How to Turn your BIG VISION into a Content Strategy

If you struggle with this, you're not alone! Here are some ways to align your BIG VISION (your purpose) with a content strategy and how to put your WHY into WORDS!  

I created a brand new free cheat sheet guide for editing your social media videos. If you don't know every single social media platform out there today is now a video platform. And I think you're leaving a lot of visibility on the table.

If you're just creating a  video, publishing on YouTube and calling it good, we have all these other platforms, they're all favoring and even begging for video content right now. 

I put together this social video blueprint to give you some layout design ideas, templates that you can use to repurpose your video content on the different platforms that you're active on. I'm really excited about it because I think it's going to help a lot of people when they're trying to figure out how do I spend less time creating videos? Essentially, how do I reach more people without spending way more time creating the video content that I know will reach more people? So you can grab the social video blueprint at the bottom of this page.

I have an upcoming workshop, a social video editing workshop, where I'm going to walk you through how to create multipurpose video content. We're going to be using the new program from Adobe called Adobe Premiere Rush. It's actually free to use. I'm going to show you how to create and repurpose content or multipurpose content from one video edit. I will walk you through step by step in the social video workshop. The workshop is going to be live on May 19th, 2019 if you're listening to this after the fact, then you can probably catch the replay at some point.

If you're interested in the workshop, you can also just go download the social video blueprint below and you'll get an invitation to the workshop right on the thank you page or in the followup email that you get with the actual blueprint. So with that said, let's continue this conversation about how to turn your big vision into a content strategy. How to turn your why into words. 

Listen to Episode 36:  How to Turn Your Big Vision Into a Content Strategy

This is a recording that I did in the Video for Bloggers Facebook group. I did a live stream there. So if it sounds a little different or if it doesn't sound like my usual podcast episode, it's because I was live streaming.

I want to talk about a question that I asked in the group yesterday and I got a couple of responses.

Aligning Your Big Vision With Content Strategy

If you struggle with how to put your why into words and align that big vision with your video content strategy, you're definitely not alone. We've all been there, we all struggle with it.

I want to talk about some ways that you can essentially get into alignment with your content and figuring out how to put your why into words. And what I mean by alignment is just that you have some reason why you create content online.

Presumably, so that you can earn a living or earn some type of income, revenue, something with your expertise, right? A lot of us have blogs and we make money through blogging or we have youtube channels, uh, and we make money that way. We work with brand-sponsored content, affiliate marketing, selling our own digital products, maybe you have services or something.

We all have a way to attract people to those things. What I mean by alignment is just how do you track the right people, the people that you want to work with, the people that you can help through your content.

How do you track those people, the exact right people to you through your content? Everything needs to be in alignment. Like when your wheels are out of alignment in your car and things get a little bit wonky. My friend. Susan used the analogy recently,  like when you have a shopping cart where it has one monkey wheel and all the other wheels or like in a straight line, they know what they're doing, they've got their act together, but there's this one wonky wheel that's just like doing its own thing and making a lot of noise and disrupting everything. It's just out of alignment.

The Question

So I posted this question, "Do you struggle with aligning your big vision, your why, your purpose with an actual YouTube content strategy?", in the Facebook group yesterday.  I wanted to float this idea because it's something that I have struggled with since I started my blog and my YouTube channel.

It's an ongoing evolution for me and I think for all of us. When I first started my blog and my YouTube channel, my goal was to help families create and capture real livable moments on video. What I meant by that was like how to use a video camera to actually create videos from your family vacations or just everyday stuff of your families. I thought it's really important that families capture these moments and then actually do something with that video footage. Because I was just seeing a lot of people take videos or photos on their phone and just dump them onto Facebook and call it a photo album. So I wanted to help families figure out how to capture those moments and how to archive those moments and save them for later.

When I Started

So I started doing GoPro tutorials because we had to GoPro camera and I was interested in using it and learning more about it.  I noticed there wasn't a lot of tutorials out there or a content blog on how to use a GoPro as a family camera from a family perspective. So I started there and I started with beginner video editing and tutorials. That was the purpose of my blog and my youtube channel at first.

Bigger Vision

The thing is I always had kind of a bigger vision than that. I just didn't know like how to put it into words and how to describe it. And I thought that it was just too big of a vision. Like it wasn't streamlined enough.

It all made sense that my vision was "I want to help families create and capture livable moments on video." So I created tutorials and content to help families do exactly that. It makes sense from a blog standpoint and on a YouTube standpoint. But it's not as broad as my life's purpose. It' was not enough of like a personal hook for me to be really excited about it consistently every single day.

Answers

Greg said, "I think the biggest struggle for any YouTube channel is what to film and ideas.

Rita said, "Yes, I've been pondering long and hard and I think it's coming together."

I asked her, "So what is your big vision and purpose?"  She responded she felt like she needed to have some fancy answer for me which I think is common.  I had the same thought.

It needs to be fancy. It needs to be put together. It needs to make sense and flow and be concise.  I think the visions are just too big to be perfectly concise and perfectly fancy. 

Rita said, "I've struggled with coming up with it for so long that I decided I needed to start putting out content that my ladies are asking for and observe what makes them go crazy in a good way. And build on that. My blog's mission is to provide simple steps to living life beautifully."   That was perfect. That's a fancy answer. Her content revolves around fashion, beauty over 50, home decor and DIY. It makes perfect sense as a vision. 

Rita asked, "Could you give me an example of a big vision and purpose? Maybe I'm overthinking."

I think it's probably impossible to not overthink about things like this. If you've ever been on a Livestream here with me inside this group or on the VidProMom Facebook page, I help content creators like you reach a wider audience so you can impact more people, make more money through YouTube and social video content.

That is not my life's purpose though. That isn't one of the things that I do is very close to my purpose and my big vision. We'll talk about that in just a second.

Last week I was at a live event, a live group coaching retreat for the coaching program that I'm in. I was in California and I was hearing so many people's big visions, like big, big visions. And I realized that I love hearing about people's big visions. I really like and enjoy helping people come up with a content strategy and figure out what content they actually need to create to achieve the goals they want to achieve. Whether they, want to grow their YouTube channel, work with brands, or sell a product or a service. It's really easy for me to just dump out a hundred video topic ideas and teach somebody how to do the keyword research to figure out how people are going to find those things on YouTube.

Hearing about people's big visions about why they're doing all of this is so much fun. I don't think we talk about it or consider our big vision enough. So I want to give you two tips that really helped me to figure out my big, broad vision, my why, my purpose,  in just a second.

Is It Too Big?

So for a really long time I thought, I thought my vision was too big. I thought it didn't make any sense. Like it was probably just a group of random thoughts put together. Which is why I really niched it down to help families creating videos. Or why I narrow it down to, I help content creators reach a wider audience through YouTube and social video content. Those are like good elevator pitches, right? But they're not the big broad vision. The big purpose. As I said, I thought my vision was too big.

I started my business five years ago.  My kids were little and I had a full-time job. I had given up on the idea of entrepreneurship. I was a freelance web designer for five years before I took my full-time job and I got really burned out from that. I gave up on that. But even though I enjoyed my full-time job, I could tell that I had all this like creative energy and skills and experience that I was putting into my employer's business when I knew that I could be applying it to my own business.  I just didn't know how or why or like what the first steps should be. Like how do you actually do that? And I resisted it for a really long time. I resisted it because I couldn't see a clear path.

Entrepreneurship is Scary

If I can't see the clear path then why would I go down that path? That sounds really scary. Well, guess what? Entrepreneurship is scary. I know there are other people in however many billions of people there are in this world who are in the same exact spot, they know they have the skills, the expertise,  the creativity, the energy, and the drive to start some type of an online business. There are so many different types of online businesses, it's not just blogging or creating youtube videos. They know they have the skills, they just don't know that first step to take. They don't know what that path should look like. Those are the type of people that I want to help figure out what that path should look like for them.

That is my big vision or part of my big vision and does my youtube channel and my blog fit into that? Yes. Does what I'm doing right now talking to you live on camera fit into that? Yes, they fit in in different ways, right. But for a long time, I thought that vision was way too big. Like, you know, imposter syndrome. Like who am I to help people starting an online business? Well, now I've done it. That's who I am and I'm here to help people figure out the path.

What prompted me to start my blog while I was working full-time and had two little kids was a podcast and somebody said something like, "The only thing scarier than taking that leap into starting a business, starting a youtube channel or doing something scary and taking action in your life. The only thing scarier than that is staying where you are." So like a year from now, if you're in the same spot, that's actually way scarier than anything you could possibly do.

That is what made me sort of like pack up my thoughts that I didn't have the right path and just pack everything up and say it doesn't matter if I have the right path, the clear path, I just need to take a step. I need to take a step forward.

Another one of my favorite quotes is "You can't steer a parked car."  I thought it is a perfect analogy. It doesn't matter where you steer your steering wheel, if you're not moving, you're not moving. Like it doesn't matter what direction you think you're going. If you're not moving, you're not going anywhere. 

What I Learned

What I learned through starting my business is that you don't have a clear path. There will never be a clear path ever. There is only just the next right step. So my big vision is to help people see what that next right step is. And maybe it's the first straight step. Maybe it's the next right step. Maybe it's all of the next hundred steps along this path. That's my big vision.

Two Things I Want to Share

The two things I want to share with you to help you think through this:

1) Think about who your big vision is for.

Who are you helping if you're creating content online? I mean, my strategy for content creation on YouTube, with my blog and with everything is to help people in some way.  I happen to help people do things that I figured out how to do and things that I am interested in. So figure out who it is that you want to help.

It may help you to imagine if you woke up tomorrow morning and you got an email or a text message from somebody and they said they'd told you what you helped them with, like, Hey Meredith, just wanted to let you know, because of you, I was able to ________. What would make you fly out of bed because you are so freaking excited for them? Think about that. You have to think about who you would want to help, who you would want that person to be that would be texting you or emailing you.

2)  What did you help them do?

For example, when I was doing my freelance web design, I used to really enjoy the moment that I kind of put a clients logo, colors and stuff onto the screen so that it looked like a website and showed it to them. Here's the first sketch, the first idea, the first iteration, whatever. I used to love to look at the look on their face because they would be like, whoa, that's my logo on a website. How exciting. This was a long time ago. Back when people didn't have websites and they hired me to create them. It was exciting for them to see their brand, their logo, and stuff on a website.

Would that make me fly out of bed in the morning out of excitement? No. Here's another question you can ask yourself. "What would you help people do even if they weren't ever going to pay you?"

Would I design websites for free just so that I could see their face light up when they see their logo on the website? No, I wouldn't, it's not that exciting to me. But the idea of like 10 years from now, 50 years from now, a hundred years from now, what I did to help people do or what I did to help them accomplish something, that would make me so excited to like literally fly out of my grave and be like, awesome, high five?  I know this sounds really silly, but it's bigger.

It's bigger than just what can I do to make money or what can I do to get paid or get people to be my client or buy my product or whatever it is. It's bigger than that. Right? So that's my big vision. I know there are people applying their skills or creativity and energy into their employer's businesses.  Even though they know they could be starting their own business, whether it's a blog, a YouTube channel, or any form of online business. I have a real passion for online business. I think because I grew up with the Internet. As HTML was invented, I was learning how to do HTML. 

A Passion For Online Business

I have a real passion for online businesses, especially as a mom because it allows me the freedom and flexibility to do mom things without having to rush my kids off to school so that I can go sit at a desk for my employer and make my employer money. As a parent, as a mom, I think we all can appreciate the freedom and flexibility of an online business. My vision is to help other people that are like me or are like where I was like my previous self and figure out what their next right steps are. 

I hope that helps. For those of you that do struggle with how to align that vision, that big vision with your YouTube strategy or your blog strategy, whatever it is, you want to think about who you are attracting.

Who are you helping with your vision? Who are you attracting with your content? Those two things should be the first thing that you put into alignment. And then what are you helping people with? The two should be related, maybe not exactly directly perfectly, but it should be related to the content that you're creating. For example, if my big vision was to help people learn how to build their own furniture, I'm not going to create content teaching people how to save money when they're shopping for furniture. Those aren't my people, right? I'm teaching people how to build furniture. I would need to create content around that. How to use a drill, how to use a miter saw,  how to shop for a miter saw. You know what I mean. So who and what. Who do you serve? Who do you help? Who do you want to help? Even if you weren't going to get paid, what's going to make you jump out of your grave with excitement a hundred years from now? 

I hope this episode was helpful to you.  I went into a livestream on a little bit of a whim without too many notes in front of me, and I think I came up with a fantastic visualization and sort of strategy for helping you figure out exactly what your big vision is, what your why is and the concept of what would you be so excited about hearing from somebody that you helped them with that you would literally jump out of your grave to give them a high five.  I think it's a more fun way to think about the legacy that you're creating, that you're leaving behind. What mark are you making on this world? What impact are you going to have on this world even after you're gone?

It is a less morbid way of thinking about it. A different perspective. What would you be so excited about that you would jump out of your grave to give that person a high five because you helped them with that thing? Interesting concept. Interesting way of putting it into words. 

Don't forget about the social video blueprint that you can grab at Social Video Blueprint.com.  I hope you will plan to join me for the social video workshop, the video editing workshop on May 19th I would love to see your happy face there and I'll talk to you next time.

Mentioned in This Episode 

Social Video Blueprint: http://socialvideoblueprint.com

Rapid Audience Growth Masterclass: https://www.meredithmarsh.co/masterclass

Search & Rescue Framework: https://www.meredithmarsh.co/framework

Video for Bloggers & Content Creators Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/videoforbloggers

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