Q&A Content Marketing

• growing your audience

• giving you easy content ideas

• flexing your knowledge and experience

This is a super powerful method to add to your content creation and audience building arsenal.

It’s all about answering the questions your customers have.

Sounds simple. But we’ll cover how to use this powerful method to catapult your audience growth.

We’ll cover:

• Part 1: Questionable Content

• Part 2: They ask, you answer

• Part 3: Time for answers!

• Part 4: RIP Yahoo Answers

• Part 5: Q&A ouroboros

Let’s get started:

Questionable Content

Building an audience is crucial to any business.

The greatest product or service in the world will fail without distribution.

It doesn’t matter how good your stuff is if nobody knows about it.

Listen to Tibo. Tibo knows:

Distribution starts by building an audience.

In my BATON framework Audience is the very first step after working out what your business actually does - Business, Audience, Tribe, Offer, Network. Without this the rest is moot.

Building an audience for a business is more than being good at dancing on Tiktok or being ridiculously good looking. If you are also these then more power to you.

But for the rest of us mortals (myself very much included!) we build an audience for our business using content marketing, specifically content that educates and informs.

This sort of content helps us:

• be liked

• be known

• be trusted

By talking about our particular area of expertise we build trust. And that trust can be converted into sales. This guy/gal knows what they are talking about - I would like to buy their stuff. It’s really that simple. Not easy, but simple.

Question and Answer

As a business owner the best way to build this trust is by educating people about your niche.

You immediately become the authority.

For example the other day I looked through the new EU Artificial Intelligence Act and shot a 3 minute video giving the highlights.

For any business owners using AI (especially in the EU) this video was valuable.

I had one Whatsapp message from a contact like this:

You need to be in a similar position of authority in your niche.

It doesn’t matter what the niche is. It doesn’t matter if it is B2C (business to consumer) or B2B (business to business).

What’s important is that you, personally, are known for your expertise.

The best way to build this authority is to answer the questions that your audience has.

I’m borrowing this concept from a book called They Ask, You Answer by Marcus Sheridan. Well worth checking out. We’ll cover the basics this week though.

The general thrust is that you need to answer questions that your audience (and thus potential customers) have.

For example let’s say I run a company that helps men who are losing their hair.

Their questions will be things like:

• how does hair loss happens?

• how can hair loss be prevented?

• what does hair loss look like?

• how does hair loss occur?

• how does hair loss start?

These are questions that my customers are already asking.

As an expert in the field (who runs a business in the niche!) I step up and answer these questions.

In the next Part I’ll show you how to find what questions people are asking. In the Parts after than we’ll look at how to answer these questions using social media and for SEO Google results.

The basic idea though is that we are going to answer the pressing questions our customers have.

Customer questions > We answer > Customer trust > Purchases

Let’s get started today with a prompt that’ll get the creative juices flowing. In the next Part we’ll do this systematically to provide us with infinite list of questions to answer.

Act as a content strategist

I am following the methods outlined by Marcus Sheridan in They Ask, You Answer. I want to integrate answering customer questions into my content marketing in order to build authority an trust with customers.

My business is [business details]
My customers are [customers]
Their main problems are [customer problems]

Provide me with a list of problem areas along their customer journey. Aim for 5 sequential problem areas.

For each provide 10 questions that they would ask at 
each stage.  

By plugging in:

My business is selling hair loss products
My customers are men who are losing their har
Their main problems are hair loss

I get the following output:

This is 1 of 5 stages that ChatGPT gives me. This prompt will generate a lot of content ideas.

Right now your only goal is to review the questions offered and ask if you are able to answer them.

If yes: this content marketing method will work perfectly for you.

If not then less so! And it also brings up the question of whether you are in the right niche or not. Your business niche should be something that you know like the back of your hand. So use this as a wake up call if these questions are too challenging for you!

In the next Part we’ll look at different methods of collecting up questions so that we have infinite content ideas.

Premium Prompt - Ask the Expert

Pulling it together

Over the rest of this Playbook we’ll look at how to practically deploy this technique.

By the end of it you’ll have a system for building your audience, authority and trust simultaneously.

A reminder of what we’ll be covering :

• Part 1: Questionable Content

• Part 2: They ask, you answer

• Part 3: Time for answers!

• Part 4: RIP Yahoo Answers

• Part 5: Q&A ouroboros

Keep prompting,

Kyle

So you can help them out, show your expertise and become a recognised authority.

Which in turn makes it much easier for people to make the decision to buy from you.

But how do we know what questions to answer? We’ll cover that in this Part.

Let’s get started:

They Ask, You Answer

The best source of questions will always be directly from your audience and customers.

But let’s say you don’t have any questions yet but want to get started with this content marketing method.

We could just make some questions up, sure!

But generally what we (as experts in our niche) think people want to know about is much more complex and advanced for our audience.

For example my most popular videos are about basic usage of ChatGPT. Not about the ins and out of large language models.

I might be interested in the advanced stuff but 95% of the people I talk to won’t share that enthusiasm. The same will be the case in your niche.

Answer the Public

Because of this we need aggregate questions. What are the general public asking, en masse?

Head to https://answerthepublic.com/

This is a free tool that’ll scour Google for the most asked questions about your niche.

For example if I want to sell virtual office space I plug in “virtual office” and get this:

Notice how question words are used - how, what, when, where, which, who, why as well as will, are, can.

This basically runs loads of Google searches with these question modifiers in play to work out the questions people ask on Google.

The image above is from the free version, which is sufficient to get started.

You can also get it all in (more useful!) lists and tables like this:

These are all actual questions people who are interested in your business are asking. We can use these to kickstart our question answering.

In the next Part we’ll cover how best to answer questions - the best format, style and script.

Premium Prompt - Focus down

Pulling it together

Armed with our customer questions we can next move on to answering.

I’ll cover the steps in the next Part.

A reminder of what we’re covering :

• Part 1: Questionable Content

• Part 2: They ask, you answer

• Part 3: Time for answers!

• Part 4: RIP Yahoo Answers

• Part 5: Q&A ouroboros

Keep prompting,

Kyle

I’m going to show you the most powerful.

Let’s get started:

Time for Answers

In the olden days (pre-internet) customers would call us or come to our place of business.

We’d basically be answering their questions one at a time.

Nowadays we can answer an individual’s question so that it helps many people.

Individual has a question → the entire audience gets the answer

This is powerful because if one of your potential customers has a question you can bet your nelly that many other people have the same question.

This one person has asked it for the rest of them. What a hero.

So now we want to answer using a format that everyone can access - we won’t answer 1:1 in an email, meeting or telephone call but instead we’ll use social media so that the question helps as many people as possible.

Video time

You know me by now - you knew this was coming.

The best format to answer questions is using video. Ta-da! Big reveal!

Video:

• is fast to produce (you can therefore answer more questions)

• has high engagement (ie. people want to watch rather than read)

• builds the most trust because it’s “really you”

• can be repurposed into audio and text to further your impact

I’ve written a whole Prompt Playbook on short-form video. It’s accessible in The Vault if you need the extra assistance.

Here’s an amazing example I’ve seen recently:

@curtisray

Replying to @noyondosh Text RETIRE to 30500 and get a free one on one for your best financial future #mpi #retire #retireearly #wealthy #... See more

This guy sells life insurance on Tiktok.

Old school industry.

And when I say old school I mean OLD school.

People have been doing what he does since the 18th century!

Curtis has just brought the practice into the 21st century.

And by doing so he has 1.5M followers and has sold lord knows how many policies.

Go and study his profile and videos.

Each of them is answering a specific person’s question. In the video above it’s for user @noyondosh - he basically runs through a calculation for them. That’s it. Super basic and super valuable to his audience.

@noyondos gets their answer and maybe buys a life insurance policy.

And other people (1.5M of them) see Curtis in action. Each time they see him builds trust. Until one day they think “hmm I need life insurance. Let’s see what that Curtis guy can do”.

Masterful.

Shooting

This is covered in the full Prompt Playbook on shooting short video in The Vault but we’ll cover the basics.

For equipment your phone is more than enough. We are going for authenticity, not polish. At least initially. We also need to start and if you begin faffing around with what equipment to use I can guarantee you won’t start.

For software, I recommend using the built in video recording function in Tiktok. If you don’t like Tiktok or if it gets banned (currently pending!) then the record function in Instagram is similar. Which you use is unimportant - go with what you feel comfortable with.

Get yourself in frame, overlay the question (or part of it) and then just answer the question. You are the expert in this area and therefore can give value. Answer as if someone came to your business in person, by phone or email. And deliver the answer as if you were explaining to a friend.

If you are struggling and need some assistance let’s use ChatGPT:

Act as a short video script writer. 

I want to answer my customer's questions in a manner that highlights my expertise and builds trust whilst remaining authentic

My customer question is [copy paste question]

Here are some basic points I'd like to make (in no particular order): [any specific points]

Please write a basic bullet pointed talking points script for me.

No stage directions, only the talking points. 

60 second video max.

If I plug in the following:

My customer question is "what are the most exciting trends for actual businesses who want to use AI?"

Here are some basic points I'd like to make (in no particular order): not research/tech focused, focused on what's actually useful, I think Microsoft's copilot is most exciting for small businesses

ChatGPT gives me some talking points:

Notice it’s quite generic. That’s fine for this task because we shouldn’t simply be reading what ChatGPT gave us.

Instead focus on the main bullet points and talk using your own expertise. After enough videos you’ll find you can just talk without having to script too much.

There’s no need to overcomplicate it. Especially at this stage. Later, in the last Part, I’ll talk about refinement.

Right now just start with quick direct to camera videos to practice and get your reps in.

Premium Prompt - Hook

Pulling it together

In the next Part we’ll look at how we can take our short video and publish it in multiple places - most importantly on a website for Google juice.

A reminder of what we’re covering :

• Part 1: Questionable Content

• Part 2: They ask, you answer

• Part 3: Time for answers!

• Part 4: RIP Yahoo Answers

• Part 5: Q&A ouroboros

Keep prompting,

Kyle

Once answered we want our knowledge to be available in as many places as possible, in as many formats as possible.

Let’s repurpose.

Let’s get started:

RIP Yahoo Answers

If we’ve spent time making a video we want to make sure it’s seen everywhere.

Let’s look at both:

• video repurposing

• text repurposing

Video First

You now have a video sitting on Tiktok or Instagram.

Great! First step is done and value delivered.

But we can immediately increase the value of that video by getting it onto other platforms.

Specifically these platforms work for short video:

• Youtube Shorts

• Tiktok

• Instagram

• Facebook

• LinkedIn

• X/Twitter

Short video is King on all these platforms and you’ll be rewarded by the algorithm for posting there.

There are two basics ways to do this: manual and automatic.

For manual here are the basic steps:

1. Download the original video without the water mark. For Tiktok use something like this. If you are using a different platform Google “download platformName video no watermark” and you’ll get loads of tools.

2. Copy the caption out of your original video.

3. Go to each platform, reupload the video and paste in the caption.

This can be done quickly once you’ve got into the rhythm of it. But it’s still quite time consuming especially if you shoot a lot of videos.

I personally shoot 3-6 videos per day everyday and doing this manually was wasting time I could use better elsewhere.

Because of this I switched to an automatic method.

I personally use repurpose.io (affil link) which does exactly this automatically and without any fuss.

Basically you connect up all your platforms and then set up workflows.

Above you’ll see my workflows are from Tiktok to all the other channels. You’ll change it to whatever your primary platform is.

One additional tip - make sure to use repurpose.io’s feature to strip hashtags out of posts going to X. Hashtags don’t work on X so remove them! Check the settings of each workflow for more tweaks like this.

Text repurposing

Each of your videos is also a powerful SEO asset.

Because you’ve talked about a subject using your expertise it’s valuable information.

We can extract the audio from a video and convert it into text to build a blog article from it.

I personally use the Captions app (on phones) to extract the transcript from my videos. You can also check out Descript and Otter.ai as alternatives.

Or, once uploaded to Youtube you can download the auto generated captions.

Once you have the transcript we’ll use this prompt:

Act as an SEO writer

Prepare a blog article based on the video transcript I'll provide. 

Do not reference the speaker or the question asker. 

Extract the main topic of the transcript and use this to generate video titles x 5

Identify a keyword and optimise for it. Give me the keyword. 

Use the tone of voice in the video but adapted from spoken to written language. 

[copy/paste transcript]

To show you how this works here’s an entire transcript from one of my videos.

Here’s the video:

@iamkylebalmer

How to produce faceless videos using AI? I get asked how to make faceless youtube vidoes a lot. 5 times just today. Someone must be sellin... See more

And the entire transcript:

How can you make faceless videos using AI? Right now, there's a trend where you can use AI to both script and create video content for YouTube shorts, for TikTok, for Instagram reels, and you can get them out and start to rank them and make quite a lot of money through this exposure by building up an audience and getting revenue options from these platforms. So there's a huge amount of interest in using AI video in order to generate faceless videos that can rank and make cash. I understand the impulse here. I absolutely do. So making videos is hard and I get it. So just today, five people have messaged me, DMed me and said, how can I make faceless videos? What is the best AI for this? And here's my answer. Do not do this. This is not going to be sustainable. The reason for this is the tools are now making it too easy, too cheap and too effective to make these videos. So what's going to happen is we're going to have lots of people rushing into the marketplace. We're going to have people who are selling courses, teaching you how to do this, probably they already are. And we're going to have an oversupply of these faceless videos. At the same time, we're going to have a relatively set demand on YouTube, on Instagram, on TikTok. The people watching these videos is going to remain relatively the same, but we're going to have more and more people supplying that demand. And when supply outstrips demand, we see value fall. This is going to be reinforced by the fact that YouTube and Instagram and TikTok are not going to want to push these types of videos. They're going to devalue them in the algorithm and these types of video will start to do less well in the future. Right now, absolutely some of them will work, most of them will not, but this is going to become harder and harder to do because there's not much actual value added in these videos. So even now, TikTok is starting to deprioritize these videos and you're seeing them less and less. And what you're starting to see more is talking heads, it's people speaking to camera like this for over a minute. And that's what TikTok is prioritizing right now. They know how to see this content and they know how to prioritize that. So what I'm saying is, yeah, you could chase the faceless AI trend and you could probably make some money and I'm sure you could do quite well doing it right now. It's not going to be a sustainable business though. And if you want to build a business on top of your content, then this is not a technique that I recommend you following. Instead, I suggest you swim upstream. You do what other people are not doing. You do what's difficult because that's going to be what's valued, especially as AI tools become more and more readily available. It's going to become so easy to generate video. That authenticity, speaking to camera like this, a wobbly camera, just, you know, sitting on my sofa, this kind of stuff is going to become more valued than flash faceless videos. It's harder for you to do, yes, but it's going to have a higher value as AI takes over. So follow the harder route, even though it's going to be more difficult because it's going to have a more sustainable benefit for you in the future. This is why I'm not going to give any recommendations about how to create faceless AI. Sorry. Anyway, you can Google it. So go and do that.

And finally the blog article:

As always work with this as a first draft!

But you’ll notice that the quality is much better than if I had just asked ChatGPT blind for a blog article about this topic. This is because ChatGPT is repurposing from existing content rather than scratch.

Use these blog articles on your blog for Google juice to open up a new traffic source!

Premium Prompt - Youtube, Google 1-2 punch

Pulling it together

Our question answering machine is well and truly up and running!

In the final Part we’ll look at how we keep the fires stoked by feeding new questions back in on repeat.

A reminder of what we’re covering :

• Part 1: Questionable Content

• Part 2: They ask, you answer

• Part 3: Time for answers!

• Part 4: RIP Yahoo Answers

• Part 5: Q&A ouroboros

Keep prompting,

Kyle

It takes some to get the flywheel spinning - over the last Parts I’ve showed you how.

Once it’s spinning it’s important to keep it rolling. In this Part I’ll show you how.

Let’s get started:

Q&A Ouroboros

In an earlier Part we used Answer the Public to kickstart this process.

This was a bit of a cheat. Because they aren’t questions from our customers.

Once we’re up and running though we want to start sourcing from our actual customers as much as possible.

Let’s look at a few methods to make this sustainable.

Questions on Videos

Super low hanging fruit but often ignored!

Here’s one of my videos that has 1729 comments:

A bunch of those comments are questions.

In this example the question is “what’s the best free chat AI?”

I could have answered with text. But instead I used video.

Notice how my comment links to another video.

Specifically this one:

@iamkylebalmer

Replying to @Mymum whats the best free AI? There are a bunch of free and paid AIs out there - whats the best one to use? General use - @Op... See more

In this response video you’ll notice I have the original question in the video.

The original question answer will be tagged and notified about the video. That’s one person right there who will be very happy with the attention you’ve given them. And thus one person closer to purchasing.

And notice that this video has 25,000 views. It’s a question (and answer) that wasn’t just of interest to the initial asker. But instead it was of interest to 25,000 other people.

And guess what. That 25,000 view video led to 64 comments. And lots of those comments are, again, questions.

All you need to do is answer questions with a video rather than text. Easy switch for near infinite content.

Ask for questions

Need more questions? Glutton for punishment!

Try directly asking.

This is simple. Just publish a video where you ask people to send you their burning questions.

The vide should quickly explain who you are and then ask for questions. Very simple.

Make sure they know how to send questions (“questions in comments”).

And then makes sure to actually answer - you’ve made a promise so carry through.

Premium Prompt - Headaches

Pulling it together

You now have a completely new content strategy in play - answering questions to cement your position of authority and trust.

A reminder of what we’re covering :

• Part 1: Questionable Content

• Part 2: They ask, you answer

• Part 3: Time for answers!

• Part 4: RIP Yahoo Answers

• Part 5: Q&A ouroboros

Keep prompting,

Kyle