Why does this USEFUL CONTENT podcast exist and why it might be a good fit for you.

If you have too many things happening at the same time, people get lost.

People only go away with one or two things at max. You could talk about 10 things. Your brain is not going to retain those 10 things your brain is going to retain one or two of those things, most likely one thing. So if we focus the content even more, we're going to increase the possibility of that content being useful.

Welcome to the useful content classroom. I am your host Juma Bannister. And today I am going to be your teacher in this useful content classroom and this first episode, this first official episode of the useful content podcast is going to be an interesting one because it's going to act as a listener filter.

So you should really listen to this very first one, even if you're here for the first time, and you don't know what any of this is about. You should really try to listen to this very first episode, and I'm going to go deep into what this podcast is about. And after you listen to this episode, it should tell you whether or not it's a fit for you.

And if after you listen to me talk, it's not a fit, no problem. I'm so glad you listened to this first episode. If you ever change your mind about things, you can come back. But if you listen to this and it sounds like it'll be a fit and it'll be something that you're interested in getting into, the Useful Content Podcast, then I'll please ask that you give it a follow and you share the episodes when you come to listen to them every couple of weeks and also in between the episodes. I'm going to be sharing some clips repurposing content from these episodes and sharing on my LinkedIn and my Twitter and possibly on YouTube. I'm at Juma Bannister everywhere. So you can check that out so you can get the clips from the episodes in between. If you want my shorter form content.

But today we're going to get into the details of the useful content podcast, and we're going to answer some questions for you. So, you know, if you need to stay here or not, the questions we're going to look at today is why does this podcast.

exist. Why does it exist in the first place? Why do we need to have a useful content podcast? The second thing we're going to get into is what is this podcast about? Is this podcast about something that you'll be interested in? What are the details? What are we going to do here?

What is the mission of the podcast and that will follow on from what the podcast is about. And then we're going to take a look at a basic introduction of what useful content is my definition of useful content.

And I'm also going to give some insight into how the shows will run. So that should be a nice tight overview that will give you insight into whether or not you want to stick around for this podcast and you want to follow or not.

So let's talk about the mission of the podcast. And of course, this podcast is contained within something bigger. So useful content has a bigger mission, but for the podcast, the whole mission of this podcast is to train and teach business owners and marketers to make useful content by changing the way they think about So it's going to attack the mind by listening to this podcast.

We want you to learn things that will make you more knowledgeable. We want you to learn things that will make you more capable in creating content for your job, for your business, for yourself, and hopefully it would even change the way you consume content so that you have a deeper appreciation for the process of creating content and so that you yourself will become even more capable in doing so. So that is the whole mission of this podcast. So if that sounds interesting already let's move onto something else, let's look at What is useful content and my definition of useful content. Now, when you hear the term useful content already, it begins to conjure up feelings of something that has utility. But even though that is the case, useful content goes a lot more deeper than that. And over the period of time, I've been creating content.

I've been inside of creativity and marketing for a long period of time. I've encountered all sorts of different types of content. And I think that it's very important to define why this content is different and why useful content is something that is very important, especially for people who want to make more effective content to become better at making content that will build long term relationships with the people who matter to them. So let's talk about useful content a little bit.

So useful content is media that positively impacts both the person creating it and the person consuming it. It makes you more knowledgeable, better at business, better at your job and teaches you new things. That if used responsibly can make your life better. So it goes beyond just likes and comments and all those things.

Ultimately useful content has to produce something that makes your life better, whether that is more revenue, whether it's that more time with your family, whatever that might be, but useful content has to go beyond just the surface level of things that you get from being on the platforms. So useful content has some characteristics and let's go into those characteristics right now.

So sometime ago I'd come up with the acronym SUPREME, so useful content is simply. Understandable, which means it uses language and imagery that is clear and not confusing. It's practical. It shows you how to do something or take action. It's relatable. You can connect with it because it's really about you at the very heart. It's about you. It's easy. It removes or reduces difficulty and makes things accessible.

So useful content does that. It's motivational. It encourages you to take action and pursue goals. And lastly, which I think is the biggest thing about useful content. It is educational. It teaches you something relevant and helpful and that last one, that teaching one is something you're going to be hearing over and over again, because that is at the core of how this podcast will work.

This podcast is designed to teach you things. It's not just talking about things or entertainment. It's designed to teach you things. So I am a teacher and all the people who come on the show automatically come into the useful content classroom and they become teachers as well. And how the show is structured is designed.

To teach you one single thing, you can take away one thing that will make you do better inside of your business and inside of your content creation so it's focused on teaching

which flows us neatly into what is this podcast About, so this podcast teaches practical, repeatable ideas and methods to help business owners and marketers to better strategize, create, and use content in their business. It teaches practical, repeatable ideas. To help business owners and marketers to better strategize, create, and use content in their business.

So that's what this podcast is about. So again, if this sounds like something that you'd want to be a part of and listen to episodes on, stick around. So I'm going to get in a little bit later. Into what those topics are, and that'll be important for you. But as you can see from the definition it's focusing on business owners and marketers.

But let me go deeper into who is this show for, who is this show for?

So the useful content podcast is a show for business owners. These are CEOs and founders who want to start making their own content. Or who wants to improve the content that they make CEOs, founders, business owners, who wants to improve their own content or who wants to start making their own content.

So this will apply to them. So if that is you, then this podcast is for you. This podcast is also for marketers, marketers who want to stay up to date and learn about new or better ways to use and create content for their clients. And if you're a marketer and you want to improve the way you make content for your clients or for yourself or find better ways to make content that will allow you to build long term relationships with your clients and your customers, then this podcast is for you.

And the third group of people that this podcast is for is lurkers. And I know we talk a lot about lurkers on the linkedin platform in particular And lurkers are an undefined group of people who consume content But never publicly engage with that content.

This is for you as well. If you're listening to the thing and you're lurking around, then this is for you too. You can stick around and do that. Although I prefer that when we release the videos and the clips that you engage with it. If you're a lurker, I have no problem with you just sticking around and doing what you need to do.

It might be somebody who is looking to do business with us, but will pop up at some point later down the road because their customer journey has not brought them to the place where they're ready to call us. And contact us to do something for them. So, you know, lurk all you want, but consume the content and it will make you a better content creator.

So now what is the format of this podcast? So I, you know, I went back and forth with this, trying to figure out what's the best thing to do. I was coming out of having hosted 70 episodes of a live show, trying to figure out what's the best format. And it's interesting. The first live show that I started to create was.

Very, very visual. It used a lot of clips. It used a lot of visual things in order to build out the show. And I did a lot of deep research on people and really got into their background and really brought that out. And as a result, the episodes were very long. It was about like an hour plus long live while that was good.

And I felt that we got a lot of good stories out of that. I really wanted to make it more practical and make it something that people could use. So we are going to reduce that a whole lot. So each episode is going to be around 35 to 50 minutes in length, if so much. And the whole idea is that you should be able to consume this content if you take your hours lunch.

You want to sit down with it for 45 minutes and you want to look or listen to the podcast while you're eating. You can take this once every two weeks and have a good session during a lunchtime. And at the end of lunch, you'll be wiser. You'll be more equipped to create content. You'll be more equipped to function as a business owner and as a marketer.

And this should be able to fit inside of your regular day, if this is you. So you can just take one lunchtime once every two weeks, sit down, listen to the podcast and get extreme value out of it. That's why it's designed to be under an hour.

And in terms of the episodes, I want to keep the seasons under 20 episodes. I would say 15 to 20 episodes at max. And it's going to be a mixture of interviews and also solo shows that I will host and I will be the main teacher. In those solo shows,

I haven't decided what I'm going to call the solo shows yet, but definitely in those solo shows, I'll be talking about some of my expertise, which I'll go into a little bit later.

And there may be times when the show wouldn't be hosted by me at all. I may ask someone to guest host or have someone else on the team come in and do an episode and it would not be an interview episode. It'll just be them. Talking about topics that is relevant to this type of thing, relevant to content creation and being better at building relationships with your clients and customers using content.

So that is major.

So on the show itself, the teachers, the people who are coming in to guest teach on the show on the useful content podcast, they will come in around one single topic and they will go deep on that one single topic and share their point of view on that topic. And later on, we'll talk about the structure of how that will work. On solo episodes

I will share mainly around content creation around content strategy, video, photography, And it's possible that I may spread into things like social media platforms, content distribution, content repurposing, and other related topics. So I can speak on all those things. So I may touch on any or all of those things when I do my solo episodes.

So, of course, the guests will be content creators, they'll be business owners and practitioners in such areas as marketing, which is all types of marketing, because, you know, we need that as part of the, of what the show is about, the marketing part of it, then there's content creation, but specifically focused on corporate or business content creation and not entertainment content creation, there'll be a focus on content strategy, there'll be people who are looking at Content writing, there'll be teachers who are looking at copywriting, there'll be teachers who are looking at social media, that is use of the platforms and the distribution part of it. There'll be people who are teaching graphic design, video production. There'll be people teaching on video. That is the production part of it. And also the strategy part of it. There'll be photography teachers as well and this is mostly for commercial purposes, commercial photography. There will be brand identity people and there will be brand strategy people or any other discipline inside of those general areas we'll be focusing on those things. Those are the type of people Al have on the show.

So again, if you're interested in listening to these type of people and learning in those areas, this is the show for you.

And so in order to be a guest on the show, you'll either have to get an invitation directly from me, or you will have to make a request to be on the show. Then we will set up a meeting or recording.

If I check out your content, I think is good. I look at what you have, you have a point of view. You are speaking into the topics that I think will be relevant to the listener of the show. Then we'll book you to come on you'll go through the whole process and then we'll set up a time to record so anybody from anywhere in the world can come and can be on the show, But the main thing is that you have to bring extreme value to the People who are listening to the podcast because they have come to learn something.

You have to be a teacher who can come and teach something. Go deep on one topic and be able to give people something that if they listen to this over their lunchtime, they'll go away a better person after they eat.

So in terms of the release schedule, the episodes will release. Once every two weeks, and that will be fortnightly on a Thursday. Thursday was kind of an arbitrary day. I used to have the live show on Thursdays before, so I just kind of picked a Thursday.

There's no special reason for Thursday. Hopefully Thursday release will allow people to listen to eat on the Thursday lunchtime or there Friday lunchtime or over the weekend if they go out and they exercise or do something around the house. I had one person who listened to the very first episode and they sent me, that was John Espirian actually sent me an image and he told me, I think he was listening to it while he was in the kitchen cooking, and that was such a great thing.

I was very wowed by it. So if you are into listening to podcasts while you're doing other things like I am, sometimes I always listen to podcasts when I go out walking, then listen to it when you can on the weekend, but mainly if you have a lunchtime and you want to listen to it over lunch, that would be the ideal time to get some useful content classroom teaching inside of your brain, inside of your thinking, inside of your mind, so that you can improve the way you think about content while you are at work or doing the things that you do.

So how will this show run? So the show will be focused on teachers. If you don't consider yourself a teacher, when you get to this, this useful content podcast, you will be in the useful content classroom and you are Teacher and so we're calling all our guests teachers. And when we gather together to have a conversation, we're going to call that the useful content classroom.

Every episode, I'm still workshopping this, but every episode we will say today we have a new teacher in the useful content classroom. And that is how we'll start off every episode. So the people who are coming to watch and listen to the show, they're not just an audience, they're students.

They came to learn. And so the people are students and the guest on this show will be teachers.

so let's go a little bit deeper into how their teaching will be structured, because I find that it's better to have. a structure when you're teaching. So almost like a, the way a syllabus is structured. So the teacher will have one main topic that they're going to go deep on.

And under that main topic, they're going to have three sub topics. So there'll be one main topic and I'll be aware of what this main topic is because they'll send it to me beforehand. When you sign up to be in the show, you'd have to state what those things are and what your point of view is.

So I'll be aware of that. And we're going to do that in lieu of having a, like a pre interview or having a call to talk through everything. Cause we know people are busy. So once you send that main topic and you send your subtopics, then we'll know exactly what you'll be talking about. And I'll prepare myself accordingly.

And then what's going to happen is that we're going to have discussions around this main topic and all of these sub points. And the show will be structured in this way for a few reasons. So let me go through those reasons right now. So the topic and the sub point structure will make it easier for the audience to follow the lesson being taught.

So the main topic and the subtopic structure will make it easier for people to have takeaways. So they know that this is the main topic and these are the subtopics that the teacher is going to hit on. So it'd be easy to take those chunks away and say that I've learned this, this and this while I was in the useful content classroom.

And the second reason we're doing it that way is because it will make it easier for guests to prepare on one single topic that they have a strong point of view about. So it'll make it much easier for the guests to prepare. So if a guest who is the teacher has to prepare on one single topic, they can really focus on that.

And get deep inside of it, as opposed to making it like a a top of funnel, kind of just the basics of the topic. And they can get deep into that one topic within 35 to 40 minutes and really give the people some one thing that they can go away with, because the fact of the matter is that just like video creation, if you have too many things happening at the same time, people get lost.

People only go away with one or two things at max. You could talk about 10 things. Your brain is not going to retain those 10 things your brain is going to retain one or two of those things, most likely one thing. So if we focus the content even more, we're going to increase the possibility of that content being useful.

And that is one of the reasons why we're structuring in that way to make the content easier for the teacher to prepare so that they can focus on one thing and go deep.

And the last reason we're doing it that way is because on the back end, if we have a clear structure, one main topic, and we have sub points, It's going to make it easier for us to repurpose the content. We're going to be able to pull out at the very least, at least three topics that we can take and create short form or mid form content about, and so it'll make it easier for us to take that content now and share it across the relevant platforms, because the structure has allowed us to compartmentalize these particular topics under the umbrella.

Of a big topic, a big main topic. So it benefits us on our side when we are editing and we are sharing the content with you, it would benefit you so we can focus in on this one thing that the teacher said inside the classroom. This other thing that the teacher said inside the classroom. And this other thing that the teacher has said inside the classroom.

So topics will be around a nucleus. It will be around one thing so that we can really focus in and get some value out of the time we spend together.

So the last thing I'll share today is that even though the topics are designed for the teachers To focus, we're hoping that in explaining the topics, they can share analogies and stories and examples that will drive home the points that they are making. And if a teacher tells a really good story that drives home the point that makes the topic even more real, we are going to leave that in, we're going to leave that in so that the person can see it the way the teacher sees it. And so therefore they can grasp it faster because stories bring life to things that have happened to you. They bring life to examples. So it's not just technical, but it's also connected to a real life experience.

And so we're going to have that storytelling time. And if you have had a really good teacher in life, you will know that the best teachers are able to bring things to life by not just saying the words. By putting the words in a context, by telling stories, by using analogies, by using examples, those are the best teachers.

And so we hope that the same thing will happen when people come into the useful content classroom and they teach our students about very specific topics in the area of content creation.

And so that's it. If this sounds like something that you'd be interested in getting into, if useful content is something that appeals to you, feel that it will make what you do better and easier. You feel that it would benefit you or your business or your clients. I really do want you to follow.

We we're going to try to build things out in a way that is true to where we first started, but obviously we're going to evolve as we go along and get better and better. I'm doing kind of rough and tumble. I'm doing it kind of dirty. In the very beginning, but we're going to get more polished, more clean, we're going to get more streamlined as we go along to make the process more efficient and deliver more value to everyone who is listening.

So thanks for listening to this primer for the Useful Content Podcast and I hope to see you in the very next episode that we have.

Useful Content Classroom, dismissed.