Business > Merchant Voice

Content is King and Time is Your Queen

In your business, you must focus on two things: content and time. They are both equally important and inextricably intertwined.

Great content will never go out of style. Seriously, there’s a reason why they call the payments to actors, producers, writers, and other artists “royalties”. Create enough great content and you can live like a king, too.

While you may not be in the business of creating pure entertainment, your e-commerce store should still be glittering with your amazing content. If it isn’t, get to work right away! Your product descriptions, images, and videos (yes, you should be making videos) should all be your original content.

Creating your own content provides benefits to both search engines and your audience.

Search engines are becoming smarter every day. Don’t think for a second that Google isn’t working on technology to decipher the content and meaning of images. If you’re using the same manufacturer-provided image as all of your competitors, there’s no reason for Google to show the image from your site over a competitor’s. By having a unique image, you have a better chance of showing up in the universal results. The same is true for creating a video.

Your audience will also appreciate your original content. Supposedly, you are an expert in your niche. Your customers want to know what you *think* about the product. They want to know how it will solve their problem. You have the ability to describe and promote the product in a far more detailed and extensive way than Amazon. Use that to your advantage! Your customers will reward you for the attention to detail.

Case in point: I was trying to purchase a specific color pattern of beach ball this week. I went to Amazon and the description didn’t match the product image. I had no idea what I was going to get. I ended up at a site that described the pattern, showed a matching picture, and indicated both the deflated and inflated size. Their pricing was good and their service was fast. I’ll remember that store. All of their content — images and description — were original.

Your content also extends to your social media presence. Just recently, Facebook announced that they determine to whom they show your posts (by now you shouldn’t be surprised that FB doesn’t automatically show your posts to all of your fans) based upon the quality of the content. They supposedly have an algorithm to determine if your posts are relevant, original, and of high quality. If you’re creating your own images and video, you’re guaranteed to have unique content!

Never forget that Content is King and should be a focal point of your business.

Your other focal point is time. As a business owner, your time is extremely limited. You must spend as much time as you can creating efficiencies in your operation so that you can devote as much time as possible to devising and creating original content.

In my business, I look for efficiencies in every crack and crevice. Any activity that is done on a daily (or near-daily) basis is thoroughly analyzed.

If you can save 2 minutes a day on some minute task, you’ve just saved yourself 500 minutes a year (assuming 50 five-day work weeks). That 2 minutes turns into one extra day per year. Multiple this by many activities per day and by many employees and you can uncover untold sums of money in your business.

Creating original content requires rather large blocks of uninterrupted time in order to plan and think. To create this time, you must squeeze every bit of efficiency out of your operation as possible.

No efficiency is too small. For example, I’ve spent time with employees sharing with them keyboard shortcuts for common tasks. In the warehouse, I’ll move trash cans a few feet to cut down on the number of steps employees must take. Just think how many steps they take per year!

In my business, we take all of our own photos and create all of our own videos. To create an efficient operation, we built a half-dozen sets in our studio. Like a sitcom, we are basically able to flip a switch to fire up our lights. Within minutes, we can be shooting. This frees up a ton of time so we can think about the most important part of the video: the concept.

We spend hours each week tweaking every script. We are able to do this because we have created a supremenly efficient production environment.

Devoting the most amount of time to the most important part of content creation (the creative vision) is how you become successful in creating your content and by extension, your kingdom.

Jamie Salvatori
Jamie Salvatori
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