I’m writing this blog post late on a Tuesday evening for publication tomorrow. That’s a less than ideal condition for creating awesome content, but sometimes that’s the case. The writing for this blog holds a lower overall priority for me than other content creation tasks I needed to accomplish today. Within the previous sentence lies part of the answer to the “how to create content that makes you money” question posed in the title of this blog post.
Core sales and marketing content comes first
This blog on its own generates very little direct revenue for me and my family. On the other hand, my other businesses ColorMetrix and SheHeMedia generate the lion’s share of my income. Simply put, that requires that as much as I want to write here, this writing must come after that which is paying the bills.
I spent most of my productive hours today completing a video to introduce new features in our ColorMetrix ProofPass.com service that will be released Thursday morning. When I’d put the video production to bed, it was time to start work on the email which will announce the new release to our newsletter list. Video and well-crafted email newsletters are content. If we’ve put the video, email and the rest of the campaign together correctly, the amount of revenue they will generate will be measured in the tens of thousands of dollars. That’s content that can make you money.
Sandwiched in between creating a video and an email, I edited two posts created by my content partner Shelby. While she’ll edit this post, the video and the email, it was my job to edit the content she created. For us, content creation is a team effort and editing is just part of the process. She’ll edit this post last and may not even get to it until morning. The video and newsletter are far more important even though their deadline is more than 24 hours away.
Will this post make me money?
Honestly, I have no idea if this blog post will make money. I know that if I write a post about cell phone batteries or a book review and include affiliate links to Amazon the post will eventually make money. This post has none of that. Unless someone reads this post or a combination of this post with others and decides to engage me as a consultant or speaker then it will be hard to measure the monetary return of this post.
But that’s a good thing. When I write here, I write for you and me. I don’t write for my bank account. I write what I’ve learned running a business and creating content to drive sales. I create videos, emails and sales pieces about the real-world human benefits of our products and services to make money. When that writing works, I endeavor to share with you what worked and what did not. I want to share which content creation had high return on investment and which was hardly worth the effort to create.
Focus on creating content that will drive sales of your core products and services. Besides, these posts are more fun to write tired and worn out knowing the content that the business needed has been created.