links, GradBlogger will earn a commission from that purchase at no extra cost to you.
Introduction
Chris Cloney: 00:01
Welcome to Episode #8 of GradBlogger, where we help academics change the world through online business. I’m your host, Dr. Chris Cloney. Today we’re talking about content machines. This is the first in a series of episodes we’ll do on different content machines. This one will cover their background, and we’ll also talk about random topic blogging as an example, which is probably where all these started. That’s where I started with my blog as well.
What is a content machine?
Chris Cloney: 00:35
What the heck is a content machine? You’re probably asking that right out of the gate. For me, I used to call them content creation modules, or CCMs. I shorten that to CM, or content machine. I think I got the idea from a post by Niklas Goeke that I read in 2017. It was called How to Publish Like a Huge Content Creation Team When It’s Only Just You.
Chris Cloney: 00:58
This is the time when I started building my blog. I was doing what I’m calling in this podcast episode ‘random topic’ blogging. I was getting burnt out and tired. I couldn’t figure out how to keep the content creation going.
When I read this post, it got me thinking. “Okay, how do I build a content machine or how do I look like a content creation team with my blog?” And that’s how I discovered templated blogs and began doing different things like database reporting, which we covered in previous podcast episodes and we’ll cover in future ones as well.
Chris Cloney: 01:30
How do you make it easier to create content to put out into the world? And not just any old content, but good high-value content that’s going to:
- Bring people back
- Make you an authority in your space
- Help grow your business.
That’s what this series will cover. In this episode, we’ll talk about:
- What a content machine is and why you need one.
- Two families of metrics, one of which is for creating content.
When we go through this whole series, each one will cover a different type of content machine. (In this episode, its random topic blogging.) We’ll rank them on content creation and different parts of content creation, such as:
- How easy they are to create
- How easy they are to get out into the world
- What value they create
We’ll talk about that in this podcast episode. Stick around to the end because we’ll give a report card on this random topic blogging.
What is a podcast series?
Chris Cloney: 2:30
Before we get into the actual episode today, I want to discuss the question: what is a podcast series?
Some people do them in a way that places the series in a particular order. I like to think of it as multi-threading: every once in a while you’ll see an episode appear from the content machine series. You may also see other series too. It’s like watching Game of Thrones: one moment you’re watching one storyline, then all of a sudden the next storyline is John Snow at Castle Black.
That’s what this podcast will do as well. We don’t want to bore you with the same topic over and over, but content creation, shipping content, and content machines are all important when you want to establish yourself as an authority.
Chris Cloney: 03:10
We’ll keep coming back to that, and we may interview people who have used content machines that I haven’t. There may be some unique ones, so we’ll cover those as well. If you visit the show notes for this episode, which will be Gradblogger.com/8, you’ll see links to all the future episodes on content machines. That’s how the series will work. It’ll be multi-threaded, Game of Thrones style, and you can easily find other episode numbers dedicated to different content machines.
What is a content machine?
Chris Cloney: 03:52
As I mentioned, in this episode we’re talking about what a content machine is and giving some background. Then we’re going to talk about random topic blogging and create a report card for this type of approach.
The goal I want for you, your business, and your blog is to become the number one resource in the world for your topic. I want you to become the biggest authority on your topic so you can build on your personal brand and create a business from it. That business could be selling products, it could be consulting, it could be anything. It could even be a research company like my DustSafetyScience company or DustEx Research company. There are lots of different ways to go, but a big part of this endeavour is building a personal brand, and to do that, you need to create content.
I want to share a story that illustrates why building this content machine is important. It centers around the post that Nicholas Galecki post I mentioned. The post, which was on AppSumo, was called How to Publish Like a Huge Content Creation Team When It’s Only Just You.
Chris Cloney: 05:04
When I started, it was 2017 and I was nervous about putting my voice out into the world of dust explosion research, which was my Ph.D. research area. I was so nervous that I stuck ‘my’ in front of the website domain. So it was MyDustExplosionResearch.com solely because I was worried that people would think that I either was the authority or presumed to be the authority. I was afraid of the whole ‘imposter syndrome.’
Chris Cloney: 05:21
After a year or so of blogging, writing, and using some of these content machines, I became the authority. Today, I have people from all over the world writing me weekly, if not daily, talking about how much they’re learning from the material and podcasts that we run in DustSafetyScience and how much they appreciate the research that we are doing. Then I felt silly about putting this “my” in the domain but when I started, I was doing random topic blogging, so I just made a list of topics and wrote about them.
Chris Cloney: 05:52
It turns out that I’m not that great of a writer, but that’s another story. That’s why I have a podcast now. I still do some writing and blogging but after a month or two of random topic blogging, I found that it was pretty hard for me and I experienced burnout. Then I started doing templated paper review posts based on the Nicholas Goechi posts I mentioned previously. I did 40 blog posts in 56 days with this process, so it was great.
Chris Cloney: 06:25
This was an example of a different content machine. Using a templated process, I took the same approach for every post: I reviewed the paper, put the notes on the back and included that. You have seen where I talk about that in some of our early podcast episodes, especially Episode #1, Content Creation Strategies for Your Research Blog and Episode #2, Three Steps to Build a Community Around Your Blog.
I also wrote a post called How to Write 40 Academic Blog Posts in 56 Days. This was my first real leap into a different content machine, and it helped. I had 40 posts over 56 days, but I still burned out again later. This suggests that once you put these machines in place, you’ll need to revisit them later to decide whether they still work for you.
Chris Cloney: 07:07
In April 2018, we established the Combustible Dust Incident Database, which features blogs about every fire and explosion incident in the industries handling combustible powders and dust. We have a huge content machine there: I think we did over 400 posts last year alone.
It’s always good to take a step back, reevaluate the whole content machine and say, “Hey, is there some process we can change here to be more efficient, to be more effective, to verify more of what we are doing, to put more value into the world?”
These are the points I wanted to lead with the story.
- You need a content machine to have a repeatable content generation process; otherwise, you will eventually burn out.
- Even if you have a content machine or several content machines, as I do with GradBlogger and Dust Safety Science, you’re probably still going to suffer burnout if you’re doing a lot of the work yourself.
- This means that you need to reevaluate those every once in a while and restructure the process. You can drop a content machine for a while or you can start one back up after a while as well.
Chris Cloney: 08:08
The reason why I call them content creation modules, or CCMs, is that they can plug into each other. A newsletter can be a content creation machine. When I share a link to my newsletter on LinkedIn, it’s a piece of content that people can click, access the newsletter, and then discover the website. That’s a content machine itself, and my other content machines feed into that. These content creation modules, CCMs, are just content machines that feed into each other.
Chris Cloney: 08:37
That was probably a lot of information, and I don’t want to confuse you on what we need for just this episode. I want to say: Don’t worry about where you are at today if you’re only doing single posts, if you’re just doing this random topic blogging, that’s great. If you have a podcast or are doing more advanced things like we are doing at GradBlogger, that’s great as well. That’s why I’m doing this series: so you can see the progression.
We will start with some of the simpler processes and may bring people on to talk about other types of content machines that they’ve created. Then we will get into more complicated things. We will talk about how I create this blog post, along with its transcripts, upgrades, and cheat sheets, and then stack everything for use on social media. We also create blurbs. It’s a very complicated process, but you don’t need to start with those advanced strategies. We’ll talk about those in later podcast episodes.
Why do you need a content machine?
Chris Cloney: 09:06
I want to talk about why you need a content machine. The big thing about building authority in your space and creating a personal brand is that you need something to show and share to the world.
You need to create content: that’s step number one. You need to ship and get it out into the world with the goal of driving people back to your website, back to your platform, back to you, back to your personal brand. You can build authority. You can also get them to return or take some action. An action could be helping to change the world or helping to manage your blog. It can be a number of things.
Chris Cloney: 09:54
In previous podcast episodes, I called this AKCC, which stands for awareness and knowledge and then connection and change. The awareness and knowledge are the content distribution and getting people to your website so that they are aware of your topic, your research field, and what you’re doing.
For example, if you are covering vaccinations or some other topic with issues that people aren’t aware of, you’re providing the education that brings them to your blog. Then, once they’re there, the question is: what are the next steps for them? That’s where connection and change come in for the AKCC process.
Chris Cloney: 10:24
The message is clear: you need content. You need something to share with the world and entice people to come back.
How are we going to rank these content machines? We are going to do it on two levels.
The first is distribution. I call it the four S’s of distribution: Ship, Show, Stack, and Share.
You need to create content so you can that you can ship into the world. I talk about this in our first podcast episode on content creation strategies. You need something to post on social media and in your newsletter and then share it with your colleagues. You need to take that content and be able to stack it, or recycle it.
Chris Cloney: 11:04
If you create a number of blog posts, you can combine them and make a ‘super post’ that covers entire scientific concepts, aspects of literature, etc. Then share it: you need to give your community something that they can share. When you post on social media, you want people to retweet it and share with their colleagues and friends. Those are the four metrics on the distribution side that we will use to compare these content machines: ship, show, stack, and share.
Chris Cloney: 11:39
I’ve added a metric that we’ll call the number of mediums. So for random topic blog posting, you only have one medium–it’s written. If you’re doing a podcast, you can have two mediums, and if you have video, then you can do three mediums. You can take the audio and create a transcript. So we’ll use that in our ranking as well.
These are examples of different content machines that we’ll cover in upcoming episodes. In this one, we’re covering random topic blogging, but we’ll also talk about things like spotlight posts, guest posts, podcast recording, micro videos, full YouTube videos, courses, and templated paper reviews.
How to compare content creation?
Chris Cloney: 12:14
The question is: how hard are these to create? We just talked a bit about the distribution of the content, but the other way that we can rank them is by hard it is to create. The metrics that we’ll use for this involve the level of difficulty.
This one is a bit personal. For some people, it’s a lot more difficult to write content then to speak it. I am one of those people. We’ll talk about complexities and the number of moving parts. If you’re writing a blog post, there are a number of moving parts, and if you’re just getting started, it may seem high. But they get quite a bit higher if you’re doing things like video, where you need to have equipment like lighting and proper sound setup. So complexity is one of the metrics.
Another is SEO value: how much value does the content that you are creating have and how easily can search engines read it? How about scalability? How easy is it to scale your content? If you want to create at twice the rate that you were doing before, is it twice the amount of work? Can you outsource some of those steps?
We’ll get into all of that in today’s example, which is random topic blogging. I’m sure that in future podcast episodes, we’ll talk more about how to scale your content creation efforts for your business.
So far in this episode, we talked about the definition of a content machine and the goal here is to create a repeatable process that you can use to generate content. You need to be able to do this to become the biggest authority in your topic, the number one resource in the world for your research field and grow your business.
We talked about why you need a content machine and how we are looking to rank these different approaches. So based on content creation, how hard is it to create the content, how easy is it to distribute, and what value can it give to your listeners?
First Example: Random topic blogging
Chris Cloney: 14:01
I want to close this episode out by talking about the first example of a content machine. In future episodes in this series, we’ll identify the content machine and explore how to use it, why it’s important, and the different steps involved in the distribution of the content created.
In this one, we’ll talk about random topic blogging. So in this case, we’re talking about written blog posts. You’ll just sit down in the morning and start hammering out blog posts. You’ll:
- Start writing from scratch
- Get your social images
- Share them
- Get the post written up
- Upload it in WordPress or wherever you’re using and publish it, so it can be shared
I’m pretty sure that most of you are familiar with the concept of written text blogging. In Episode #1 of the podcast, we talked about some different methods of doing this, such as:
- How-to posts
- Review posts
- Using scientific concepts as your list of topics
For each of the metrics that we use (and we’ll go through them all), we’ll give a ranking of between 1 and 3. Three is good and one is bad. We’ll try to give everything a ranking based on that scale and see how we do.
In terms of the difficulty of creating random topic blog posts- I gave that a 2. It’s a little bit subjective. It’s quite a bit harder for me to write blog posts than it is for other people. I can write good material: I can write a good thesis or a good scientific paper. It just takes me a long time to review it and then edit it.
Chris Cloney: 15:50
I struggle with that process, so writing’s harder for me. Some people writing is a 3, but for me, it’s at least 2 and in all honesty, it might even be a 1, but I’ll leave it at 2 for the purpose of this episode.
For complexity, there are not a lot of moving parts involved in writing a random topic blog post compared to other methods. When you’re just getting started, it seems overwhelming because you have to factor in WordPress, creating social images, SEO, tagging, and metadata. There are some moving parts but nothing physical. You don’t need to use cameras, change mediums, transcribe audio, or use any third-party tools so compared to other types of content machines, it is quite a bit simpler.
Chris Cloney: 16:38
In terms of SEO value, I give random topic blog posts a 3. It might be 3 or 2 depending on how you look at it.
Getting SEO into your blog posts is easy. There may be some complications when choosing the correct SEO, but if you are doing audio, you need to take some extra steps to make the content search engine friendly. Therefore, I gave it a 3 because you don’t have to do any extra stuff: it’s all there in your blog post. If you know what you need to include for images and how to tag your images and that sort of stuff, then you can do everything pretty simply or at least more simply than you could with video and audio.
Chris Cloney: 17:22
In terms of scalability, I give random topic blog posts a 2. It’s probably a bit lower: maybe a one / two in the sense that you can outsource some parts. You can get somebody else to upload the post and publish the post, but then you’re stuck. You need to write the content unless you get someone else to do it, in which case the rating goes back to 2.
The issue is that it’s hard to scale blog posts any further. If you want to do two times as many posts, you need to write twice as much, and because your writing is probably the longest part of that whole process, it’s hard to scale.
Chris Cloney: 18:08
With podcast recording, I record this podcast for about twenty minutes, and then we do a lot of other stuff. It takes hours of work to get it uploaded, but it’s also easier to scale because more stuff can be automated or handled by others. With random topic blogging, the biggest chunk of time is allocated to writing the blog post.
So for metrics, we have difficulty as 2, complexity as 3, SEO value as 3 and scalability as 2. That gives us 10 out of 16. So a 63 on the content creation report card for random topic blogging.
Chris Cloney: 18:46
Regarding distribution, we have our four S’s: ship, show, stack, share and then the number of mediums that the content machine can access. In terms of shipping, I rate random topic blogging a 2 because you are usually at the early stages of your blog if you’re doing written posts. It’s rare to do video and audio and ship that content and then come back and start writing this random topic blog post. So you’re usually at a stage where you’re practicing “the ship muscle”.
Getting un-scared of putting something into the world is a big thing that you’ll need to overcome. I mentioned this in a previous podcast episode. It is the biggest thing that stops most people from moving forward. (Number one is selecting a podcast name. If you want to learn about what you can do so at GradBlogger.com/4.)
Another big difficulty is shipping: pressing the big red or whatever colour the button is in WordPress and putting the thing out into the world. With written material, this is not easy but it’s also not too hard, so I put it in the middle as a 2. You just need to create your tweet or Instagram image or whatever it’s going to be, and then you can share it right there. You don’t need to do any extra steps like you might need to do with video or something like that.
Chris Cloney: 20:14
In terms of stacking content, I put random topic blogging as a one. If you listened to some of the previous podcast episodes, I’ve talked about ways you can stack written blog content. It’s powerful in the sense that you can use it in your newsletter or you can collect three or four posts and cover a full chapter in a textbook. However, if you want to stack four pieces of content and create a new piece, you need to write that new piece. It’s hard for written content to stack together in a way that doesn’t require any extra work for you.
Chris Cloney: 20:49
For sharing, which is social sharing by others in your community, I gave random topic blogging a 2. People like to share written content. It makes them feel that they’re doing something useful. For the number of mediums I gave it a 1 because it’s only the written medium that the blog post appears in.
In terms of content distribution, random topic blogging has an 8 out of 20 for a total of 40%, which is a failing grade compared to maybe some other content machines, such as:
- Guest posts. When you share them, you can message the person who wrote them and they may also share for you.
- Spotlights. You can create a post on (for example) five different individuals from industry X without needing any extra content up front.
There are different written mediums that can be distributed easier than random topic blogging. We’ll cover some of them in future podcast episodes.
Conclusion
Chris Cloney: 22:09
So with that, I’m going to close out the first episode in our content machine series. If you’re listening to this when it comes out, know that we’ll be doing more of them. If you’re listening to this in the future, you can go to the show notes at GradBlogger.com/8 and access links to the other podcast episodes in this content machine series as they come out.
If you liked this episode and you liked the material that we’re putting out with GradBlogger, please share. You can share and tag us on Twitter or Instagram. Let us know you found out about the episode and how you like it and we’ll try our best to reply. If you want to get the transcripts for this episode, we will have these in the show notes at GradBlogger.com/8 and include the report card that we wrote up for random topic blogging.
Chris Cloney: 23:07
With that, I hope you have a great week ahead. I appreciate you listening to GradBlogger, and I’m looking forward to helping you continue to build your business, get started with your blog, or facilitate the change that you’re going to put into the world. I look forward to talking next week on the podcast!
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