The Keys to the Writing Kingdom: Effortless Content Creation

Welcome to the Best Seller Secrets podcast, where business owners learn how to crush their business goals with their own best selling book, Just like I did, and 1500 plus of our past clients. I’m your host, Rob Kosberg, and today we’re going to talk about how to build an effortless content creation process. This tends to be the biggest sticking point that our clients, and in fact most people have, is in the actual writing of the book. Nathaniel Hawthorne, famous author, said that easy reading is damn hard writing. And that is certainly true. If you are trying to create great content by writing 500 to 2000 words a day, and you have done that in fits and starts and stops and have tried to pick back up the mantle of discipline, then you’ve probably learned it’s really, really hard to do it that way. So I want to give you a process that we use, that our ghost riders use to create compelling content. And this is something that we have built out from our own failures and from our own experience. I wrote about it in chapter four of Publish, Promote Profit. If you have a copy of that. I learned that many, even really successful people, have an issue with this process of content creation. So I wrote about that in my book. Publish, Promote, Profit. It is in chapter four. If you have a copy of that book, here’s the deal. When I wrote my very first book, now 15 years ago, I understood right from the get go that I am not a classically trained writer or a traditional writer in any way. And so I thought this process of writing 500 to 1000 words a day probably isn’t going to work for me. So I thought, well, what are my options? The only other option that I really knew of was kind of the traditional ghostwriting path. So I decided to hire a traditional ghostwriter. It was a large check that I wrote and unfortunately, it didn’t work out quite the way I expected it. I really enjoyed the process. Typically speaking with traditional ghostwriting, you’re going to have a Q and A process. Oftentimes they help you with your table of contents. Many times they do not. Mine did not help, but I had a pretty good idea of how I wanted to lay out the content. I did that and then over a period of about four months, she did an ongoing number of question and answer calls and conversations, all of which she recorded. She would ask me a question about the content of a particular chapter. She would ask me points, she would dig deep. It was great because I felt very, very comfortable speaking my content rather than writing my content. I remember after a period of about four months of Q and A and then a number of months of her in the writing process, I received back my rough draft, or at least our first version of it. It was about 100 and 8186 pages long. I was super excited until I got through about eight to ten pages, and I realized this isn’t going to work. It wasn’t that it didn’t work because she wasn’t a great writer. Her sentences were great. The structure was great. She was certainly a better writer than me. It didn’t work because it was not in my voice. It sounded like the content was there, but the context was missing. I learned that this is a very common problem for people that understand that they either don’t have the time or desire to write it themselves. And so they end up hiring a traditional ghostwriter and then end up in the exact same mess that I ended up in, which is having content, but not really having something that is compelling. So there I was at the end of many, many months of this journey, having written a really large check and wondering, okay, what am I going to do now? I guess I’m just going to have to sit down, grind out 500 to 2000 words a day and get this thing completed. I was probably procrastinating, and I was watching Ted Talks, and this is a number of years ago, of course, and I remember watching a Ted Talk and I was thinking, this is really great. It was entertaining. It was enjoyable to watch. I learned a lot through it, and it was short. And I thought to myself, it’s a lot like a chapter in a book, a chapter you should be able to get through in 15 to 17 minutes, which is about how long a great Ted Talk is or TED Talk. And then I thought, okay. It was captivating, it was interesting. There was great content that taught me. I thought, this is a way, this is a process where if I simply map it out, I can speak my book and I can speak a chapter at a time in 15 to 17 minutes. I ended up writing my first book using this process. And it was a pretty rough process, but I ended up writing my book in a very, very short period of time using this process. And of course, my book went on to become the number one nonfiction book on all of the Amazon store when we launched it. And of course, it launched my financial services business to a multimillion dollar company, all because I was able to figure out how to eventually get this content out of me. Well, at that point, what was born was what we now call enhanced ghost writing. It’s not the traditional ghostwriting process where there’s a simple Q and A, but there is a process of mapping out the content in every single chapter so that an author can speak their content and have a step by step guide on how to do it. So what does that look like? Well, it’s a very, very simple process. Obviously, you can complicate it, and you can add two or three different bells and whistles to it, but I’m going to give you the simplicity of it, and then you can decide whether it’s something that will fit in your framework and in your content creation. Basically, all great Ted Talks have some type of compelling story that’s being told. Often it is a story directly from the life of the speaker. There are points of drama within that story, difficulties that the speaker went through. It also could be a story from history or a story from sports, et cetera. For our clients, it could be any of those things. And also it could be a case study of somebody that they helped. Obviously, if you’re writing a book as a coach or a consultant or a service provider or an expert in some way, you probably have dozens of case studies of people that had dramatic points in their life where they came to you and you helped them overcome those issues that they faced. In the same way, you tell the story, whether it’s a case study or something from your personal life, et cetera, and you don’t culminate the story. You leave it at whatever point of great drama or difficulty there is, and you create an open loop. The way an open loop works is very simple. Basically, our brains need to close the loop. If we hear an interesting story and there’s some drama within that story and we don’t know how that story ends, we got to close that loop. We want to know how the story ends so it keeps people captivated until the end of the chapter or until you close that loop. You close that story. So, great story, culminate it or bring it to a dramatic point. Do not culminate the story. Leave an open loop, and then go into teaching. You teach the things that you learned. You teach the steps that you took. You teach how to get out of whatever drama that you were in or that the person that you helped was in. So there are your teaching points. 0,1.2.3. Then simply, you come back in, you close that loop. You conclude your story. This is what most Ted Talks look like. Now, you can have two stories in a chapter one that you culminate completely in the beginning and one where you leave an open loop. You can do this lots of different ways, but first, start the simplest way possible until you get a great feel for it. Now, one thing that Ted Talks do not have, that you should have in every single chapter, is next steps you can’t sell in a Ted Talk, right? You’re just supposed to teach. You’re supposed to give big ideas. You’re supposed to keep people interested as you’re giving them the big idea. However, with your book, you want to do all of that, and you want to build a relationship with them. So you need to give them next steps. Tell them how to get more information. Send them to a link to your website where there’s a PDF or a tip sheet or a video series where they can learn more. That way, they give you their email address. You begin this two way relationship where you can communicate with them and they can communicate back to you. After all, if they’re reading your book, if they’re falling in love with you, if they’re learning that you are the trusted expert in this process, then why wouldn’t they want to know more about you and to potentially deal with you when it comes to your services, your programs, your coaching, et cetera? This is what enhanced ghostwriting looks like. This is effortless. This is a system of effortless content creation. Simply map it out. By the way, you can do this for blogs that you write. You can do this for any type of social media content that you want to post. Just tell the story, leave an open loop, teach the two or three things from it, culminate the story, and then give people next steps. This is how you build an effortless content creation process. Look, if you enjoyed today, then you might want a copy of my book Publish, Promote, Profit. If you go to the link publishpromoteprofit.com, I’ll give you a 75% discount over Amazon, plus I give you hundreds of dollars in free bonuses. All simply to consume and to enjoy the things that I’ve written about. Chapter four in particular is on this kind of effortless content creation. Thanks so much for being with me today. Now go get your book done.