Whether you are a business owner, account manager or a virtual assistant, you can learn and benefit from this guide by implementing it in your business or your client’s business.
The Content Factory process is structured into four main phases: Produce, Process, Post, Promote.
Simply put, it starts with setting up the digital foundation for your Content Factory, followed by producing content, processing it and amplifying it.
This guide will help you gain a deep understanding of the entire system and also provide step by step instructions for all the four phases.
The Content Factory is a 4-stage process designed to help you become visible on Google by leveraging Al tools and maximizing the use of your best content across various social platforms.
The four stages are: Produce, Process, Post, Promote
Produce: Generate content that proves you do what you say you do in the places you say you do it in; capturing any activity done by you or your team as photos and videos.
Process: Transforming this raw content using Al tools like ChatGPT and Descript, into blog posts and web content, sprinkled with Google’s E-E-A-T components, ensuring that your content is not just helpful for your audience but also “helpful content” by Google’s standards, giving you the authentic and timeless SEO boost that your business deserves.
Post: Distribute your processed content across various platforms to maximize reach.
Promote: Boost your visibility with targeted marketing efforts.
There is an initial stage called Plumbing which is like setting up the Content Factory – the foundational elements like Google My Business (GMB) to ensure your business is easily found on Google Maps and search results.
The Content Factory Process: Your Hidden Key to Local SEO Success
Every stage of the Content Factory has an exponential effect on your overall SEO efforts.By properly utilizing each subcomponent, you can rank for any of your desired keywords by feeding authentic and timeless signals to Google’s Knowledge Graph, precisely what Google is looking for.
Let’s break down the four stages of the Content
Factory so you can see how each step plays a crucial role in your digital marketing success.
Before we start, we make sure plumbing is in place.
We then start with content or raw ingredients (Produce), which we then Process, Post and Promote.
In each stage, we perform Metrics Analysis Action to optimize and improve the workflow so we can maximize results.
Plumbing
We have seen people making the same basic mistakes when it comes to their GMB and SEO or whatever you want to call it: their websites aren’t organized properly.
For example, the location and service page isn’t linking to their GMB, the website doesn’t load fast enough, and they don’t have retargeting. These are all basic things that we coach several thousand
As a local service business owner, you have spent countless hours working with various tools essential for your business.
When you shift your focus to working on your business rather than in your business, you need to learn to use several types of tools and software, such as CRM software, call tracking tools, and various ad platforms.
One of the biggest challenges you’ll encounter while learning to use new tools is that the data you need to make decisions is scattered across different business tools and their interfaces. It can be overwhelming.
You don’t have to manage this yourself. An account manager (or young adult) can help you set up your digital plumbing effectively by going through our Digital Plumbing Course and Digital Plumbing Checklist.
Digital Plumbing is the critical process of connecting all your platforms, ensuring that the different tools you use work in sync to help you make decisions.
This process ensures that crucial data from each tool is passed on to the other platforms.
For example, your web analytics should receive data from your call tracking software. Your ad platforms should receive data from your CRM to identify key business actions and allow you to optimize those actions.
Here is a diagram to understand how we do
Plumbing.
Stage 1: Produce
The second stage, “Produce,” requires business owners to actively create new content based on their expertise. This is raw, unprocessed material created by the business owner.
It involves recording various forms of content, ranging from photos and videos to hosting Zoom sessions and crafting social media posts tailored to a specific audience, essentially demonstrating their experience and expertise in various ways.
In this stage, the focus should be on producing high-quality content, as it forms the foundation for all subsequent stages.
When the original content is good, each stage of the Content Factory will amplify its quality many times over. However, if the original content is poor, no amount of amplification will make it better because zero multiplied by infinity is still zero.
Content is the foundation of the Content Factory process, and every single piece of this content is used to demonstrate your E-E-A-T (Expertise, Experience, Authority and Trust) which is what Google is looking for.
All your content – whether it’s Zoom webinars, videos of your speaking events, or just your everyday social media posts and photos of your team and yourself at work, showcases your “Expertise,” “Experience,” and “Authority.” This builds “Trust.”
Zoom/Speaking
Raw video footage from your Zoom sessions, webinars, as well as speaking at events and conferences that demonstrates your knowledge about your industry or vertical.
Podcasts
Networking with others related to your vertical and doing podcasts on the topics that resonate with your ideal audience. Here is an email template that a virtual assistant can use to help a business owner get more invitations to podcasts.
Social Media Posts
Start by sharing raw content, such as a photo, video, an interview, or a Zoom recording. This raw content can then be turned into an article published on a high-profile site.
The authority of the content increases – not because the content itself has changed, but because of where it’s been published.
Once the article is live on the higher-profile site, you can share it again on social platforms.
At each stage, the value of the content increases, and you can share it repeatedly to maximize its impact.
1. Posts with a Hook and Something
When choosing a caption for your social post, craft a few lines that entice people to click. The goal is to use a strong hook-something engaging enough to draw your audience’s interest. It can be a key fact or an “aha” moment relevant to the content that you’re sharing.
Every sentence in a social post is its own paragraph.
This is called broetry – a style which improves readability and engagement.
Avoid phrases like, “Thank you, XYZ.com, for mentioning me,” or “Look, I’m famous now!”
Instead, make it about your audience. Be a humble servant. Here’s an example
“My fellow Black Americans often face challenges in building good credit.”
“But it’s easier than you think—here’s how...”
The key factor is if we can get ten people to engage within the first hour, then it’ll take off, even if you have a “nobody” account.
2. Photos of You and Your Team
3. Short 1-Minute Videos that Directly Address the PAA
1: Questions Identified By Your Account Manager
Creating one-minute videos is all about authenticity and taking the first steps, even if they don’t look good. By not trying it, you’ll never know the great result that you could accomplish by creating short videos.
You want to use one-minute videos to tell your stories, the things that made you who you are, and to drive interaction.
It does not have to be something as dramatic as a time of hardship, or a life changing event. It can be anything
ordinary, day-to-day and relatable.
Any stories about your values and your beliefs – something that reflects your “Why.” An example of a Why video by Sam DeMaio of Showcase
Remodels.
2. Make one-minute videos answering the People Also Ask questions for your industry and vertical
You can start with the most basic PAA questions in your niche, such as:
People also ask :
In what order should you renovate a bathroom?
And then continue to add more content, answering more specific questions, e.g. for specific keywords like “bathroom remodeling Miami, FL” “kitchen renovation, Gilbert AZ”.
Because you are an expert in your industry, answering about 50 PAA questions would not take you more than an hour to record, if you answer each question in 1 minute.
Once you have recorded these answers, your VA(s) can repurpose them into articles following the Content Factory process
.
3. Four components of a one-minute video
• Hook (from 0-3 seconds)
• Ignite pain/pleasure (from 3-15 seconds)
• Describe the solution (from 15-50 seconds)
• Call to Action (from 50-60 seconds)
Go Ahead and Make Your One-Minute Video
4. Talk About Other Local Businesses: By Elevating Others You Help Yourself in Many Ways
The best way to support local businesses is to simply talk about them.
Views on Google Maps are considered high-intent views because they indicate that someone is actively looking for information about a specific location or business. These views often lead to actions like visiting the place or making a purchase.
Views on Google Maps are considered high-intent views because they indicate that someone is actively looking for information about a specific location or business. These views often lead to actions like visiting the place or making a purchase.
To support friends and local businesses, the most effective way is to talk about them with enthusiasm and recommend them to others, both in person and online. Word-of-mouth recommendations can have a significant impact on driving traffic and business to local establishments.
iCloud Photos and Google Photos
Content can be captured during different activities-events, conferences, workplace gatherings, or even a casual lunch with your team-and uploaded to platforms like iCloud, Google Photos, or Dropbox.
This material forms the basis of the Content Factory, hence needs to be of the highest quality, because you amplify what you start with. It is then processed by virtual assistants through the other stages of the Content Factory to create the desired impact and establish the business owners’ authority in any particular industry.
Effortless Tagging: Google Photos’ Al Does All the Work
When you use your smartphone to record photos and videos, Google Photos uses Al to analyze and understand the content.
It identifies objects, people, places, and activities, then assigns relevant tags to make it easier for you to find and organize them.
For example, if you have a photo of a beach, Google Photos might tag it with “beach,” “ocean,” “sand,” and
“umbrella.”
This automatic tagging forms a key signal for E-E-A-T because it tells Google you’re honest about where you say you are and who you’re with.
Except iCloud, all the other services take a long time to upload huge files. But Apple makes automatic sharing hard – or at least I’ve not managed to figure it out yet.
I’ve done some in-depth analysis on the pros and cons of the various services (Apple Photos, Google Photos, Amazon Photos, Dropbox, Verizon Cloud), posted on basecamp and reviewed in Office Hours.
On videos longer than 2 minutes, Google Photos will often hang, requiring me to manually select it from my phone and hit the upload button.
I compare storage capacity, tagging capabilities, upload speed, sharing features, and so forth.
They all max out at 2 TB except for our unlimited Google team drive and iCloud at 6 TB.
To add people to photos in Google Photos, open the photo, tap More > People > Edit, and then tap Ada next to the person you want to add.
This is how geotagging information appears next to the photo, showing where it was taken.
Google values authenticity, including real photos and videos that show you doing what you say you do, in the places you say you’re in.
Incorporating geotagged photos and videos on your websites and social media sends a strong signal to Google that your business is authentic. The goal is to trigger a knowledge panel by using all the content you create and running it through all the stages of the Content Factory.
Ensure everything is linked together properly so
Google can pick up all your signals for the Knowledge Graph and connect them with both your personal brand and your business entity.
Stage 2: Process
Process: Virtual Assistants (VAs) handle tasks in the
“Process” stage of the Content Factory, by processing the content from the first stage “Produce” using Al tools such as Descript and ChatGPT, then tracking all the assets in the Content Library which is exponentially better than a content calendar.
Descript
Descript is an all-in-one tool that not only helps extract transcripts from videos but also processes videos in additional ways.
ChatGPT
There’s so much more we can do with ChatGPT than just basic things like processing video transcripts.
ChatGPT can thoroughly search the web, scrape content, and even help brainstorm ideas for successfully running a business in specific locations.
It can also audit any page of your website, rating it on a scale from 1 to 10 to determine if you are addressing all the key People Also Ask (PAA) questions for your target keywords and ideal audience. This allows your account manager or VAs to fine-tune the pages and enhance their SEO.
We teach how to use ChatGPT to process content intelligently, using active listening skills, sprinkling the content with real stories and photos so it complies with the E-E-A-T guidelines.
Liana Ling also shared some great insights on how you can use ChatGPT along with an additional feature called Code Interpreter.
Remember, ChatGPT is an assistant, not a replacement for your VA.
Stage 3: Post
Post: When VAs or account managers have successfully processed your content in various ways, the next step is to post it across all channels and platforms.
This includes your website, social media channels like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, TikTok, YouTube, GMB and other places.
All the pages (whether web or social) where your content shows up, play a role in building your authority. These pages are your Properties. Learn more about the
3 components of authority (Proof, People, Properties)
Did you know, the best way to “do SEO” (as people call it) is by posting your content on social media.
Google sees whatever you post, and it directly impacts your ranking.
YouTube
Videos such as webinar recordings, conference speeches, interviews, and podcasts are excellent sources of ‘microcontent.’
You can post them directly on YouTube and other channels, and after repurposing them into an article, you can post them again on all social channels.
Facebook is an excellent platform for discovering and distributing evergreen content. Because of ads and tracking, Facebook is the top platform determining someone’s greatest hits. If you’ve defined the right Goals, Content, and Targeting with your content strategy, repurposing content on Facebook is simple and effective.
However, compare the reach you get from a public figure page above vs. a professional profile below:
The reach you get by boosting posts on a professional profile
(Facebook)
Therefore, in addition to a public figure page, we recommend having a personal profile as well, in which you should turn on the professional mode, to be able to boost your posts.
Boosting content directly from your profile is proven to have a several times better reach compared to what you get with a public figure page.
Follow these steps to find posts to repurpose and distribute across your Facebook profile and page:
• 1. Go to your Facebook profile or page.
• 2. Find a post that is performing well using our Standards of Excellence, one of the components of MAA (Perform)
As a general rule of thumb, look for
high-engaging content that is “evergreen” (meaning it’s relevant at any time).
• Click on “Posts” on the left side, then the search bar on the right side (type any date or keyword).
Go to Business Manager to manage this Page.
• Scroll down until a sticky header appears at the top (4 drop-downs:
Name, Timeline, Year, Month). Select any date.
3. Consider how you want to repurpose the post using your goals, content, and targeting (GCT).
• Repost the content directly to your Facebook profile or page.
• Cross-post the content to another social media platform.
• Make a one-minute video on the same topic and post the video.
• Create an article around the topic and post it to your blog.
• If the content is a video, transcribe it, and create a post and/or article from it.
• To see how we do this, refer to the “Video Content” section at the end of this guide.
• 4. Keep a record of repurposed posts in your Content Library. Click on the timestamp and copy the URL to copy the specific link of the post.
LinkedIn is another platform from which you can repurpose pillar/evergreen posts into many different pieces of microcontent.
1. Go to your LinkedIn feed and select the “Me” tab in the upper right-hand corner. Choose “Posts & Activity” from the drop-down menu.
2. Find a post that is performing well using our Standards of Excellence.
3. Consider how you want to repurpose the post using GCI.
• Cross-post the content to another social media platform.
• Make a one-minute video on the same topic and post the video.
• Write a short article around the topic, and publish it on your blog.
• If the content is a video, write a post or an article about it.
4. Keep a record of repurposed posts in your Content Library. To copy the specific link of the post, click on the three dots in the upper right-hand corner of the post and select “Copy link to post.
Company Website
While repurposing content to post on any channel including your company website, it is critical to consider your strategy.
A business strategy has three main components:
Goals, Content, and Targeting.
When you create or distribute content, think about your end goal.
– What type of content do you need to produce to achieve this?
see this content?
– And what demographics or audiences should
This is the idea behind Goals, Content, and Targeting (or #GCT). You can produce and distribute content more effectively by considering these components.
Slightly repurpose the content into syndicated blog posts and memes when you post to your profile.
We have hundreds of Facebook profiles and public figure posts that we can turn into blog posts and Linkedin posts with little to no effort.
You can use your judgment on what is more engaging or look at the number of likes/reactions and comments as an indicator of power.
Stage 4: Promote
How we use the Thank you Machine, promote content using Dollar a Day Ads, use Social Commenting and Roundup/Listicles the right way.
Promote: The best content is then boosted using our Dollar a Day method.
We also use a neat trick called the “Thank You Machine” to generate influence at this stage..
This is based on the concept that: It’s not what you say about yourself that matters but what others say about you. You gain authority and trust by making a positive impact on your community.
What’s a “Thank You Machine”?
The “Thank You Machine” is your “trick” to generate influence.
It’s not what you say about yourself that matters but what others say about you.
You gain authority and trust by making a positive impact on your community.
Your “Thank You Machine” will make ripples, leading to endorsements and inbounding potential clients who read what others say about you.
What are Positive Mentions
Mentions are all the appearances, quotes, or places where you have been mentioned online, such as your customer reviews or stories of how you helped X achieve Y with Z.
We know that when someone else talks about us, it’s more authoritative than when we talk about what we do.
So, we assemble all our top mentions in the Content Library. We then score them based on our 3 Components of Authority on a 30-point scale:
What, Who, and Where (What was said, Who said it, and Where it was posted) to decide which of these mentions are strong and authoritative enough to be boosted.
Boosting our best mentions helps leverage them to their fullest potential in building authority.
