How To Efficiently Publish Content To Become A Leader In Your Niche With Shawn Smith From Trizone [AMP 043]
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- A bit about Trizone and what Shawn does there as a “jack of all trades."
- What it’s like working with a small team and how they work as efficiently as possible.
- What fluidity means to Shawn and how it helps his team be more effective and productive when it comes to creating great content.
- How automating some of the process helps Shawn and his team be more efficient and save time.
- How and why the Trizone team works with subject matters to help them with their content creation and thought-leadership. Also, Shawn talks about how he gets into contact with them and gets them to contribute.
- Shawn’s best tips for working with subject matter experts and collaborating with a remote team of people.
- Information about the Trizone workflow process and why it works for them.
- Advice for a small team who is looking to become an authority in their niche through content creation.
- “Once we’ve built a piece of content, we start to go and jiggle it. We use the social media template and then we start building it out. It’s so quick and easy.”
- “We spend a lot of time with [experts] talking about their subject matters in depth because they do bring a wealth of information that, clearly, we will never have.”
- “Stay on point. Whatever you believe is right, stick with it."
How To Efficiently Publish Content To Become A Leader In Your Niche With Shawn Smith From @TriathlonZone
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Nathan: Publishing content consistently is one of the best ways to become known as a thought leader. Just look at the brands that do it extremely well like Red Bull, Subaru, and Trizone. Trizone is one of the top publishers of triathlon content in the world. Today, on the Actionable Marketing Podcast, you and I are chatting with Shawn Smith, the co owner at Trizone. You’re about to learn how to create lots of content as efficiently as possible with pretty limited resources. To do that, you’re going to learn what Shawn calls fluidity in the publishing process. You’ll also learn how to improve your content by involving subject matter experts from outside of your business in your content creation process. You’re going to learn why automating manual processes helps you focus on getting more done. I’m Nathan from CoSchedule. Let’s check in with Shawn. Hey Shawn, thanks a lot for being on the show today. Shawn: Hey Nathan, thanks for having me. Nathan: I’m excited to have you. I was wondering if you could just kick us off, Shawn, by telling me a little bit about Trizone. Shawn: Absolutely. Trizone is an Australian based small publishing website specifically around triathlons, the sport, the multidiscipline sport. It’s the number one site here in Australia, probably in the Asia Pacific Region now probably as well. We spent a lot of time talking to professional athletes as well the age group athletes and write a lot about trials and tribulations as well as sports and nutrition. I have a lot of sport sites people come on. It’s a really good site. Nathan: I know you guys are doing a lot of great things there. I’m just wondering. Tell me a little bit about what you do at Trizone. Shawn: I’m jack of all trades. I’ve got a small team as well, but me personally, I run the show. One thing that I really love doing though is overseeing the majority of the operational side of the business as well as rolling my sleeves up and then talking to a little group of a pro athlete type and grow relationships with those athletes. I spend a lot of time talking to them about their journeys. That’s ultimately the things that I like doing, is really getting to the cracks of why someone has got to the sport where they are and how they got there. Everyone has a story no matter how big a name or how small a name is. Everyone has a story. I love to bring those to fruition during the sessions I have with them. Nathan: You touched on just a little bit of your team. I was wondering about that. How big is the team? Who helps you publish all that content in Trizone? Shawn: We have some full timers as well as some part timers but mostly, there are probably about six of us. The number one thing for me is the social side of things. The content is great and we certainly try to push out as much content as we can. As I mentioned in a previous discussion, we try to get one to two pieces a day. For a small team, it’s pretty tough especially when you have long stories to tell. Moving forward, certainly, we’re getting there. We don’t think we’ve ever said we’ve solved the world’s problems pushing content out but for me, we’re still working on what’s the magic formula around the social part and I think we’ve spoken about that before, Nathan, too. Utilizing CoSchedule for me personally gives me a top down view straight away about where we’re missing things but also the automation piece which is for a small team, you’ve got to be lean, you’ve got to be efficient, you’ve got to be flexible. I know we spoke earlier about fluidity in our storytelling and my story but being able to move things around in a rapid sense. If there’s a new story that’s been created that we might need to push out or the old stories, then have everything follow that. That’s so important for us. Nathan: You mentioned that a smaller team and process helps you boost your efficiency. I was wondering if you could tell me a bit about that. What processes have you guys implemented to help the team work as efficiently as possible? Shawn: I suppose because I’m not necessarily a control freak but certainly, there are certain aspects that I still take over. That’s the scheduling of the work. Our formula is pretty straightforward. We know that each week we have a certain type of content that we want to get out each week. It maybe a feature article each week. A feature article may be around a headline story, an athlete, an event, or some heavily opinionated piece. As long as that’s done each week and we know what piece that’s going to be about, we then focus on the next tier down, which is our standard content. I call it standard anyway. But a standard content which may be around nutrition, maybe we have a piece around training, or which we’re now focusing a little bit more of my attention on, which we just put a new person onto our systems and these are the reviews of our product and services. It might be a review of a bike, or a bag, or a piece of new swimming goggles or something like that. We know that what style of content needs to be delivered each week. That’s a pretty easy task for us. Nathan: You mentioned fluidity just a little bit ago. I want to dive into that because we chatted before and you talked about that topic. Tell me about fluidity. How would you define that? What do you mean by that? Shawn: I probably should talk about what it never used to mean to me first to give a bit more context. The fluidity part, before when we didn’t have it, we would have a spreadsheet or because we use WordPress as our publishing platform as well as all the other social media platforms, having all those in sync was near an impossibility, there’s a lot of guess work. There’s a lot of are we ready to go? Hey, hang on, three or four different windows open in Explorer or your web browser, Safari or Firefox. I can’t believe I just said Internet Explorer, actually. I don’t know why I said that. Does anyone still use it? I should say Chrome or Safari. Having those sitting open and making sure they’re clicking save, or send, or post, or tweet, or whatever, I’m sure some people may have said, “Well, you can do that with other platforms. There’s other things that can help you post things at the right time.” But then not all are in sync and that’s the question. That’s the challenge that most people will have. When searching for something, I needed to make sure that the major thing was centered around the content publishing piece and making sure that when I needed to publish something, everything else followed. That was what it wasn’t before. When I talk about fluidity now, is being able to drag things around. I coined the phrase, Outlook and steroids. That’s how I look at CoSchedule. It allows me to drag and drop things really quickly and the subsequent social media components to it are moving around. I may have something that I’ve planned to schedule this week but it may be a recurring post for the next week to two or three and I need to move it out. Essentially, just dragging it for one day to another and changing times if I need to. That’s what I call the fluidity. It’s just moving things around. In our business, in our style of business, some things really need to be moved really quickly. If I’m on the move and I can just open up my laptop, jump into CoSchedule, and move things and it’s done. It’s less than a minute to do. Coming back to the small team environment, I don’t have a dedicated person that’s just overseeing publishing times and when things need to be moved. We don’t have that person. Like I said, it’s probably me but the team just rely on me to make sure things are getting scheduled when they need to and they know when their tasks are required as well. The side note to that it when they need to know when their things are required based on the requirements of that week or that month. Nathan: Part of that is automation. You’ve tried to avoid some manual processes. I know you do that really smartly so you can focus. Tell me more about that. Why is automating some of the manual things important to you? Shawn: Time. Just so simply, time. And then, ensuring we don’t miss anything. One of the things that I did do actually when I first jumped into CoSchedule, I hope no one ever looks at these because I think they’re probably a little bit antiquated now. Just to prompt me when I create a potentially new article and I’ve created those tasks that are inside of the, since it’s not the social media component, this is just the task that are required for us to complete something. For instance, that might be to create audio and who’s assigned to do that. Sometimes, I might require an assistant in doing some research on a particular athlete because I may not have time to and then I’ll actually provide that to someone who I think they may not know that athlete. Therefore, it gives them some insights into that athlete also. They’ll spend probably an hour or two doing research. That for me it’s just those quick buildup of tasks and assignment of those tasks is really easy. This is probably the thing that I’m a little bit embarrassed to actually say first off, is I really never use the social media templates. I know you and I talked about this a while ago, Nathan. Thank you. I actually use them now. I hate to say I kind of was doing this somewhat manually. I was taking somewhat of a bit of a guess and thinking how long can this story run based on its content. Rather than actually saying numbers, which I’m such a numbers guy. I’m a numbers driven individual around performance of website and KPIs and those types of things but never really did on a social media site that often. But now, moving forward, certainly now, when we’re building out our piece of content, we will build all of the headlines based on different variations for all of the posts that we’re required to go out for that piece of content during the process of building the content itself. That, for me, is outstanding because once we’ve built that piece of content, we start to go and jiggle it. We use the social media template and then we start building it out. It’s so quick and easy.
![We spend a lot of time with [experts] talking about their subject matters ...](https://media.coschedule.com/uploads/talk-with-experts.png?w=3840&q=75)
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