281: Join our 7 Day Content Sprint

Hi there, friends. It’s Darren here from ProBlogger. Welcome to episode 281 of the ProBlogger Podcast. I’ve also got a live audience watching us today. They’ve been chiming in and saying good day. We’ve got people watching from Singapore, California, Adelaide, and all around Australia. It seems to be quite a few Aussies on due to the time of day that we’re going at the moment. I will explain to you I have my son playing trumpet in the background today and this is not to give you ambient music but because he’s got an online trumpet lesson today as part of his schooling.

Today, I want to give you a fun little opportunity. We have been hearing from a lot of ProBlogger readers, podcast listeners about their current situation and how they’re feeling about the Coronavirus, what’s been going on in their world, and how that’s impacting their blogging. We talked a little bit about that in the last episode, episode 280. I gave some suggestions on moving through it and blogging through this crisis. We also wanted to do something for you, and this is something that we want to offer to you for free, which will hopefully keep some momentum going in on your blog, and I hope this will help you. 

As I just said on the live video, we have created this on-the-fly, so it’s not polished by any means, but we think there’s some value in it. I’m going to share my screen for the live video viewers and I’ll pop this same graphic up in the show notes for those of you who will be listening to this on the ProBlogger Podcast.

This all comes out of us observing one of the big problems that a lot of our listeners have at the moment. That problem is that many people are really struggling right now with motivation for their blog, particularly with content at the moment. They have this big problem, that they’re feeling a lack of motivation, they’re feeling distracted by all the information that’s coming out at the moment about Coronavirus, and many are feeling fear and uncertainty about their businesses. 

Someone just in the live stream said that they’ve lost their job out of this and that has brought fear and uncertainty for many of our readers. We’re certainly hearing that increasingly, or at least people feeling like their work, their employment might be coming to an end. They’re looking to their blog for some income but not really knowing how to do that and feeling paralyzed by it. 

One of the results of this is a lack of content on many of our reader’s blogs or at least some blockages when it comes to creating content. If that’s you, then you’re not alone. If you’re watching the live video, let us know if that’s something that you do feel. If you’ve got a reason for that, if it’s fear, uncertainty, or it’s just distraction, let us know about that. I have felt that myself even over the last week.

A week ago, I remember sitting for almost a full day, just consuming the news about coronavirus, and I realized that I really wasn’t any more informed at the end of the day than I was at the start. The next I got up and I decided I was going to do something positive instead of just consuming uncertainty around us.

What we want to do on ProBlogger is to help you through the challenge of creating content at this time. The solution that we’ve come up with—again, this is on the fly, it’s not overly polished—is we want to do a seven-day content sprint. A seven-day sprint where, as bloggers, podcasters, YouTube creators, and whatever content creator you are, together, we’re going to move through seven days of creating content together.

We want to call it a sprint because we’re going to do it for a defined period of time. We want to invite you to participate in it and to participate to the level that you feel comfortable in doing that. We’re calling it ProBlogger seven-day content sprint, and it’s going to happen next week. We’re going to start it on Tuesday Australian time, which is Monday US time, so this is the 23rd of March. I’ve said April on the screenshot there, but it’s actually the 23rd of March. That’s US time and the 24th of March is Australian time, Tuesday the 24th. It’s going to start that day, run for a week.

Now, I know some of you right up-front are going to say, “Well, that’s not a good week for me.” I still want to encourage you to sign up for it, and then you can do it at your own pace if you choose to do that as well. It’s the type of thing that you can have, you continue to have access to after because the sprint is over and you can run it at your own pace as well. You might want to take two weeks to do it, that’s totally fine.

What do you need to know about this sprint? Firstly, the cost is free. This is something we want to give you as bloggers, as readers of ProBlogger. It’s going to take a little bit of time for us but it’s something that we want to give because it’s definitely a need that we see in our community at the moment, one of the needs.

You can sign up to be a part of the sprint at problogger.com/contentsprint, and if you’re watching live, you can go there right now pop in your email address and your details. We will let you know when things are kicking off and how they’re kicking off. At the moment there’s not a lot there once you’ve signed up to look at, but you’ll see there a bit of the format for the time that we want to go through as well.

“Who is it for and what is it?” is one of the questions, actually, I got on my screen here. “What is it?” is another question. Basically, over the seven days, I don’t want to overwhelm you with content. I don’t want to overwhelm you with things that you need to do, listen to, or watch. I want to provide you with a short video every day, five or ten minutes. In that video, we’ll deliver it to our Facebook group in the ProBlogger community area. We’ll give you a little bit of further viewing or further teaching on that particular topic if you want it, but the main thing each day is that we’re going to give you a challenge to create a piece of content on that day.

The content may not be a big one. I’ve mixed up the types of content that I’m going to challenge you to create. Some of them are quite easy to do, some of them are a little bit more involved. As I said before, you may choose to do this over seven days, or you may want to spread it out a little bit more. On day one, I’m going to take you through a bit of a planning exercise, and by the end of day one, you should know what your next six pieces of content are going to be on your blog, and then over the next six days, I want you to create those pieces of content. It’s going to be as simple as possible. I’m going to give you a new type of content for each day.

I’ve tried to choose types of content that I think you could do on a blog, a podcast. You could do these on Instagram, you could do these on YouTube, you could do them on live video. I think all of these types of content could be done in lots of different formats. You might choose to do this in any of those formats.

Day one, we’ll be planning to come up with six pieces of content for the rest of the week, and then over the next six days, you’ll create that content. You will need a little bit of time every day or as much as you’ve got on your hands to create content. For some of you, that’s going to be easy because you’re in lockdown or you’re in self-isolation at the moment; you’ve got lots of extra time on your hands. For some of you, you might need to put aside a little extra time before or after the rest of your day.

Again, you can sign up for the sprint at problogger.com/contentsprint, pop in your email addresses there. The last thing I already had a couple of people asking is who’s this for. It’s anyone who’s struggling to create content right now, either because of the Coronavirus and feeling fear, uncertainty, and paralysis, or for anyone whose blogs just been dormant for a while. 

So, whether you are a blogger, podcaster, YouTuber, Instagramer, live streamer, or influencer, you are welcome to join. We’re going to have a daily piece of content for you to watch just to give you some ideas, and then the challenge is for you to go away and create that content. Then we’re going to have an opportunity for you to come back and share that content with the rest of the group.

We want to encourage each of you to also visit a few other participant’s contents as well, maybe even share that. My hope is that you’ll come out of this seven days with six new pieces of content, that you will have interacted with some other bloggers, had some fun along the way, and hopefully even has some extra traffic along with that.

Again, you can go at problogger.com/contentsprint and hopefully, we’ll see you next Monday/Tuesday, depending on where you are in the world. If you’re watching the live video, if you’ve got any questions, please pop them into the comments now, I will answer as many of them as I can.

Keep in mind we are creating this on the fly. We decided to do this about an hour ago, two hours ago at the most, and my team has done an amazing job to get a landing page up and to start setting up the course content behind the scenes as well. Grove, Lainey, Mario, thank you so much for responding so quickly. If you want to join us, please do that.

I might be in the podcast there, but if you’re on the live video, ask any questions. Those of you on the podcast, we’ve gone from having no episodes for a long time to two in a week. There you go. I know many of you have been waiting for something more. We’re going to be getting into more content over the coming weeks. We’ve actually decided on the podcast to see what we’re doing at the moment as a bit of a series. We might call it the Coronavirus series on ProBlogger Podcast, but we want to create a series of content that’s particularly targeted to helping us all navigate through this tricky time, so tune in to the podcast on that. Thanks for listening.

Before I go, I want to give a big shout out and say thank you to Craig Hewitt and the team at Podcast Motor who’ve been editing all of our podcasts for some time now. Podcast Motor has a great range of services for podcasters at all levels. They can help you to set up your podcast but also offer a couple of excellent services to help you to edit your shows and get them up with great show notes. Check them out podcastsmotor.com.