A big part of many developer advocacy programs is content. Content can be in the form of tutorials, blog posts, videos and hands-on workshops and other forms. Coming up with content ideas is not always easy. In this blog post I’m going to share some ideas how to simplify content creation.
The IBM Developer SF team hosts weekly events. We host at least one in-person event and one online event (webinar/online meetup). For every in-person workshop we host an online event. It’s usually best to host the online event after the in-person event as people who couldn’t make the in-person event can watch the online version (but the other way is also fine). The in-person event is about two hours and the online event is usually 40 minutes. So yes, the content covered will be different but the basis will be the same. This is the first example where doing a hands-on workshop easily creates content for an online event.
We we host our online events on Crowdcast, the event is automatically recorded and the recording is available a few minutes after the event is over. The video can be downloaded and uploaded to your YouTube channel. Right there you have another piece of content. You can also take the video and create a blog post with it. Embed the video in the blog post with a short description of what you covered. That’s another content idea.
Here is an example of how you can start:
This is nice considering this all from a single content piece.
Most online events have a Q&A at the end. Even if you can answer all the questions, your answers might be short and not very detailed due to time constraints. After the event you can take the questions and publish them as a blog post with more detailed answers. It’s also likely you didn’t know an answer to a question or two. You can tell the audience to check out your blog where you will publish answers to all the questions plus the questions to which you didn’t know the answer.
The in-person events that we host are usually always hands-on type events. This means developers bring their laptops, they code, build and deploy an application. You can take the workshop steps and publish it as a tutorial on a blog. That’s another content.
Now, you can take one step further and create a video tutorial from the tutorial. I know it’s very similar to an online meetup but the video tutorial will only show the steps how to build the solution. This will be a very technical video. Optionally, you can make a blog post from the video.
All this wonderful content you created can be syndicated to a number of other platforms. For example, if you first publish on your own blog you can then syndicate to dzone.com, dev.to, Medium and LinkedIn. LinkedIn has a nice publishing platform built-in (in addition to just regular social media sharing). You can of course pick and choose where to syndicate and from where.
Let’s say you also want to do live streaming on Twitch. For example, you can take the tutorial and build the application live on Twitch:
Virtually all the content that you create can also be shared on various social media channels:
I hope this helps and demonstrates that a single piece of content can produce a lot more content. Keep in mind this is just a template that you customize for your program. The sequence can be easily changed and the arrows can basically go from and to anywhere. You can easily add other resources such as GitHub, Stack Overflow, your company blog and others.
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