Our guest today, Melanie Deziel, is the founder of StoryFuel, the author of “The Content Fuel Framework: How to Generate Unlimited Story ideas” and an international keynote speaker recognized as one of the world’s leading experts in native advertising and branded content.
Many of you have been asking how to be consistent with your content and having more story ideas. How can you do this in your business more often where it’s not taking so much time and money? That’s what we’re going to talk about today.
In this episode, we talk about the power of storytelling, content creation, and strategies which you should implement in building a better brand.
DIVING INTO CONSISTENT CONTENT
Brandon Birkmeyer: [00:03:39] People ask me, how do I create content consistently? That’s probably something I get asked all the time. I’m not a specialist in this. It’s such a simple question, but it is a loaded question. We get to really dive into that today because content is your jam.
Melanie Deziel: [00:04:20] Yeah, I’ll take that. Content is my jam.
Brandon Birkmeyer: [00:04:24] You’ve been doing this for a long time. You teach it, you coach it, you speak it. Now we get to interview on it together.
First I’d love to set the stage in terms of the value of good content, the value of good storytelling. Why is it important?
CONSISTENT STORY IDEAS BUILD RELATIONSHIPS
Melanie Deziel: [00:04:44] In so many ways, content is a tool for building relationships. I make so many relationship analogies when I talk about content. I think sometimes people might laugh at me, but think about the relationships with the people in your life who are most important, your family, your partner, your friends.
In almost every single case with very rare exception, it’s built over a period of time through back and forth exchange. It wasn’t that you just talk at that person without listening ever. Then suddenly they were in love with you and signed up for life.
It’s always a slow build over time. I think stories with our customers go a long way to doing the same thing. The more we talk to our customers, we share value, we listen. We signal to them that we value the same things that we know the same people.
All of those things, over time, help us build a deeper relationship. I like to find ways to share stories that show who we are, that speak to our audience, and that show that we have a lot of things in common. I think that’s the best way to do it over time.
RELATIONSHIPS NEED CONVERSATION
Brandon Birkmeyer: [00:05:41] I think historically this has been a very one-sided conversation. Now in the past 10 years, it has become multi-directional.
I had a great conversation with John Lee Dumas where he said the reason he likes doing interviews and having two-way conversations is that it’s a collision of ideas. New ground is broken when you bring two things together.
Do you feel that that storytelling and content can be and should be a two-way street?
Melanie Deziel: [00:06:23] A hundred percent. We’ve all had that experience where you read a blog post, or you see a picture and you think, oh, this is all about them. Why are they bragging so much? Why are they only talking about themselves? What does this have to do with me?
It’s because it lacks that back and forth. It lacks that acknowledgment of who the audience is and what they actually want.
One of the things I’m always talking about is actually reverse engineering your content. Start with your audience. What do they want? What do they fear? What are their challenges? How can you help them?
ACKNOWLEDGE YOUR AUDIENCE
If all of your content is created with them in mind, with your audience at the center of what you do, then you’re going to have their caring and their engagement built-in because it’s for them, not at them.
I think I draw a lot on my background as a journalist because so much of what we do (good journalists anyway,) is we’re acting on behalf of our audience. What would my audience want to ask this person? What would my audience need to know about this situation? If they were here, what would they be observing?
We’re standing in for our audience in many ways as we report. I try to bring that same mentality to the brand content we create. What can our audience learn from us?
What would our audience want to know? How could we help make their lives faster, easier, help them save time or money, whatever the case may be. Putting our audience’s needs at the center I think is absolutely key.
WHO NEEDS UNLIMITED STORY IDEAS?
Brandon Birkmeyer: [00:07:40] I think we have a unique opportunity here. You’ve had to build your own personal brand. You have your own audience, your own business. Who are you helping? Who have you figured out is the person you speak to, that you have a relationship with and how did you figure that out?
Melanie Deziel: [00:07:55] I actually think our audiences may be similar. A lot of my audience is people who are in marketing, but they’re often in marketing either recently or by accident in some way.
There are people who are creators or building a personal brand. Maybe they’ve been laid off and they’re now doing freelance work, so their reputation is more important. It’s basically people who are saying, “Okay, I think I need to be doing some storytelling. I need to create some content.” Now, how do we put a system around that? How do we do it more regularly?
I also do have a decent amount of media folks in my audience because that’s the world that I came from. A lot of them are journalists or podcasters, broadcasters who are trying to build a personal brand in that way.
YOU MAY BE YOUR OWN MARKETING MANAGER
The way I figured it out, truthfully, it was by accident and by listening. Like I said, my background is as a journalist. I thought I would be in a newsroom somewhere, writing stories for probably a print newspaper in the middle of nowhere. That used to be the trajectory of how you built your way up.
Then the digital disruption happened, and so went my career ladder out the window, no way of knowing what comes next. I ended up in marketing myself by accident. I took the skills I was going to use as a journalist and started applying them to brand communications.
That’s how I ended up in this world of creating branded content and doing content marketing. I see a lot of my audience’s experience in my own experience and vice versa.
Sometimes you don’t expect to be a marketer and it kind of happens to you. You have a merger, an acquisition, a change of jobs. You start your own company, you join a startup and suddenly you’re a marketing team of one, or you’re wearing many hats, one of which is marketing.
LEARN WAYS TO BE EFFICIENT
I think what becomes really important is how do we do this efficiently? How do we do this with an acknowledgment of our resources? How do we do it in a way that’s not going to make us lose our minds because there’s only so much we can do with the resources at our disposal.
Nobody wants to feel burnt out from having to share their story in all these different ways.
Brandon Birkmeyer: [00:09:52] What is the thing that you get asked all the time around content or storytelling? What is a problem that people want solved?
Melanie Deziel: [00:10:20] I think there are two. Is that allowed? Is that cheating?
I think the first one that comes is everyone says, “Well, I’m not creative, so how do I find someone to do it for me? Or how do I solve for that if I’m not creative enough to do content creation or take photos, write blogs, or whatever else?”
Brandon Birkmeyer: [00:10:44] I imagine the answer is that you don’t have to be creative. You just have to tell your story or make it personal or something like that.
Melanie Deziel: [00:10:53] Yeah. I would say that the answer is actually that you are creative and you probably just don’t know how to tap into it.
TAP INTO YOUR CREATIVITY FOR STORY IDEAS
So much of creativity is handing responsibility to some other entity, right? It’s luck. It’s a muse. You’re born with it. I’m not Steve Jobs. I’m not Beyonce, whoever it is that you look to for creative inspiration. Actually, it is a process. It is a muscle that you can work out. It is something you can practice.
Anyone who’s feeling not creative has probably been put in a position to try to come up with some sort of creative solution where it wasn’t an ideal situation. They didn’t have the right conditions to do it effectively, and that has made them believe that they can’t do it ever.
Brandon Birkmeyer: [00:11:37] I don’t know how many terrible brainstorms I’ve been in where it was our one creative outlet for the day. Why are we so bad at it? I guess we don’t tap into it as much as we can, and maybe this is not part of our normal jobs every day.
Melanie Deziel: [00:11:50] Yeah, exactly. I think it’s not something that we’re generally trained to do. Oftentimes the essentials of life, of moving through the world as a functional adult person, doesn’t involve training for how to think creatively or come up with ideas.
YOU CAN LEARN CREATIVITY
Hopefully, if you’re lucky, you have some sort of creative passion, whether you’re a writer or a photographer, or you have some hobby. You may have practiced that on your own.
If not, then you may think that it is something for other people. It’s not something that you generally find in your day-to-day work. Maybe you’re working in food or retail. Maybe you think that creativity is not important for you, in what you do.
The truth is, it’s just something to learn. As long as you have steps in the process, I think it makes it a lot more approachable, both to learn it, to practice it, and then hopefully to find it more natural down the line.
HOW TO CONSISTENTLY PRODUCE CONTENT
Brandon Birkmeyer: [00:12:39] I think it’s reassuring to know that all of us could find a way to be creative enough to move our business forward and start supporting our business with content, whatever that might be.
What’s that second question? You have me curious about what the other one is.
Melanie Deziel: [00:12:51] I was really trying to decide between these two, but I think they come up equally. The second one is really how do I do this more efficiently? How do I do this with less time?
How much time do you spend on your podcast every day, every week? It’s very time consuming to create quality stuff and we’re all pressed for time. How do I make this faster, easier, and less stressful? Otherwise it’s not sustainable.
KNOW WHEN TO OUTSOURCE
Brandon Birkmeyer: [00:13:18] That makes sense. What I hear you can either just create every day and document the process. I’ve also heard you should create one big thing and then chop it up. Are those the ways to go? Are there other ways?
Melanie Deziel: [00:13:36] Those are some ways to go. Another way you can go is to find people who can help you. If you’re finding it particularly stressful or time-consuming, there’s a good chance that you’re putting a lot of effort into something that someone else can do very easily.
If editing the video takes you way longer than recording the video, find someone who’s really good at editing video and partner up with them. Find ways to outsource those things that are super stressful or time-consuming for you.
LEARN HOW TO BATCH PRODUCE YOUR CONTENT
The other thing that makes it super easy is batching. Batch your content.
Think of how we do laundry. You don’t wash your outfit at the end of every day. You save it up for a week and you create a whole week’s worth of clean laundry that you then wear throughout the next week.
If you have a baby, it’s every other day! However, there is some element of batching there so that you’re not doing the same thing less efficiently all the time.
Look for opportunities to batch certain elements of your content. That might be writing a bunch of posts and scheduling them in advance. It might be deciding one Saturday a month, you record your whole month’s worth of weekly videos.
Just finding ways to put those things together so that you get into that mindset, in that mode. You get all your tools together, you do it all at once, and then you can roll those out over time.
That way you condense your stress into one point and then have less stress the rest of the time when you’re just rolling it out.
YOU NEED TO HAVE A PLAN FOR YOUR STORY IDEAS
Those two questions, as we were talking about it, I just realized that they’re actually pretty closely tied to one another.
I think a lot of what takes up the stress and the time and makes the whole process inefficient is having to think about it so much because it doesn’t come naturally or because you don’t have a plan.
For example, say you’re a small business and you’ve decided you want to be on Instagram. Well, half of the challenge of what to do on Instagram is sitting around for half an hour, going “Dang it, what am I going to post,” and looking around trying to find something. No, that doesn’t look nice enough, and we just posted that yesterday.
You’re spending so much of what you think is stressful content creation time that is actually content idea time. If you could condense that to have a more efficient process, you could come up with a bunch of ideas, batch the creation of those and then roll them out over time.
They play into each other very well, I think is what I realized.
BREAK IT UP INTO PIECES
Brandon Birkmeyer: [00:16:32] Yeah. That makes sense. If I have to do it once a week for one thing, it’s not a lot harder to sit back and think about your year. What are all the things that you want to talk about in your category?
There’s something about the framing of the problem you have. I need to create a bunch of content for this year. What are all the things? You think, okay, I’m free to fill out this box. The confines you give yourself completely determine how creative you can be.
Melanie Deziel: [00:17:07] One hundred percent. It’s one of those things, too, that can be very overwhelming sometimes when you look at the big picture.
Having a framework, having a structure, or as you said, categories or buckets, (I call them franchises if you do Fanmail Friday or Gluten-free Fridays,) you have some sort of recurring theme that really helps guide your thinking.
CREATE CONTENT CATEGORIES
It makes it a lot easier than if you think, “Oh my gosh, I’ve got to come up with a whole year’s worth of Instagram posts.”
If you break it down and you say, “Okay, actually I’m going to do one recipe every Wednesday. That’s only 52 recipes,” that becomes a lot more approachable than a whole year’s worth of content.
If you say, “Okay, there are different seasons. I need four to eight recipes for each of these particular seasons of the year where things might be different,” you can break it down into smaller parts.
It becomes a lot easier. It feels a lot more approachable than trying to sit down and eat the whole elephant in one bite.
STORY IDEAS CAN BE REPURPOSED
Brandon Birkmeyer: [00:18:03] That has been true for me. For Season Two I said, I’m going to figure this out ahead of time. I wanted to talk more about personal branding this year, so I wrote down the things that might fill this topic out.
In my mind, it is almost like writing a book. What are all the things? What are the subcategories? Now when I turn on the microphone I can do four or five at a time. At the end of the year, I’ll probably have the framework for what could be a book.
Melanie Deziel: [00:18:57] That’s exciting, and a good point you bring up. My topic at Social Media Marketing World is actually content repurposing. I love hearing this idea that you’re planning for one content type, for one format that can be so easily segued.
Even if you have to adapt it a little bit into another format, I think that’s really smart.
HOW DO YOU START REPURPOSING?
Brandon Birkmeyer: [00:19:16] Let’s talk about repurposing for a second, and then I do want to get into your background because I promised that to the audience here. I know you can talk about repurposing probably forever. It’s a pretty popular topic right now.
It is an expensive thing to do. It is a time-consuming thing to do, to take things and chop them up to push them across ten different media types and do it three times a day, whatever it is that the gurus are saying.
What is your model when you’re starting to get people going on this? What is the first step to repurposing and what are some simple actions to take?
Melanie Deziel: [00:19:49] One of the things that I really encourage people to do is think about how many different ways there are to repurpose. The example you gave is certainly an option, making it smaller, excerpting it in a way.
DON’T OVERLOOK DUPLICATING YOUR CONTENT
However, you can also just straight up duplicate it. Maybe there’s a blog post on your blog that you could also publish on LinkedIn. You could also publish it on Medium. It requires very little additional effort but allows you to be in many different places.
That’s not always going to be a strategic fit, but it’s one of the easiest ways to start practicing putting your content in multiple places and getting more mileage out of it.
Another one would be to adapt it into a different format. Like what you talked about, you have your podcast episodes. You’re going to adapt that into a book.
It’s actually not a ton of effort. You could upload all of those into a transcription service and basically have a starting point with words already written. That would save you a lot of work.
DUPLICATION WORKS FOR MANY FORMATS
You can do that with other formats too. If you’ve created a video, splitting that into images and audio is fairly easy. Then as we just said, having audio turned into written content is very easy.
Now from one video, you have a blog post, the written form. You have a podcast if you wanted just the audio from that video. You have the images that you can use for your social posts.
Breaking things down into smaller parts, adapting them into other formats, duplicating them in different places, and then of course updating your content or creating derivative versions of it is another way to approach it as well.
I think if we can explore all those different options and find out which one is going to work for us, it makes it a lot easier to see how we might be able to make better use of the content we already have and not overwhelm ourselves with trying to create a million different things.
FIND SMALL PIECES FOR REGULAR CONTENT
One of the really great exercises I always encourage when you’re doing content re-purposing is think about how you can break something down into its smallest possible parts.
That’s what we just did. We had a video, and it has audio elements. You could have the written words. You can have still images.
There are going to be a couple of great sound bites in our conversation naturally. Those sound bites could be shortened clips. Those sound bites could be quotes that we create graphics of those same quotes.
You could really take this one interview or one anchor piece of content you’re creating and really continue to make use of that in many different ways as you said, over the course of a month, or maybe two weeks. Maybe you do it every other week so that you don’t have to be constantly turning out a new interview every day or a new video every single day.
UNLIMITED STORY IDEAS DOESN’T MEAN DAILY NEW CONTENT
That’s a lot of pressure, even for professionals. That’s newspaper level of productivity, putting out a new piece of content every single day like that. You don’t have to put that pressure on yourself.
If your actual job is running a restaurant or owning the storefront of your boutique, making cookies or whatever it is that you do, don’t make it so that you spend so much time on content that you can’t do the thing you actually love doing.
Find a way to make it fit into your lifestyle, into your business so that you can still find time for those things.
RELATED: Build your personal brand with the Content Marketing Starter Guide.
Brandon Birkmeyer: [00:23:23] The reason it works is it’s a very natural process. I think the majority of us think of subjects in categories, subcategories, bullets and sub-bullets.
When we actually are building a larger piece of content, our mind is already working like that. Breaking it down into smaller pieces usually just brings it back to how you were building it in the first place.
VISUALIZE SMALLER PIECES OF CONTENT
Melanie Deziel: [00:23:50] Yeah, absolutely. I think of going back to the school tactics of when you were studying for exams. The easiest way I have found (honestly, it’s so old school) is to have a printout and use a highlighter. This quote, this stat would make a good graphic.
When you see it all laid out and you can circle, highlight, underline, and draw boxes around things, it allows you to see how many tiny pieces of content are hidden in your bigger piece of content.
Obviously that does work best if you have something written or a transcript because you can circle things, but you can do the same thing if you’ve got video or audio as long as you’ve got some editing savvy or you just want to write down timestamps.
Again, outsource to someone who’s better at chopping things up. That that might be a better use of time.
HOW MELANIE FINDS STORY IDEAS
Brandon Birkmeyer: [00:24:35] Let’s get into a little bit about you and why this is something that you’re doing now.
Where did you come from? I know you have a little bit of native content background, or branded content background. I understand what that is, but let’s talk about that so the audience gets it and where you started from.
Melanie Deziel: [00:25:01] Sure. Native advertising is kind of a buzz word. You may have heard it used in a couple of different ways. I’m going to give you the general definition that you may have heard elsewhere and then the specific way that I was involved.
MAKE SURE YOU CONTENT FEELS AT HOME
Generally speaking, native advertising refers to any kind of advertising where it natively fits in its environment. You think about plants that are native to a region, or people are native to certain places. You are native to LA.
Using that word with regards to advertising just means that this advertisement really fits and belongs here. It blends into its environment, not in a tricky way, but in a way that it really belongs here. It fits in.
That could be used like on Twitter. Since that natural environment involves tweets, a native advertisement on Twitter would also be a tweet, a promoted tweet. We see those in feed all the time. Same thing about a post on Facebook.
WHERE MELANIE WAS WORKING
When it comes to my application, I was working in Publishers. I worked at the Huffington Post. I worked at the New York Times and at Time Incorporated, which is a series of magazines, (Time, Fortune, People, Entertainment Weekly, et cetera.)
What people came to us for was content: articles, videos, blog posts, slide shows, things like that. A native advertisement in that environment had to be content as well. People were coming to us for articles. So an advertiser, if they wanted to fit in, needed to provide articles at the same quality.
My job at those publications was to help teach the advertisers essentially how to think like journalists and create content like our content producers do so that the stuff they created and paid to promote in our environment was actually going to perform well.
We don’t want them to come in and write a really bad blog post that doesn’t work for them, that our audience doesn’t love and that makes us look bad. In order to make it a win for everybody, we had to get them up to speed on the basics of creating quality content and oftentimes help do that for them.
That’s really what I was doing at HuffPost Partner Studio, which was that brand content team, and at T Brand Studio, which was the New York Times brand content team, and then at The Foundry, which was Time Inc’s brand content team.
WHERE MELANIE HELPS NOW
Then five years ago I set out and actually started Story Fuel, which is my company. Now we don’t do that just for individual environments, like the New York Times or HuffPost.
We help brands and marketers learn how to do that in any environment so that they can take that same storytelling skillset for content marketing and apply it no matter where their content is going to end up.
We started very specific to one publication and now we’re focused on content no matter where it lives.
THE FORMULA FOR UNLIMITED STORY IDEAS
Brandon Birkmeyer: [00:27:28] You have this knowledge you put together that you’re bringing to the table and speaking about. You’re putting this into a book, right? When is that coming out?
Melanie Deziel: [00:27:47] The book comes out on February 24th. It’s actually available for pre-order at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, wherever you like books online right now.
On February 24th it will finally be in people’s hands, which is really exciting to me because it’s just been in my head for so long.
Brandon Birkmeyer: [00:28:03] I’m excited for you! It’s called The Content Fuel Framework, How to Generate Unlimited Story Ideas. Why this book, why now?
Melanie Deziel: [00:28:10] This was really my way of trying to give away the secret system that was in my brain. I didn’t really know it was there. Everyone has that thing that you asked earlier, what’s the question people ask you about all the time?
I was hearing from others that my superpower is coming up with these ideas. People could come to me and say, “Well, I know people say this content marketing thing is great, but I run this kind of company or I have this kind of brand and it doesn’t work for me.”
To me, that was so exciting. I would say, “No, no, wait a minute. You could do this, and you could make a map and you could make this.” I would run through a bunch of different content ideas off the cuff. I love that.
WHERE DO STORY IDEAS COME FROM?
Then people would say, “How did you do that? How did you find these hidden gems in what I thought was an empty cave?”
I couldn’t explain it, and that really bothered me. I couldn’t explain what was happening in my head. I just knew how to do it, and that’s not a good answer when you’re supposed to be helping others.
I spent a lot of time trying to unpack and really think critically about what is the series of steps that are happening in my brain that allows me to find these different combinations?
TWO CRITERIA TO NAIL DOWN
What I essentially came up with is I run through a list of focuses, things we can talk about. We could focus on people. We could focus on data, on history, on curating something.
Then I run through a list of formats. We could do that through writing video, audio infographics, et cetera. That was really the system. My brain had this giant list of potential focuses and this giant growing list of potential formats.
Now we have TikTok and Bytes and all these other platforms that pop up and my brain was just mixing and matching until it found combinations that worked well.
I figured the Content Field Framework is sharing that exact formula. Here are a bunch of focuses you should consider. Here are a bunch of formats to consider.
Here is a system that allows you to mix and match them in a way that you could sit down, thinking I’m not a creative person, and all you’ve got to do is mix and match different combinations and see what works. You’ve got a hundred different ways to tell that same story.
GOOD CONTENT SHOWS
Brandon Birkmeyer: [00:32:02] What would you say was the first, most obvious difference (in terms of the messaging and how you think about creating stories) when you started to work in the marketing space? What was a different slant that the marketers had versus the journalist?
Melanie Deziel: [00:33:05] The very first thing I noticed (because I was coming in with a totally clean slate, I had never worked in marketing) was that everyone was so obsessed with telling everyone else why they were awesome.
That was deeply different psychologically from journalism where the personas almost disappear into the background. I am a vessel for this information. My opinion is irrelevant. I’m gathering and delivering.
DIFFERENT TYPES OF THOUGHT
It’s a totally different way of being. That’s what was shocking to me. I just remember thinking man, even you think this is boring. This is not good. No one’s going to like this stuff. We have to find a way to get closer to our audience’s actual desires and expectations.
It seems so obvious to me because that’s what we had been doing all the time. I’ve joked many times before that I’m really just doing journalism and hopefully no one catches on. I’m just wearing a marketing hat and doing journalism.
It was trying to help marketers understand that just because you have a new product coming out doesn’t mean your consumers woke up and said, “I can’t wait to read a press release.” We have got to find a way to make this relevant for them. We have got to try to approach it in a different way.
STORY IDEAS CONNECT WITH YOUR AUDIENCE
In journalism school, they teach you to show, don’t tell. It’s not my job to tell the audience what I think, what I feel, what they should do, but to show them what happened, paint a picture for them, give them as much detail as I can so that they can make those decisions on their own.
In an ideal world, objective, good journalism, that’s what you do. You gather and you present it so that they can make those choices.
I tried to bring that mentality. Okay, right now we’re telling our audience that our products are great. Our customers love us and they should buy from us. What if we showed them that instead? What if, instead of telling them our customers love us, why don’t we interview customers and let them say it instead of saying they love us?
Instead of telling them that our products are awesome and they should be buying, let’s demonstrate how it works. Let’s find real people who are using it, who believe it and share that instead.
KNOW WHAT YOUR AUDIENCE WANTS
I think when you focus on showing instead of telling, you naturally have to take a more storytelling approach because it requires you to build a demonstration, to provide evidence, to talk to other sources. It guides you.
If you ask, “Am I showing or telling right now, how could I show instead of tell?” That’s a really simple question you could ask yourself to get more toward that journalist mindset of demonstrating your value instead of just declaring it.
Brandon Birkmeyer: [00:35:31] It forces you to ask yourself if you have heard enough from your customers to tell their story. If you take this approach, you’re forced to explore the question, is this actually working for people? What are they saying about it? How do they talk about it?
Melanie Deziel: [00:36:17] One hundred percent. The other thing if you’re looking for one little change you can make that’s going to make a big difference is to really think about using other sources.
By this, I mean every good journalist knows they’re quoting other people. Unless it’s an opinion, they’re very rarely sharing what they think. They’re finding experts. They’re finding authorities, professors, researchers, influencers, celebrities, anyone who can speak with authority on a topic.
FIND AUTHORITIES ON YOUR CONTENT
I think in marketing, we often forget that and we talk only about ourselves. We only quote our executives. We only use the perspectives of our employees.
Anytime you create something if you just ask, “How can I bring a reputable source? Who is someone who can I interview? Who could I quote, who can I ask about this?”
If you’re quoting someone, you have to explain who they are. You have to use their quotes, and you have to find a way to add that into the story. Again, that naturally guides you toward being a little more story-driven because now you have characters.
You have to create some sort of interplay between what you’re saying and what they’re saying. Just ask every time is there someone else I could ask about this, ideally someone outside of the company, even if it is a vendor, a partner, a customer. Who can I ask? Who else could weigh in here?
PITFALLS TO AVOID CREATING STORY IDEAS
Brandon Birkmeyer: [00:37:30] I want to validate that this an easy thing to figure out overnight. This is why there are people that coach on it and help with it. You’re validated in your feelings that this is not an easy thing. It might feel like it should be easy, but it’s not.
I’m sure there’s a lot of mistakes when people are getting going and doing it on their own. Are there some things out there that you see that people are often getting wrong, especially at the beginning of their journey that hopefully we can get them to skip?
Melanie Deziel: [00:38:07] Yeah. In an attempt to keep it positive, I think that the biggest mistake that is almost self-sabotaging in a way is just biting off more than you can chew.
Just like you said, it’s complicated, it’s hard. It’s time-consuming. If you wake up tomorrow after you listened to this podcast, you get all inspired and say, “I’m going to do three YouTube videos a week,” more power to you. Let me know how I can help.
DON’T TRY TO DO IT ALL AT ONCE
However, that’s a really tough transition to make out of nowhere. I’m not saying you want to lower your expectations. I don’t want you to lose that ambition and that inspiration, but think realistically about what you can achieve.
Start small and build up from there. If you decide that you need to have the posts go from nothing to posting on Instagram every day, or writing a blog post every day, there’s a really good chance you’re going to burn out and then that will stop altogether.
I would much rather see you consistently do something once a week or twice a month for some standard of time (and then grow as you get better at it) than see you go all out for a week or a month and then totally stop.
That’s not going to serve you or your customers. I would say just don’t bite off more than you can chew. Start small and build up because you’ll feel more confident. You’ll get more efficient and your customers will get used to it.
PRACTICE MAKES PERFECT
Brandon Birkmeyer: [00:39:23] How do you move beyond just creating to creating something great? Can anyone do it? Is it just practice over time? What is that thing that starts to separate the really good content from when you’re just getting it done?
Melanie Deziel: [00:39:59] Yeah, two things. I think one is really having your finger on the pulse of what’s working and responding to that information.
They always say if you want to write, you write every day. Even if some of it’s bad, you listen, you get feedback, you edit, you get better over time.
Stephen King didn’t win awards for the very first thing he ever scratched out on a notepad. It takes time to be great. You have to practice that skill. These skills are like any. The more you do it, the more confident and better you’ll be.
BE CONSISTENT, ESPECIALLY WHEN STARTING OUT
The other thing that it takes is consistency. That’s why I think the advice not to start too big is really important. Think about the things that you love, the people that you follow on social media, the shows that you tune into and watch on TV.
The reason you can grab onto that is because you know when it’s coming. It always shows up. If you showed up at the movie theater and the hours were irregular and half the time it was closed, you probably wouldn’t keep going back.
Same thing with a restaurant. If the hours were not posted, or totally random where they were posted and then not adhered to, you’d feel betrayed. I thought I was coming here for a meal and now I can’t even get in the door.
You don’t want to give that same feeling to your viewers, subscribers, followers, whoever they may be. Picking something consistent and showing up, even if it’s less frequent, is really important for building a loyal following, building relationships.
Don’t stand up your audience. If you’ve invited them to a date, just keep showing up. Over time that trust will grow and forgiveness will grow if you come to a point where you can’t deliver on something some week. There’s an understanding at that point, I would say.
REALLY USE YOUR UNLIMITED STORY IDEAS
If you follow any sort of reputable Youtuber, you’ll see at the end of every episode, they always say, “Follow me! I put out new videos every Thursday.” They know that consistency is what keeps people coming back and they can promise that to their audience.
Whatever that looks like for you, you don’t have to declare it and say, “Follow us on Instagram. We post new videos, new photos every day,” but deliver on that promise. You don’t have to tell them necessarily, but show them that you’re going to show up and keep delivering things that provide value to them regularly.
I don’t know if you’ve seen a series that came out recently on Netflix called Cheer about a particular cheerleading team that wins all their competitions, essentially.
PRACTICE UNTIL YOU CAN’T GET IT WRONG
She had a quote where she said, “We practice until we get it right. Then we practice until we don’t get it wrong.” I think that’s a good distinction there. You keep practicing until you get good and then you keep going until you’re never bad, or mostly never bad.
I think that’s a good way to think about it. You don’t have to aim for great. Right now we’re trying to get good, and then once we’re good, we can aim for great. It’s a nice way to get there.
Brandon Birkmeyer: [00:43:24] Everyone that I look up to, that’s exactly what I feel the message is. I’ll acknowledge that one of the greats out here in LA passed away really tragically this week, Coby Bryant. Not to put a damper on this, but he was a huge idol of mine.
He used to say that you didn’t just try to get as good as the game. You tried to get it so that the practice was actually harder than the real game so that by the time you go to the game, the real game felt easy.
HAVE A STRONG WORK ETHIC AND GOOD RESOURCES
Melanie Deziel: [00:44:14] That’s the Mamba Mentality, right? That’s how he was. That was his work ethic. You could go to one practice with Kobe and he could show you how he shoots free throws.
It doesn’t mean you’re going to be as good the next day. He’s put in that work. He shows up consistently to those practices every single day. That’s what made him so great at what he did.
Brandon Birkmeyer: [00:44:32] I think that’s a good thing to end the show on, because at the end of the day, this all getting around the right people that can teach you the things that you need to do.
That’s probably what is going to separate you and your business over time. Are you getting around the right people? Are you putting into practice these things you’re learning over and over and over again?
Thank you, Melanie, for coming on today and sharing what you have been doing all your life, bringing it off the stage and into the podcast to us today.
Melanie Deziel: [00:45:15] Thanks for having me and let me share my story.
WHERE TO FIND MELANIE
Website: www.storyfuel.co
Melanie’s book: The Content Fuel Framework
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