How To Create Long Form Content
I love long form content because it is multi-purposed. All too often I see people shy away from this type of content because it can be challenging to create. Today, I am going to share with you my process for how I’ve consistently created long form content for the last 4 plus years.
Before I dive into my process, I want to briefly talk about what long form or as I like to say Macro content is exactly. I define macro content as content that has a long life span. Its benefits can last for weeks, months, or even years. It has SEO value and can be repurposed on multiple platforms. Macro content types include podcasts, youtube videos, facebook lives, and blogs.Let’s dive into my process for creating long form content.
Content Categories The 30,000 Foot View
The first thing I always like to address when thinking about creating long form content is the 30,000 foot view. Every entrepreneur I work with we define what their content categories are from a high level. Content categories help frame the structure for creating long form content consistently. When I think about high level categories I always ask my clients what makes them unique, what is the process or system that differentiates them from their competition. These are great examples of categories that they could define. For example, in my own business, I could talk about Social Media, Marketing, Funnels, Technology, Mindset etc. Ask yourself, what are the high-level categories that I could always have my content speak to over and over again.
The Content Buckets – The 10,000 Foot View
Once the categories are defined for the long form content, I then break it down one step further into content buckets. This is the 10,000 Foot View. Each of the categories is then broken down into buckets. For example, in my business, I could break social media down into each of the different platforms or for marketing, I could talk about email marketing, affiliate marketing, podcast marketing etc.
The Content Topics – 1,000 Foot View
Once you have the buckets you can then come up with topics that fall into each of the different buckets you have defined in your business. This is where you will create the actual topic for the long form content that you create. Oftentimes, this is where I see people get stuck. The get overwhelmed on what to create content about or run out of ideas. Here is how I come up with the topics for long form content.
- Ideas – These are simply ideas that I come up with. Usually when I’m out for a walk with or working out. I write them down in my content notebook.
- Research in Groups – I love to get real time feedback from my own facebook group and from other facebook groups. I will ask where people need support or do an ask me anything. From there that gives me feedback about what type of content to create.
- Questions. I love taking questions that I am asked from prospects and from clients and creating long form content out of those questions. I always keep the person anonymous unless of course I ask them if I could use them as an example in my content.
- Keyword Research. I love researching popular keywords and creating content from those keywords. This works great especially if you are using youtube as one of your long form macro content platforms. My two favorite tools for doing this research are Tubebuddy and Keywords Everywhere.
The Rule of 3
Once I have my topics, I then lean on the rule of three to flesh out the content. This is the meat and potatoes of the long form content. For each piece of content I create 3 bullet points and then 3 sub-bullet points for each bullet. This works great because it also helps me pace the length of my long form content. Each bullet point should take roughly 3 to 4 minutes to cover in total. That means each sub-bullet point should be approximately one minute. Plus an introduction and an outro. This is a simple way to pace yourself when creating this long form content.
Here’s an example…
Topic: Increasing Instagram Reach
Bullet 1 – The Feed
- What to post – creating value driven content
- Increasing engagement
- Imagery
Bullet 2 – Stories
- The benefits of adding text
- Increasing organic reach
- Cross Promotion & Tagging
Bullet 3 – Hashtags
- How to choose which hashtags
- Hashtag research
- Hashtag Rotation
As you can see this is a great example of how I would go about mapping out a long form piece of content. You can absolutely add more information in each of the different bullets and sub-bullet points but I don’t recommend scripting out exactly what you are going to say. I recommend having a solid outline and working from there. It will sound more natural. As you get more comfortable with the process you will be able to use something like the above.
Some topics I will dig a bit deeper in terms of my notes and research but one thing I did when I was first getting started with long form content, is put post-it notes around my computer so that I didn’t lose track of where I was in the content. This kept me on track and minimized my editing.
And that’s it folks! That is the exact system I use to create long form content like youtube’s, podcast’s or facebook lives.
What type of long are you going to create?
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