Content at scale has been at the core of how my business has grown. In this blog post I’m going to show the tools and systems that I use to create lots of content, promote it, edit it and publish it.
Full disclosure, there are lots of affiliate links for each one of these products. However, I only ever give affiliate links for products that I use myself. Also, because they are affiliate links you’ll probably get a good deal, free trial or money off.
Mediocre marketing
Let’s face it, content marketing sounds a lot more appealing before you realise how much work needs to go into it. The concept of writing scripts, blog posts, books or filming videos and then editing them. Or having to find guests or topics for podcasts and then uploading it. It all seems like a massive hassle.
Part of that problem is knowing which tools are gonna make it as effective and efficient as possible, to create content marketing. There are so many options out there, and frankly a lot of them are pretty mediocre. I must have spent thousands of dollars trying, testing and quitting lots of tools before I settled on my particular content marketing tech stack.
There is no holy grail
I think there’s a bit of a misconception that there is a “holy Grail” of content marketing tools? As if there’s going to be a particular streaming platform or editing suite which is perfect and doesn’t have any flaws. One of the tools I use, Camtasia, has certainly come on a long way. But it still has quirks and bugs.
Some video makers wouldn’t be seen dead using something like camtasia. But even the professionals moan about the high-end expensive sweet products such as Final Cut Pro premiere pro.
There is no such a thing as the perfect product. But over the years I have found that this particular tech that works quite well.
Your customers are looking for experts
I owe a lot of the success of my funnel business and Sell Your Service to the scale and potential behind content marketing. When I was just starting out, had zero traffic and no customers, I invested my time heavily into content marketing.
Even if you create content that doesn’t get hundreds of thousands or even thousands of views or visitors, it still could be the difference between a large sale and a missed sale.
Your customers are looking for experts to help them, and experts have content. The faster and easier you can get content out there, the faster you will start to increase your authority.
Which platform?
On top of all that, it’s difficult to know which platform you want to invest heavily in. I’m a huge fan of YouTube but I understand people’s hesitation to create video. I also love my podcast even though I don’t update any more. And as you can tell I’m a huge fan of writing blog content, books and guides.
Perhaps if you understand the tools that are out there to you, you might make a choice on the type of content you want to create more of.
All my content marketing tools that I’d use
I’ve divided this blog post up into the five tools that I use in my different types of content marketing, as well as how important I find them. Full disclosure, these are affiliate links. So I do get a small kickback if you decide to click on them and buy something.
Product promotion
However, it’s also important to know that I never promote a product that I don’t already use myself. I get dozens of requests a week asking to promote people’s products for a fee.
There are already platforms out there that do that. I feel I can’t recommend a product unless I already use it.
My entire content marketing stack
Camtasia
Video marketing. Video editing. YouTube videos.
Camtasia is a video editing platform, screen capture software and mini content marketing suite. Originally it was a screen capture app that allows you to record your monitor as well as a small WebCam feed of yourself. This was back when it was called camtasia 6 or 7. It came with a video editing suite that was pretty basic, but did the job. And I’ve been using it for years.
The thing I absolutely love about camtasia is just how accessible they have made video editing. This is a case of there are absolutely platforms and software out there that do a far superior job. But for my videos on YouTube and even course products, it’s perfect for what I needed to do. It’s not a Tesla, but it’s a perfectly good and solid Nissan. It doesn’t have all the bells and whistles, plug-ins and templates. But frankly, most of those types of additions won’t increase the quality of your content.
As with most things, video is measured in quality of the content at story and script. The editing suite can certainly make things look nicer, but they won’t be at the core of your video marketing success. It has seen transitions to be able to fade between different shots. You can quickly and easily edit video tracks, add music, blur out certain screens and loads of other effects that make your YouTube videos or any kind of video, more engaging.
You absolutely do not have to be a video editor, or videographer to get the most from camtasia. One of the things I absolutely love about it, is the ability to do a screen capture all in the same platform, upload a video and then do a really easy voice-over all from one screen all with the same platform. For a long time camtasia was my podcast editor, webinar editor, video editor, and even my upload tool.
If you’ve ever shot videos even on your smartphone, your WebCam, digital camera-camtasia is the perfect tool to bring them all together quickly, edit them and upload them. Like all tools there is a learning curve, but having used it for 4 to 5 years, I found that the simplest edits and tools within the camtasia suite are the most effective.
Something I’m not too keen on is the audio can sometimes become out of sync. It’s a relatively easy fix, and also only happens on super long videos over two hours in length in my experience. But they are constantly updating it adding new features and making it easier to create and upload videos.
If you’ve ever shot a video and you’re like me and you hate doing one long continuous take, film a load of different cuts for each sentence and throw them all into camtasia and edit them together.
Even better? Each version of Camtasia is a one-time fee. You can install on two machines per user and it’s compatible with both Windows and Mac. There is an annual optional maintenance cost at a severely discounted rate, which upgrades you to the next year’s licence. It’s available for around £240 or $250.
You can even get a 14 day free trial by clicking here.
StreamYard
Steaming. Facebook live. YouTube live. Interviews.
Back before streaming was taken over by racist gamers and sex workers, it was actually quite complex to be able to broadcast live to a group. Arguably, needlessly complicated. When Facebook realised that they had a captive audience middle order sense for them to open up their streaming platform but it still was complicated if you wanted to do anything like a screen share or multiple camera angles.
You used to have to download tools such as OBS. But now it’s become ludicrously simple due to the geniuses at StreamYard. I reviewed StreamYard before, and I think it’s one of the most underrated content marketing platforms out there at the moment. It’s essentially a streaming studio in your browser, with banners, overlays, multiple screens, screen shares and even allows you to download the recordings and videos.
Something which StreamYard does extremely well is broadcasting to multiple platforms at the same time. Again, this used to be so complicated having to root things through as things called “slave cameras”. But now you can broadcast to Facebook, YouTube and other platforms with the click of a button.
Live video has the massive advantage of being a community drawer. A bit like morning TV shows or radio stations, the ability to interact with your audience makes up for the fact that the editing quality might not be as good.
Having said that, StreamYard has created an incredibly professional suite of tools that allows you to essentially create a real-time studio.
During the global lockdown, many businesses including massive media conglomerates and tech giants, realised that they could create entire professional studios using a webcam and some screen share software. You’ve got basically the exact same tools that BBC, CNN and ABC use. And it costs about $20 per month.
How I use StreamYard, is to create a topic, throw it into my Facebook group and onto my YouTube channel and just broadcast. Because StreamYard also allows me to schedule posts, I’ll make sure I drive a little bit of attention and audience to the post before going live. But then I’ll simply use a mixture of my webcam and my screen share to explore a topic and get feedback from people.
Occasionally I turn the WebCam towards my whiteboard and give a live lesson. Or I’ll invite someone on using their WebCam and will have an interview or a conversation talking about another topic.
If you’re looking to get into podcasting or YouTube creation, or create a strong community within a private Facebook group. StreamYard is probably one of the best tools that you could use to make that happen.
Something I wish I could do was perhaps change the layouts of the screen share or cameras. Don’t get me wrong, there are multiple layouts for having multiple screens, but I’d rather have sometimes a full screen with my picture in the corner rather than it separated into columns.
But as I mentioned, for under $300 a year you can get multiple streaming to different destinations, logos, overlays, backgrounds, downloading recordings, comments, life sharing, scheduling and so much more. If I told you 10 years ago that a tool like this existed for less than what you pay with a cup of coffee per month, you’ve told me I was insane.
Media companies have spent millions of dollars over the years trying to create studio suites as slick as this, and you now have got this within your browser.
You can even get $10 in credit using this link here. StreamYard is available for $20 per month, but there’s even a free version. But honestly, if you’re serious about content marketing I would use StreamYard as your hub on the pro level for $20 a month, create the content using that, then download the videos and MP3s and turn that into content later using some of the tools I got coming up.
OptinMonster
Optins. Email list growth. Traffic conversion.
If you have a hundred thousand views a day to your blog, content, podcast or YouTube channel. That would only be worth as much as what each visitor is willing to pay you. I am staggered at the number of businesses who have tens of thousands of visitors to their website a week or a month, who were doing nothing to generate income from those visitors.
Advertising is one route, sure. You could even argue a post like this with affiliate marketing is another great method of monetising traffic. But in my opinion, absolutely nothing will beat growing an email list.
In fact, I place growing an email list as the number one priority for all businesses including funnel builders and marketing agencies. Even if you only have a list of 10 people, that 10 people who have said “I Wanna hear more from you”.
Again, there are lots of different tools similar to OptinMonster. Beaver Builder even has their own versions. Elemental and all the page builders have their own. And there are of course other platforms available. However, for the sheer ease of use, efficiency and process behind capturing Optins I simply haven’t found better than OptinMonster.
There are three ways that I absolutely love to use OptinMonster, which turns anywhere between 50% and 6% of my traffic into leads on autopilot.
First of all, around 6% of my organic traffic across my website converts into a lead because of OptinMonster. I simply place a free guide, report or resource in a pop-up opting which appears around eight seconds after being on the page. You’ve probably already seen it reading this blog post.
Everyone says they hate Optins, everyone says that they hate putting them on their site. People turn their noses up at having them on their site. But a 6% opt in rate is not to be sniffed at. That means that for every 100 people who visit the page, six of them become email subscriber. One I have not paid a cent for
The next way I love to use OptinMonster’s what I call “post content Optins”. What this means is our right a hyper- specific blog post on a certain subject, and then use OptinMonster to offer a lead magnet at the end of that blog post.
This means I treat some of my blog content like longform opting or squeeze pages. Talk about the process, idea or topic. And then suggest at the end “if you’re serious about X, then download our why”. Again some of these convert at anywhere between 10 and 12% on average.
Finally my third favourite way to use OptinMonster is on a good old-fashioned squeeze page. Because of the integrations with WordPress, I can take the same Optins from OptinMonster throw them across multiple squeeze pages and know that integrating with my CRM of choice.
I can split test different types of Optins really easily without changing the URL (which is harder to do than you think without a tool like OptinMonster). And it also means that I can change redirects, content and text across multiple forms without having to change or edit the page.
True, I could use beaver themer and saved modules or saved rose to do something similar. But the critical resource I have within OptinMonster’s analytics.
If I have one opting across multiple pages I can see where that opting is most effective. Being able to cross-reference and look at if one blog post or page yields higher opting the same offer, is valuable insight.
OptinMonster is available from just $9 per month AND the PRO version with everything is just $29 a month at the moment. Also they have OptinUniversity which is a totally free learning suite on lead generation, customer acquisition and more.
Sean Cannell’s video ranking Academy 2.0
YouTube ranking. YouTube strategy. Content marketing strategy.
Sean Cannell is a YouTube marketing and video expert. I used to be very on the fence about YouTube marketing and video creation, as well as buying online courses from businesses like his. However, over the months that I watched his videos on YouTube for free. It became obvious that Sean had a lot of value to offer.
The reason a course is considered part of my content marketing stack, is because his particular course helped with my YouTube strategy as well as gave direction to our business. Not only in terms of subscriber growth but also traffic to the website, leads and the message of our brand.
The course has recently been relaunched and had the content restructured to. Sean’s emails are one of the few I get in my inbox, that I’m still subscribed to stop his videos and content split between hyper- practical advice on cameras, software, microphones and other fun gear. Compared to strategic decisions for video, uploading video content to YouTube and using YouTube is a video platform.
YouTube has been at the heart of my brand’s growth. And it’s no secret that Sean’s advice and coaching has been a massive part in that.
You can check out the new Video Ranking Academy here. If you’re even a little bit curious about creating video content for your business, Sean’s training and videos are going to help you publish great YouTube content, generate an income from it and grow your audience and leads. Check out Video Ranking Academy here.
Otter.ai
Transcription. Subtitles. Idea capturing. Productivity.
Finally, one of my methods for producing vast amounts of written content is using transcription service. And my preferred service is Otter.ai. otter is an artificial intelligence transcription service, which allows me to upload video and audio to its service, and then receive an extremely accurate and fast transcription within minutes.
When I create YouTube content, podcasts, coaching calls, webinars and even just my thoughts. Otter is there to capture that and turn into written content. Because it uses AI the transcription is extremely quick. And frankly the accuracy is so good that I need to edit it as much as I would a human transcription from ref.com.
Revie’s fantastic. And I don’t have a problem with it. But when it comes to quickly capturing lots of audio and converting it into a transcription, you cannot beat Otter.ai.
Even more awesome, is that now it connects directly to zoom calls and meetings, and allows for meetings with people to be transcribed in real time. Also Zoom automatically sends recordings for coaching calls and webinars to Otter, and I receive a notification minutes later telling me that the transcription has been created.
You can get one month free of otter premium by using this link. One of the ways I love to use otter is opening the app, and use my smartphone to record all of my ideas for books, blog content, videos and tasks for our team. It basically turns a half hour drive into a serious content creation and idea capturing session.
Make sure to use this link here to get one month free of premium transcription-did I also mention that otter is free to use for a certain number of minutes per month? There’s literally no reason not to use it. And the more you use it, the more accurate it becomes.
“Creating content seems like a lot of work”
I see creating content as similar to going to the gym. To people who don’t regularly go to the gym, going once a day for an hour can seem like a massive vestment of time and energy. And yet, once you go for a few months regularly, you wonder how you lived without it.
I won’t lie, there are days where creating content isn’t easy. Which is why I use these templates and tools to be honest. But the benefits that content marketing has given my business, now far outweigh any investment cost of energy.
Summary
- Camtasia for video editing and screen capture: free trial here
- StreamYard for live streaming and video: sign up for free here
- OptinMonster for lead capture: click here for 50% off
- Video Ranking Academy 2.0 for YouTube and content strategy: click here to read more
- Otter.ai for transcription: click here for 600 free minutes and a premium account
