Systemizing Your Content Structure with Justin Welsh

[Music] good afternoon everyone I'm hope Dorman senior content marketing manager here at kajabi so I am particularly thrilled to bring on Justin Welch who is going to be talking about a topic near and dear to my heart systemizing your content structure for an intro on Justin over the last decade he's helped build two 50 million dollars plus AR companies teams with over 150 people and raise over 300 million dollars in venture capital and now he's building a portfolio of one-person businesses to five million dollars in revenue and outside of that he's in a he's an advisor to early stage s b SAS companies mentor to entrepreneurs at a lot of startups and then LP at GTM fund which is a rolling fund investing four million dollars per year into early stage B2B SAS companies so what an impressive resume am I right Justin thank you so much for being here today oh thanks so much for having me I I appreciate it and I'm looking forward to jamming out with the audience awesome so Justin I'll hand it over to you now for your workshop and then with about 10 minutes left in this session I'll come back for the Q a portion so get those questions in the chat and hopefully we'll be able to answer yours awesome can you see my uh my screen cool well thanks so much for uh hope for the great introduction I appreciate it my name is Justin Welsh and today I'm going to be going over a presentation called building a systematized Content strategy and really the focus here is trying to build a high volume high quality content system for social media so as hope mentioned and I won't go into my bio I'm a former startup executive built a couple of companies uh with some some friends of mine left that world back in 2019 uh and kind of stumbled into the creative world unexpectedly uh just by writing on LinkedIn about building SAS companies I eventually transitioned over to Twitter started writing there I've got almost a half a million followers across those two platforms do about 350 million yearly content Impressions my business is a seven figure one-person business with five different revenue streams that operates around 95 margins and I use zero advertisements so everything that I do is through organic social media strategy and that's what I'm going to walk you through today so before I walk you through it I think it's really important to ask ourselves why is it important to have a systematized Content strategy and that is because every person that you think of as a creative whether that's a a music artist somebody who writes music an author who writes books they all use systems for their content music artists have formulas movies have templated scripts books have templated story lines and I think it's really strange that us as creators or folks who create on social media are held to a different standard and I like to bring some of the systems that I learned in my last business into sort of the Creator realm and systems for me are there when motivation isn't so I'm sure we've all woken up in the morning before and not wanted to write content not wanted to produce videos not wanted to record our podcast and that's where systems are there systems are the safety net for when motivation is not there and I'm going to walk you through my favorite system today and it is a nine-step system that I call the content operating system that keeps me creating roughly 30 pieces of net new social media content every single week for LinkedIn and Twitter part of this social media strategy is not just about the creation of the actual content but it's how the content works together to de-platform users to take them off of your favorite social media channels like LinkedIn Twitter Youtube Instagram and get them onto your website where they can start browsing your products and services and sign up for things like your email newsletter so my system works as a hub and spoke model The Hub of my system is a piece of long-form content that I send once a week that's my newsletter called the Saturday solopreneur it's a newsletter that goes out every Saturday morning you can read it in four minutes or less and it gives you one actionable tip to grow your online audience in business and the spokes of this model are the content that comes off of that actual Hub it's a lot like garyvee's sort of content pillar strategy but slightly different in the way that we actually use the spokes of this model to bring people off social media and onto your website so let's walk through the system itself Step One is simply ideation in ideation just means coming up with new ideas for that long form piece of content and that can be a newsletter a podcast a YouTube series it does not have to be only a newsletter it can be a Blog it's anything that is long form that is produced in a regular fashion so I have this picture on my calendar here and every Wednesday around 10 30 central time I carve out an hour and that hour is dedicated to one thing and that is coming up with new ideas and that I spend that hour kind of searching through a bunch of different mediums so I might look at YouTube channels read other people's newsletters look at curated emails check out popular content read through Linkedin read through Twitter to try and find ideas so for example here's my buddy Matt Ragland he does YouTube videos I sort my most popular what are people enjoying that he's creating how how I journal every day for increased productivity there's a great idea that I could Riff on and give my take on I might read a curated newsletter so how to promote and grow your podcast simple idea I could write about that I could record content about that I look at my tweet threads or tweets that have been popular like here's my four-step writing process that was my third most or second most popular tweet of all time I might turn that into a newsletter that's a great place to find ideas and for this example I'm going to show you an idea that came across my plate the other day where I was reading a curated newsletter and Dan McKinley was talking about how he went from 100 to 5000 Twitter followers so I thought that's a great idea why don't I write about my take on growing from zero to five thousand Twitter followers which I did last year I'm now over 160 000 but it's like what about the folks who want to go from from just zero to five thousand how do we get them there so I selected this idea for my newsletter and you can see inside of notion which is a piece of software and you can use Google Drve you can use notion you can use a piece of paper if you want it right I just collect these ideas on a regular basis so how to get your first 5000 Twitter followers simply became an idea in my idea Bank once I have an idea I like to go out and do some research so of course there's the way that I would go from growing from zero to five thousand Twitter followers for this example but there's probably a lot of other information online and from friends of mine and peers of mine on social media that might be able to add some additional color or Flair to my newsletter so I might do something like go out and search for tweets quotes books articles anything that supports what I'm going to write about and step two is I store all of my research in my notion document so for example I might go to Advanced Twitter search and type in Twitter growth tip and come up with a bunch of folks who have shared their own Twitter growth tips and you can see here there's four that just came up Jeremy JK Tebow Chase all folks that I know all friends of mine I might select Jeremy moser's Twitter growth tip and he's got three bullet points right here so I would simply install that tweet into my step two research so it's easy for me to have access immediately to that piece of research that I want to then put into my newsletter so you can see when I wrote my newsletter on how to grow your first 5000 Twitter followers I simply took the piece of research from Jeremy and installed it into my newsletter as a way to back up what I was saying so I added some other color or Flair from an additional creator once I've written my newsletter this is where the system really starts to take off right so the step three is here here's me writing this newsletter I have a template that I use and I write using a how-to step-by-step template I use a very similar template every week here's the problem here's how most people handle the problem here's how I would handle it and I find templates in all of the most interesting places this is a piece of content excuse me piece of software called typeshare and inside of typeshare there are templates that you can use how-to guides grocery lists five main points dispelling myths telling a personal story and you can just take one of these templates and use it for your newsletter so I'll write out my newsletter on how to grow your first 5 000 Twitter followers including some of that research I shared earlier from guys like Jeremy once the newsletter is done at the center of your Hub and spoke content the rest of this becomes so easy because you have a topic that you can now think through all the time our topic how to grow from zero to five thousand Twitter followers around that Hub that newsletter there are going to be six individual pieces of content that we're going to create together a story an observation a contrarian take a past versus present a listical and a tweet thread so let me show you how I do that step four is taking our long form content and turning it into short form content so I'll start by looking at the different styles and style number one is a story so with that in mind how to grow to your first 5000 Twitter followers I will turn that into a story and a story has five parts pain agitation Intrigue positive future and solution and so I will simply write a story right inside of this operating system right underneath my newsletter and you can see the story template here and how I fill it out so pain and attention use a personal Story start with a problem agitate twist the knife really tell the reader how things got worse and what happened to you or someone else dive into the Intrigue paint a positive picture of their future if they use the new intriguing solution and then deliver the solution to your audience a simple way to take a piece of long form content and turn it into a piece of short form content like a story once we have our story written I want to turn it into an observation so again our topic how to grow to 5000 Twitter followers where what's something interesting that I noticed in growing my own account to 5000 followers so here's an observation accounts growing Crazy Fast don't have the best content they have a clear profile helpful content and a deep Network nothing fancy all meaningful not my best content ever but a simple observation that I can write about growing to 5000 Twitter followers so we're starting to develop the spokes of our Hub and spoke content and once we create all of our spokes we're going to bring everyone back to our website to make purchases which I'm going to show you in a moment once you have your observation you want to go ahead and create a contrarian tape so what's a commonly held belief that you think is wrong in this instance about growing to 5 000 Twitter followers so for example I'll write something that I think nobody else thinks like growing fast on Twitter has almost nothing to do with relevant experience it's about growing a powerful online network of peers then add creativity confidence experimentation and repeatable systems so this is a piece of content that I wrote that's a contrarian take on what it takes to grow on Twitter and I just create these on a regular basis story observation contrary intake once I've got my contrary intake I turn the same topic into a listicle so how can I write a listicle what are some tools books newsletters that I can use to write about on this relevant topic so for example here are six tools every Twitter Creator should know about to help them grow to 5000 followers and then I list out six simple tools right so I've got four of my six spokes done my next spoke is past versus present so for example what did it look like to grow on Twitter in 2019 or what was I doing on Twitter in 2019 and then what am I doing on Twitter in 2022 so in 2019 I was doing all the wrong things in 2022 I'm doing these four right things so just a simple juxtaposition of History what was happening in 2019 what's happening in 2022 A simple piece of content that comes off of that newsletter so now we've got five out of our six spokes filled out and the last spoke is just a Twitter thread for me and this can be something else for you you don't have to follow these exact six pieces of content so for me I'll take a throw I'll take my newsletter and I'll copy and paste it and I'll put it into my publishing tool I'll separate it out into 280 character increments and I'll turn it into a very simple Twitter thread like the one I'm writing right now for this newsletter how to add 5000 Twitter followers in just 90 days A four-step playbook that anyone can run so I will just simply use the newsletter that I wrote turn it into a Twitter thread and distribute it on Twitter so once you have your six pieces of content you have a couple of different options the first option is you can tie all six pieces of these content back to your newsletter and the second option is you can go around the spoke Circle again Second Story second observation second thread contrary intake past versus present and listicle and you can come up with anywhere from 6 to 12 pieces of unique content that are all relevant to this very specific topic that you wrote a newsletter about and when your short form content all your written content on LinkedIn or Twitter or your short form videos on Instagram or Tick Tock when they're related to a long form piece of content like a newsletter like a podcast like a YouTube series you can tie all of those back using a simple link so that's what I do over the next six to 12 weeks so over the next six to 12 weeks I will stagger all of my content on Monday I'll tell a story the following Tuesday I'll share an observation three Wednesdays from now holistical four Thursdays a Twitter thread five Fridays a contrarian take so on and so forth so then I'm not talking about the exact same topic five days or six days or 12 days in a row I'm talking about that topic over the course of time and the great thing is all of these short form pieces of social media content again they all tie back to my newsletter so at the end of each short form piece of content I say would you like to learn more about this specific topic if you'd like to learn more about this topic here's a newsletter issue I've written about growing on Twitter to 5 000 followers so when they read my observation when they read my listicle when they read my thread I can assume that if they've read those pieces of content engaged commented liked them that this topic must be interesting to them and if this topic is interesting to them they should want to go from my social media content onto my website and so when you set it up like this you start to see a significant number of website Impressions and you start to see your traffic increase so you can see here in the start of the year I was doing roughly 10 000 or so looks like a week maybe 8 000 visitors to my website a week and now I'm you know hitting around 16 to 18 000 visitors on my website per week and in the last six months organically with zero advertisements in only two social media channels I've driven 1. 8 million page views in six months across Twitter and Linkedin and when you're selling services or when you're selling uh digital products it really is a numbers game so if you drive 1. 8 million people especially people who have read a piece of content of yours that they like that's relevant to them that helps them solve a challenge or educates them or keeps them motivated or empathizes with them if you're bringing those people 1.

8 million times over six months to your website they are now de-platformed they can do simple things on your website that you want they can sign up for your newsletter they can browse your services they can check out your products they can reach out to you via a contact form you have done you're in such a better position when folks are on your website versus when they're simply interacting with you on social media so I go from producing this content to bringing them to my social to my website 1. 8 million times in six months and that's where I generate my business Revenue so that 1. 8 million you know views on my website turns into a little over 700 000 in course in coaching sales in six months so this is the entire engine that drives my business so to sort of recap I start off with a hub and spoke model and the Hub is really a long-form piece of content newsletter YouTube video podcast off of that idea comes six to twelve distinct pieces of content that are highly related to the newsletter topic or to the long form topic over the next six to 12 weeks you stagger that content on social media and every time you end that content you tie back to your newsletter you tie back to your podcast website you tie back to your YouTube video section of your website whatever you want people to do on your website and there you have that active audience where they can now do the things I describe subscribe to your newsletter subscribe to your YouTube channel buy a product or buy a service so if you want to learn a little bit more about how I help people build Diversified portfolios of Internet income you can go check out my website it's Justin welsh.

me that's Justin welsh.