Fresh content is the lifeline of any content marketing campaign. But creating content regularly can take a lot of time, especially if you have to compete with thousands of other businesses.
At BuildFire, we create a lot of content. Over the course of a month we publish over 15 articles, often containing over 50,000 words.
Now, if we had to write all that content ourselves, it'd take a really long time. Instead, we use an alternative method which revolves around audio and transcription to craft content at the same level of quality as we used to output with a lot of writers, but now with less time needed.
What we'll detail here is how you can effectively write over 7,000 words worth of content in a matter of hours - exactly what you'd need to put out 7 articles at 1,000 words in length each day to keep your blog fresh and keep readers coming back.
Instead of writing maybe a 1000, 2000 words in an hour like you would typing through a keyboard, you'll be able to write upwards of 5,000 words in an hour, even more if you really know your subject matter.
Here's how you do it.
1. Outline Your Content
Start by outlining your content into headlines and sub headlines. What this will do is it will show you the overall outline of what you're going to be talking about. Specifying headlines, sub-headlines and key talking points you want to mention helps to keep you on track and maintain a consistent flow as you record your audio.
2. Record Your Content
This entire content creation method revolves around recording yourself speaking as if you were reading an article aloud. Your audio will be used in the next step to create the article itself.
The reason we rely on speech is because a human can speak between 120 and 150 words per minute - much faster than most people can type, but also faster than a text-to-speech software can transcribe.
You simply talk through your headlines, sub-headlines and key talking points in order to create an audio file that will be used in step three.
3. Get The Audio Transcribed
This step is the key to fast content creation. By having your audio transcribed, you can ave a heap of time, time you can also use to record even more content to be transcribed.
My recommendation for transcription is Rev.com. It's a great service for fast transcription and only costs $1 per minute of audio recorded. Transcriptions are delivered within 24 hours, often times within 12 hours.
4. Format Your Content
Once you have your transcription in hand, it's time to format your content to look more like an article you'd publish. You can format your article with headlines, sub-headlines, link out to references content and add images.
Chances are there will be some "umms" and pause words that were transcribed - you'll want to remove those and clarify your sentence structures accordingly.
As you scale this process, you can even bring in a content editor to take care of this step and streamline your process.
5. Rinse & Repeat
Just keep walking through this process over and over again to craft content as you need it. It'll become easier and faster to develop content after you've gone through this process a few times.
Timing
To clarify, let's dive into the timing of each element so you can understand where your time should be spent.
The content outline steps shouldn't take more than 10 minutes. It often takes us about 5 minutes now that we've nailed down a system, but if you don't have your content strategy in place, it'll likely take a bit longer.
Assuming you talk at 120 words per minute, the recording stage will take you a little over 8 minutes for every 1,000 words of content.
Exporting and sending the audio file over to your transcriber often takes about 5 minutes, depending on the amount of audio you've recorded and your internet connection.
And finally, the formatting step takes approximately 10 minutes depending on how much research you need to put in and how you format your content. The only way to really streamline this is through a content editor.
In total, you're looking at about 35 minutes to write one long form article that's between 1000 and 1500 words. Not bad considering the time it would take to type out and article of that length.
To drive home the point, this entire article was outlined, transcribed and ready to publish in less than 20 minutes.
When you multiply that by 7 articles that you're going to be creating over a course of a week, it should take about four hours to output a week's worth of content through transcription, to formatting and to finally publishing it.
And if you want to take it up a notch and do an entire month's worth of content, you're only looking at two days or so to create the entire set of content that you'd need, assuming you are publishing an article a day. That leaves you a lot of time to focus on promoting your content, building backlinks through guest blogs and all of the other typical tasks you need to take on for your content marketing strategy.