How To Become Consistently Great At Every Part Of Online Business | StrongStart.fm – 015

StrongStart.fm : Design, Automate, and Outsource the Technology of Your Online Business

In this episode we’re going to talk about how to take any topic in online business and become consistently great at it.

One of the key activities I’m doing with my business is breaking down everything into topics, processes, tools, automation, and outsourcing by breaking in to this components I can take each one and either get better at it myself, automate it or outsource it to some service provider, virtual assistant, or freelancer. As I break down my business into these processes, documenting all of them as I go and they’re basically going to form a core part of the free content that I provide at StrongStart.fm and inside of my membership programs.

In this episode you'll learn:

• How to take an online business topic like blogging and break it down into it's key components and topics
• Read the top 3 resources I can find about the topic
• Distill what I've learned into instructions/checklists
• Determine how much can be automated or outsourced

Action plan:

• Identify all of the major processes in your business
• For each, break them down into their core components
• For each component, identify the top 3 resources for learning to be better at it
• Read those resources then distill them down to processes and checklists
• Document the processes and checklists in the tools of your choice
• For each component, determine if you need to do it yourself, whether you can automate it, and whether you can outsource it
• From then forward, always use the documented processes, checklists, automation, and service providers
• Whenever you see any issues or areas for improvement, update the processes and checklists

If you systematically do this for your each part of your business and content, you should see huge improvements in your productivity and quality.

Over the coming months as I do this in my business I will be providing all of the resources, checklists, and automation in my free content and membership programs.

I have created a diagram of the process I described in this episode:

Links and resources mentioned in this episode:

CoSchedule (affiliate link)

Process.st (affiliate link)

Asana

Transcript Download

Download a PDF of the Transcript

Transcript

Hey everybody, Dave Ziembicki here, welcome to StrongStart.fm. My mission is to help you design, automate, and outsource the technology of your online business. In this episode we’re going to talk about how to take any topic in online business and become consistently great at it.

One of the key activities I’m doing with my business is breaking down everything into topics, processes, tools, automation, and outsourcing by breaking in to this components I can take each one and either get better at it myself, automate it or outsource it to some service provider, virtual assistant, or freelancer. As I break down my business into these processes, documenting all of them as I go and they’re basically going to form a core part of the free content that I provide at StrongStart.fm and inside of my membership programs.

For this episode, as a free bonus, I’ve created a diagram of the process that I’m going to describe here that shows you step by step how to break down any topic and become consistently great at it. The diagram’s going to be available over in the show notes at strongstart.fm/015.

What do I mean by breaking everything down? Well, for this episode, we’re going to take the example of a blog post. How do you become consistently great at creating and publishing blog posts? For a topic like this, what I do is I make a list of all of the elements that make up a great blogpost. Here is the example that we’re going to run through.

Most good blog posts start out with a process of research and gathering data and information and even statistics for the content and topic that you’re going to be writing about. As an example, most blog posts, if it’s just a random spouting of opinions without any supporting evidence, they’re not really going to be considered great by your audience.

Anybody can sort of spew out an opinion, but a piece or a post that has a lot of opinions in there but backed up by research, backed up by data, backed up by statistics, those are the ones that tend to resonate more with an audience because you’re providing some additional value, an addition to just put an opinion out there. You’re doing some research, maybe you’re summarizing some data that you found or you’re backing up your opinions with the opinions of other experts that happen to agree with you.

A good blog post also usually have some form of key word research that’s done ahead of time as well. If you’re trying to write an epic piece of content or a definitive guide or something along those lines, what you’re going to be want to be doing is doing some key word research related to that blog post so that in addition to whatever your topic is, you’re going to go out there and find the popular keywords, maybe the long tail keywords that you want to have included inside of your post to improve your search rankings. Look at some of the other sites that are out there that do link back links to other articles or refer to other articles and so forth. You know, key word research might be a core part of your blogpost process.

Once you’ve got some of the basic research done, other steps in the process include thinking about the headline for your post. Something we’ll cover here in a future episode, but there’s entire books written about just how to write great headlines. The importance of headlines really can’t be under estimated in this online world where billions of blog posts and podcasts and all of this are published on a monthly basis. So headlines are something that’s ‘important and that you want to spend some time on.

So again, as I’m breaking down the process of writing a great blogpost, I’m trying to look at each of this key components. Headlines would be one, next could be the structure of your blog post. The opening line, the opening paragraph, the headings and structure, those are another key element of a good blog post and from there, there’s a bunch of other things. The copywriting itself inside the post, the featured image that you’re going to use, the conclusion that you use at the end of the post to sort of lock in the knowledge or the benefit that you’ve provided your audience.

Most good blog posts have some form of a call to action or an opt-in. Once you’ve written your first draft to the post, then you could think about entire editing process. This might be just using some automated online tools or you might pass the post off to professional editing a service. Another path that you’ll want to take on a blog post before publishing is an SEO analysis of that post.

If you use Yoast SEO or any other WordPress related SEO plugins. Most of them and especially Yoast, which is probably the best one out there by far is going to give you a bunch of different signals and data and information about your post, effectively scoring it from an SEO perspective. Again, before you hit publish, you want to make sure that any small fixes you can do in there to titles and meta descriptions and some of the back end data about the post that are going to improve its SEO scores, you want to make sure you’re doing some of those things before you publish that post as well.

Then once you’ve hit the publish button in WordPress, it’s not over yet. A great blog post, that’s just sitting there and never read by anyone isn’t really going to be considered great by anybody other than maybe yourself. So once you hit that publish button, there’s a couple of different campaigns that you’re going to need to have related to that blog post. There might be a social media campaign where you’re raising awareness of it out there in your social network following.

Another one might be an influencer outreach campaign, where if you’re maintaining a list of influencers and people that talk about your particular topic or tend to repost or amplify content related to your topic, you’re going to want to do an outreach campaign to those folks to make sure that they’re hopefully spreading the word about your blog post to their audience.

Another related thing could be what I call content amplification campaign. So it’s a little bit different than the other two; it’s basically doing things like going into forums and groups that you’re a part of and adding value to those groups and when it makes logical sense to mention your article or post, you can feel free to do that if you added a lot of value to that group and now you’re bringing into it something that you’re looking to promote to that audience. There’s a number of different ways to do that. Groups and forums and Reddit, and different sites like that where you have the potential to amplify your content because of the large audiences on those sites.

Then the final piece maybe of a good blog guru, a post process is content repurposing. So you’ve written a great piece of content, there’s probably 10 to 15 different tweets that you could pull out of that content. The featured image, you might be able to pull out and put a quote over it, or a text over layer something like that. You might turn the episode into a podcast episode, reading into a microphone and amplifying on certain points and so forth.

So that’s just a basic example but as you can see there, if you just take something as simple as a blog post, you know, some places out there I’ll tell you, “Oh yeah, you can write a blog post in 30 minutes and be done with it and then move on to the next one.” But there’s a reason why epic content is epic and why most people aren’t able to do it and that’s because it does take a lot of time and effort to be consistently great at blogging and consistently great at providing detailed content and, you know, high end content in your site.

Bigger brands and companies may have a dedicated person or even a team for each of these elements. So, you know, obviously if you’re in a large publisher or a large online site, there will be an author, there will be an editor, there will be a graphic designer, there will be a social media manager or even an entire team. So, you know, there will be teams, processes, tools, check lists, a huge amount of what I call, sort of infrastructure that’s sitting behind these sites that are what allow them to crank out content very rapidly and at high quality.

Now, many of us obviously won’t have a 10% content marketing staff, it’s going to allow us to compete at that scale and that speed. But we don’t really have to, if you look at some of the most popular blogs that are out there. Many of them only publish a post once a month or once a week. You know, of course there’s others out there that are doing daily posts and things like that but they tend to have the infrastructure that I talked about there, the budget and the dollars to be able to do that.

Even though we might not have the budget and a staff of 10 to help us with our blogging, I do think there’s a lot of things that we could learn and implement from those models in a smaller business or even in a solo entrepreneur type of world. Through the use of good processes, tools, automation and outsourcing.

Now, if you’ve listened to any of my other podcast episodes, or read any of my other content, you know, that’s really the focus of the content that I create is how to take this lessons learned and all this best practices from the larger businesses, larger organizations out there, the type that I’ve done consulting with for the last 20 years, and how do you distill that down into some things that the individual or solo entrepreneur can do in side of their business?

Even though I have a small virtual team, I’m implementing a pretty robust process so that my business can scale and that’s what I want to outline here in the remainder of the episode. One of the key things that I’m doing in my business is following a model that Gary Vaynerchuk’s been talking about a lot in the last couple of months and that is this idea of document, don’t create.

What he’s talking about there is that there’s a lot of pressure this days in online business and content marketing to just crank out tons and tons of content. Really, what that’s doing is that’s driven the overall quality level of content, I think, a lot lower. If you go on and do a search or in Google or in Buzzsumo for any topic that’s fairly generic like online marketing, online business, content marketing, you will just get inundated with a huge amount of relatively low quality articles.

In a lot of cases, these are written by outsourced copywriting firms or it’s just article after article, copying and summarizing other articles that are out there. Very low quality content. So when Gary talks about “document, don’t create”, what he’s talking about there is don’t just sit there and think I’ve got to crank out 15 blog post this week, which is generally going to average down your quality. He’s basically saying, focus on whatever your core content is, whatever your audience actually needs.

Have a big part of your content and be the work that you’re actually doing to create the core content or to help your audience or help your customers. You know, there’s a reason why he’s hired a videographer to follow him around 24 hours a day. At any point in the day, he can basically create a piece of content just by speaking into that microphone or answering a question that he just got on Twitter. He’s basically documenting his day as he goes and turning that into a huge amounts of content.

What I’m doing and what I recommend that all of you do is a little bit of a derivative of that. You know, obviously I’ve been blogging and podcasting here for a couple of months and in some cases, some of the content like the blog for a year or so, but what I started to do is to really go deep into ever area of the pieces of content that I create and break it down just like I did in that blog post example.

Then what I’m doing with each element in there from research, all the way through to headlines and writing and down into the social media campaigns is I’m defining detailed processes for each f those steps and then creating checklists and tools and looking at how I can outsource them. What I want to do is basically break down that exact process here for their last part of the episode.

If you take something like the blogpost example for each item in that process, what I’m going to be doing and what I recommend you do is three steps. The first is read the top three resources I can find about that topic. If the topic is headlines then what I’m doing is I’m going out and I’m doing a couple of searches and I’m finding the best articles or posts or podcast out there about how to write great headlines.

Now, again, you’ll get deluged with thousands of results for that but again, you want to go with the top three. In Buzzsumo, yes, the top three based on shares, in Google it’s going to be the top three based on which keyword to use in their ranking algorithm. But relatively quickly, you’ll be able to get to a couple of key sources there and what I really am a strong believer is that you have to know about a topic before you could automate it or outsource it.

Now that doesn’t mean you need to be the world’s expert but you do need to know enough about the topic and what you want to effectively do with that topic to be able to automate it or outsource it so that you’re not over spending or causing yourself to have to do rework later as you learn more about the basics of the topic. Again, that first step is read the top three resources and learn about the particular topics. Again, it could be the headlines, it could be research, it could be copyrighting, basically all the elements in this example, the keys to a great blogpost, I’m going to go read those top three sources.

The next step is you have to distill what you’ve learned into instructions, processes, or checklists. So again, with headlines, I’m going to be publishing some content on that right after this episode. But when you read through the best sources out there on that, there are a lot of checklists of things like “does my headline do this? Does my headline do that? Does it have this attribute?” You know, there are headline formulas out there that you can use, even though you’re starting from a good baseline and you just fill in the blanks with your particular topic or focus area.

What I’m going to do in each one of these areas is basically distill down all those best practices into a process and a checklist. The difference between the two is the process is what I’ll go through to actually do it. So for headlines, you know, some of the things that you might do in that process are go search for the highest ranking headlines on that topic that are already out there. Evaluate what types of patterns worked or didn’t work.

Another one will be, look at the headline formulas that I mentioned and you know, pick 10 or 15 headline formulas and then basically create 10 or 15 headlines for your topic area and then go through a process of reviewing and ranking those. There will be a process side of it that is basically how to do the particular item and then the checklist is basically the quality control afterwards. There might be a 10, 15, 20 element checklist that I can run my headlines against to make sure that remembering to do all of those things that I found in my research.

You know, maybe someday each of us has written 4,000 blog posts or something like that over 10 years, we’ll be able to do some of this things without the checklist but I’m a big believer in those, as you know, if you’ve listened to my previous content. Because I do want to become consistently great at this. I don’t want to miss a key element because I just forgot. I want to have this tools in place that are going to think about and do all of those best practices that I found in my research. If we don’t find a way to consistently utilize those best practices then that time we spend reading those articles and doing that research are kind of wasted.

So then once I’ve read the top three resources and once I’ve distilled it down into the processes and checklist that I want to use, the next step is to determine how much can be automated or outsourced. That’s really the key; when you’re going to move from a phase of writing something down, how you want to do it and then you’re going to start thinking about outsourcing or automation, it’s really going to help you to have already gone through the details of exactly what you want.

Because basically if you’re going to go write a piece of automation, you have to have some form of functional specification right? That’s basically the collection of requirements and features and capabilities that you want from that automation. If you’re going to go outsource it to somebody, there’s usually going to be two models there, you might go on Upwork or some kind of freelancing website and say, “Hey, I’d like somebody to write some headlines for this post or I’d like to get a freelancer to edit my post,” or any of the other topics that you might outsource.

But you're going to have to provide that freelancer, that editor the list of requirements. You know, “Here’s what I want you to do, here’s generally how I want you to do it and here’s how I’m going to evaluate your results.” Again, you’re only going to be able to have good details on that if you’ve really thought through and understand the topic and have documented the processes and checklists that you’re going to utilize against it.

Whether it’s automation or outsourcing, it’s going to really be a big help and be much more efficient to do those steps of learning the topic and documenting what you want done before you start trying to automate or outsource it. So coming back to the blog post example, for automation on my blog post, I use CoSchedule for a couple of different pieces of this process. I use it for my blog content calendar so I know when different pieces of content are going to be out and it gives me the ability to plot that out on a calendar and schedule the post in advance.

But CoSchedule also has some other really great features, which are things like letting you schedule social media posts. Yeah, there’s other tools out there, Buffer and Hootsuite and all this that let you schedule posts. But one thing that I like about CoSchedule is it lets you basically create what they call a social campaign. Think about the case where your process might call for, “Hey, I want to tweet about this blogpost three times on the day of publish, took to raise awareness about it and then the day after I publish, maybe I want to do it, tweet about it twice and then the second day after publish, I want to tweet about it one time and then back on the first day, I might want to post it out to my Facebook page or my Facebook group as well. Or I might want to take the featured image and post that up on Instagram.”

CoSchedule lets you schedule all of those things and basically create that entire campaign as a template and then you can basically attach that campaign to every blog post that you schedule or publish. For me, this cut out basically about half an hour from every blog post because I use effectively the same campaign for every blog post that I publish. Once I’m done writing it, I just have to scroll down to the CoSchedule section of the post, click that social media campaign, it automatically attaches all of those draft messages to that post and then I just have to go in and maybe change some hashtags or change a few items there.

When I click “schedule”, that’s basically going to schedule the blog post and it’s going to schedule out all of those social media updates. That entire campaign basically just runs automated once that blog post gets published. Some other steps that I automate in my particular process is things like grammar and spelling checking. You know, there’s sites like Grammarly and Hemingway app where you can basically just pop in the entire text of your article and it’s going to come back and do the basic proofreading and grammar checks for you, which you can then go fix up.

Others might use outsourcing instead of automation for that step. If you have a little bit of a higher budget, you may basically sign up for an editing service. I usually only do that for my definitive guides or my really long form content. You know, once my business builds up a little bit more, I’ll probably add that to the mix and just have a professional edit pass on all of the content that I publish. But again, that’s a great example there of deciding, should I do it myself, should I try and automate it using tools or should I outsource it?

Some steps that I do completely outsource are things like basic research, right? Sp I have a virtual assistant when I’m scheduling out the blog posts that I want to do, I’ll have my VA go out and do a lot of general research on that topic. You know, “Find me the top 10 articles, find me the top 10 podcast episodes about the topic, find me the list post of statistics or expert round ups with quotes and all these types of things.” So there is a structured and outsourced process for research that I utilize as well and that’s something that I’ll also be talking about in some future episodes.

So again the idea here or the basic premise is to have a process and a checklist for each of these elements of a blog post. Then once you have that systematically go through each of them and decide which of them you’re going to automate or outsource and generally if your budget supports it, you want to get to the point of outsourcing everything but the core content creation itself and then the other unique value that you bring to the table.

So I’m using the written word in a blog post as an example, but let’s say you blog about design or graphics or illustration. Then obviously you will not probably outsource the featured image that you are going to use in that post. You are going to showcase your core content there along with the written word. So again since that’s the unique value that you bring that part you wouldn’t outsource.

But in my case I am far from a graphic designer so I’m not going to be messing around with these images. I’m going to have somebody else do that part. I’m going to focus on this case on the written word or the spoken word or the checklist and the process diagrams that I create and things like that because that is the core value add that I bring to the mix.

So what’s the payoff for this? Well I’ll give you another finished example for my business and that’s basically what I’ve already done with this podcast. So generally, for a 30 minute podcast episode, which seems to be what’s the sweet spot for me right now, I only personally do 60 minutes or so worth of work for that podcast episode. Now in that 60 minutes I’m not counting the research and preparation on the topic. That can range from one to four hours depending on how deeper I’m going to go on a particular topic.

But what I mean about that is for 30 minutes of final recorded audio that gets published on iTunes, there’s only about another 30 minutes worth of time that I have to spend on that process. Everything else is completely outsourced or automated. So what that 60 minutes of total time breakdown into is there’s about 15 minutes of set up time where I create some metadata, like what’s the topic of the episode, what am I going to call it, what are the files that are going to be needed? An image for the post, MP3 file, a transcript.

So basically I define some metadata about what needs to be created there, then I start the recording process which is me just speaking into a microphone. I’ve got all my audio gear is always set up. One of the things that I’ll be talking about in my studio build out content series is I’ve got equipment that lets me save settings. So on my mixer I can save different settings from whether I am doing a podcast or whether I am doing a video.

So basically with the click of one button, I can switch around all the microphones and processing and audio settings and all this kind of stuff so I don’t have to do that set up every time. So basically recording is pretty straight forward. I turn on my gear, I speak into a microphone and basically save off the wave file for that episode, pop it into Dropbox. As soon as it goes into Dropbox, there’s automation that basically alerts my podcast editing service.

So they know, “Okay Dave posted a new wave file in this folder that means he’s got a new podcast episode ready to be edited.” So podcast editing is something that I outsource to a service. Now that’s fairly expensive, so not all of you are going to have the budget at this point to be able to do that. There’s packages that range from $150 a month for one or two podcast episodes up to three or $400 a month for four to five episodes and then there’s even some higher end stuff if you want to do five episodes a week or something like that.

But basically I’m in the four to five episodes per month category and that is about $300 a month or something like that and then I chose an extra package, which is going to give a human created transcript to all of my episodes as well. So again, you had some options there in terms of how to outsource podcast editing. There is definitely cheaper things out there but I wanted basically this automated service that was fairly robust and was going to give me that transcript capability.

Then once the recording is done and the episode audio is created, a lot of the rest of the process is outsourced to my virtual assistant. So she goes through and creates the episode post in WordPress, creates the title image for that post, she uploads the MP3 file, creates the structure of the show notes, uploads the transcript and so on and so forth. So basically 98% of getting that podcast episode post created is done by my virtual assistant.

Once all those tasks are done then the workflow comes back to me for a final review and then I’m the one that always hits the actual publish button in WordPress once I’ve checked everything, previewed the post and make sure everything looks the way that I want it to. So when you think about that for a podcast and then you did the same type of thing for a blog post, that’s about as efficient as you can get. So the vast majority of the work for those things other than creating the core content is automated or outsourced.

Again, that’s the core of what I am trying to do on my business and it’s actually the core of my content, it’s helping you to be able to do that in your business. So I’ve basically got that down for a podcast episodes and what I am going to be doing next is doing that for my blog posts and then later for my online videos and then my online courses. So I’m on a couple month project in my business to go through exactly what we talked about in this episode of define everything as a process, break every process into steps, get the checklist created for those, and then decide how much of that I’m going to do myself versus automate or outsource.

Now one thing I wanted to mention that I’m going to deep on some future episodes is the tools that we use in my business to make these processes happen and after a lot of experimenting, you might have seen my epic list of productivity tools. So about a year ago I went through over a 140 different tools in different categories as I was going through the process of selecting tools for my business and what I’ve settled on for this key aspect, which is the processes and the checklist is two tools. One is Asana, which almost everyone has heard of and I utilize that for project management and then then the key really was when I stumbled a tool called Process Street a couple of months ago and what Process Street is, is that’s basically an online checklist application.

What it lets you do is really easily author very rich checklists. So it could be as basic as just tasks and checkboxes but it also lets you really go multimedia for each of the steps in the checklist. So you can embed videos into there, text, you can format the text, you can embed checklists within checklists and so forth. So it’s basically an authoring environment that lets you create really robust checklists much more efficiently than trying to do that in Word or a PDF document or really any other form.

So the key was when I basically joined Asana together with Process Street and what I mean by that is the process flow that I’ve described here I put into Asana. So for the blog post what I’ll do is I’ll have a template project in Asana which takes each of those steps, research, headline writing, copywriting, editing, all these stuff I’ve mentioned in this episode and each of those parts of the process is a task in that template project in Asana.

So every time I want to create a new blog post, I just create a copy of that Asana project and that entire structure comes over with it. Then what we are doing is inside of each of those tasks like “write the headline for the blog post”, there is a link for that task over to a checklist in Process Street. So whether it’s me doing the headline or if I am going to outsource that to a copy writer, when it gets to that point in the project, there’s a link over to Process Street.

That’s where I’ve encoded all of those steps and checklists and quality checks and so forth that are specific to headlines and so what will happen there is whenever the precursor steps are done and it becomes time to write the headline that project will assign that task to whoever I can figure in there and then that person goes into Asana to ask and they see, “Oh I am doing the headline. Here’s the checklist I need to do,” and they click on that Process Street checklist.

Then that’s going to make sure that they’re doing the same thing consistently every time. If it’s something that I am going to do myself, then again that’s my cheat sheet, that checklist. I’m like, “Okay, I don’t have to think about it as much. I know there’s these 25 steps that I am going to do every time I write a headline.

So that’s really been the key to getting lists instantiated inside of my business and there’s a lot of different benefits to this. One is the consistency, so you are going to do it the same way every time. Now what happens if you learn something? Hopefully the more you do this we’re learning more so the other reason why I like having these tools and checklists in place is it gives me a path for continuous improvement.

If I think of another quality check that I want to do while I am writing headlines I just put that into the checklist in Process Street. As soon as I do that, it’s going to be utilized for every other headline I ever write thereafter. So again overtime you’ll be able to consistently improve those checklists as you learn more and more about these topics. The other side benefit is the fact that if I would happen to lose my virtual assistant for some reason, God forbid since we’ve been working together for a year and a half.

I hope that never happens, but if she needs to move on to a different job or something like that, I have all of these processes documented in detail. So it’s going to really minimize the ramp up time for the next virtual assistant to get to the same place as my current one because I have got these detailed processes and checklist already created. So I don’t have to retrain this person, I can say, “Here are the checklists. Here’s the videos that I have already recorded. Here’s all the detailed step by step that I want you to do,” and I don’t have to recreate that all over again for the next person or the next service provider that I use.

So I’ve spend a lot of time talking about basically how I do this inside of my business. For your business in content creation, I’d like you to think about how you can use these techniques to your advantage. To summarize the steps that we’ve talked about here, the first is to identify all the major processes in your business. If you’re focusing on a single channel like a blog or a podcast, then you can just zoom in on that. If you are doing a multichannel like I am, then you’re going to maybe look at each piece of content type that you are creating and think about creating a process for that. For each of those items, you want to break it down into its core components.

We used the example of a blog post here. I talked a little bit about a podcast type of flow but basically think about each of your core content types or any of the core processes in your business and break them down into their components. Then for each component what you want to do is identify the top three resources for learning about it and read those and get better at it. This could be a blog posts, this could be books, whatever it is. Whatever the top three resources are for that particular topic, take the time to read those, understand the topic better.

Once you read those what you then want to do is to still them down into the processes and checklists. So as you are reading these things, make sure you are taking notes. Highlight things inside of the episode or the blog post or the book so that at the end, once you have gone through these sources, you can go back to all your notes and highlights and comments and start using them as the basis for building your processes and checklists.

Once you’ve roughed out those processes and checklist then what you want to do is get them embedded into the tools of choice that you are using in your business. So I talked about using Asana and Process Street, which is my current recommendations for this type of flow. You might be a Trello person, you might be an Evernote person, any of these tools out there can basically do what we’re talking about here. It’s just that there are some differences in some of the features and benefits at automation.

For each of the components and processes and checklists that you create, determine if you need to do it yourself, whether you can automate it. or whether you can outsource it. Again, that’s going to depend on your skill levels and automation or your budget for either having somebody else build some automation or your budget for potentially outsourcing to a VA, a freelancer or some form of service provider.

From then forward what you want to do is always use the documented processes and checklists and automation or any service providers that you’ve chosen and then whenever you see any issues or areas for improvement, update those processes and checklists and get that continuous improvement cycle going inside of your business. Now if you systematically do this for each part of your business and each content type that you publish, you should see huge improvements in your productivity and quality in a relatively short period of time.

So that’s really what’s most exciting about this entire episode is that while it takes a lot of leg work upfront to do it, this is really the difference between people that publish consistently great content and those that are just winging it or just trying to fill a content calendar and basically not putting the effort into becoming better at it overtime. So I mentioned the document versus create strategy that Gary Vaynerchuk has been talking about.

That’s going to be something that I am definitely doing here, which is going to be of benefit hopefully to all of us and especially all of you in the audience because over in the coming months, as I do this in my business, I am going to be documenting all of the things that we talked about in this episode and all of those resources, checklists and automation that I create are either going to be part of my free content or they’re going to be included in the membership program that I’m setting up for launch later this summer.

So all of the paper side of things like the checklists and some processed diagrams and things like that are going to form the basis of my free content and then for the things that are a lot heavier amount of effort like automation and some of the other things that I’ll be building, those are going to be some things that I am going to offer up inside of my membership site.

So as a free piece of content associated to this episode, I’ve created a diagram of the process that we talked about here that basically shows you step by step how to breakdown any topic and become consistently great at it utilizing the process that we talked about in this episode. So that diagram is going to help basically be a cheat sheet for you to think about inside of your business without having to come back and re-listen to the entire episode or anything like that. So that diagram is going to be available for free over at show notes at StrongStart.fm/015.

So that brings us to the conclusion of this episode. I want to thank you for joining me today. If you’ve been enjoying the content here at StrongStart.fm and would help us out greatly if you could give us a quick positive review over on iTunes. My goal is to help as many people as possible to reach their goals so I need to spread the word about this podcast and all the content that I am putting out there to help as many people as I can.

I’d also like to encourage you to join my free membership academy. In addition to the easy access to every download and free resource that I’ve created in the last two years, you also get exclusive member content and access to my private Facebook group. So to join us, head over to StrongStart.fm/joinfree. Thanks and we’ll see you again in the next episode of StrongStart.fm.

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