The Simple Way To Mine Your Life For Help Content
By: Nicholas Leonard
Tags: Guides And Tutorials, Strategy, Contet, Content Creation, Help

The Simple Way To Mine Your Life For Help Content

Photo by G-R Mottez on Unsplash

Help Content

Help content is something I’m huge on. Simply put, it’s something that’s made to help out the audience in some way, shape, or form. For those of us looking to build up an audience and attract folks to our blogs and YouTube channels, help content can be valuable.

It’s an easy way to “deliver value” and also can give you a ginormous list of evergreen topics to write about.

“But Nicholas,” you might ask. “How do you find all of these ideas? Surely you’d run out, right?”

Well, as one meme would put it, that’s where you’re wrong, kiddo.

Figuring It Out

We’ve all had to do this before in our lives, right? We’re just blazing along doing our thing, say we’re writing an exciting fiction series. And then suddenly, we’re trying to figure out how to do something.

Photo by Gabriel Crismariu on Unsplash

Let’s say we’re using Scrivener to build ourselves a list of places for our fantasy story, but we’ve fumbled the ball with sorting things. We started out with a few places, and next thing you know we’ve got a huge list of names and we don’t even remember which were states and which were burgs and which one was the hideout.

So, what happens next? Well, usually folks find a solution. Or start over, and keep that point in mind for next time, right?

There you go! That could be a potential blog or video right there! “How I Organize My Locations for My Story” or “A Great Way to Keep Track of Towns In A Fantasy Story”.

Take your life lessons, and turn them into valuable evergreen content.

Let’s hit up another example.

Fountain of Content

As an arcade furry gaming enthusiast, I’ve had a lot of experience with MAME, an arcade emulator that most folks are going to run into sooner or later if they venture into the world of emulation.

MAME is…not the most user-friendly thing out there. If you want to learn this emulator, get ready to spend a lot of time either fooling around with it or looking things up.

This would be an excellent source of help content, would it not?

The other day I took my Xbox 360 Gaming Wheel and tried to set up the controls for Hard Drivin’ with it. Do you know how hard that is? REALLY HARD.

Screenshot of Hard Drivin by Author

And also a really good potential piece of help content.

In fact, I’m currently doing a series on my channel right now where I go over the different kinds of controls for arcade games and how to do them in MAME. “Easy!” You might say. “Just plug in a controller and we’re good!”

Well, that’s where you’re wrong again, kiddo. Arcade machines used more than a joystick and some buttons, so I don’t think a controller will work quite as well for a lightgun game or something like Ikari Warriors that used a twisting joystick.

Yes, Twisting Joysticks are a thing.

Each different kind of control I’ve had to figure out is a helpful content piece waiting to be explained by any one of my characters.

Difficult for Others

Keeping with our MAME example here, let’s say you’re a genius at this kind of stuff. You easily clobber any emulation issues on the fly without ever feeling like you’re playing software tech support.

Still, that can be great help content. You might have not been lost setting up Battlezone’s controls…but chances are, someone else has and has no idea what the optimal set up is.

Don’t ever think that just because you can do it easily, others can. Something as simple as “drag the zip into the roms folder and make a chd folder named after the zip and drop the chd file into that new folder” can be really really confusing for others.

Now, help content is not guaranteed to help you grow overnight. That’s not what I’m selling.

But what I am selling is a way to build an impressive body of work that has the chance to grow its roots and bear some really good fruit down the road. And if anything, you can flex your knowledge and show that you’re real know-how with things.

Not Yet Discovered

Photo by Markus Winkler on Unsplash

One last thing I’d like to mention before we close here:

Please stop writing help content when you haven’t done it yourself.

I see article and video after video of folks going “Hey you need extra money? Start a blog! You see this random person I just now heard about started a blog and...” or “Amazon affiliates pays X% per purchase so if you just do Y sells a day you can pay rent!”

Yes, this is help content…sort of.

I say sort of because one, you’re not really giving us steps. Go back and re-read what I posted: I gave you some good insight on how to mine the problem-solving moments in your life for good content.

And also threw in a nice outline of how to do it with something as basic as figuring out how gaming software works. These are real, tangible things. Not theoretical diatribe I figured out by looking at TubeBuddy’s commission rates.

Now if you have hard, honest-to-goodness research that you can back up your Amazon Affiliate article with, that’s different. If you know a friend who killed it, and you can break it down and explain it for us, great! That’s tangible.

Looking at CPM’s for furry vlogs and saying how much we “could” earn is not.

Take a walk down memory lane, rediscover the times you solved problems related to your niche, and turn it into an awesome catalog of valuable help content.