Back to Basics 4: Content Creation

Last night was a special time for me. Chris Guillebeau stopped by the Nashville Entrepreneur Center for the release of his latest book, Time Anxiety.

Chris’s first book, The Art of Non-Conformity, had a major influence on my life. It was released in 2010, and partially due to it’s influence, in the next three years I released my first CD of all original music, had my first book published by McGraw-Hill, backpacked through 7 countries in Central America, and went back to work for myself.

This is not meant to be an article on Chris, but it does illustrate the effect that content creators and influencers can have on your life.

My Blog: I started the Automation Primer (www.automationprimer.com) in January, 2011 while still working at a large custom machine building company. At the time I hadn’t read many other people’s blogs, and didn’t know much about writing in general. I put a bunch of general information about automation devices and applications there, with no real end in mind. I thought of it as a place I could put information and refer co-workers to it.

At last count there were over 400 posts and about 30 pages of other stuff there.

My Books: Partly influenced by starting the blog and researching for some of the posts, I started writing a book tentatively titled “The Automation Primer”. The story of getting rejected by the first publisher and accepted on my second pitch by McGraw-Hill is detailed in the blog, so I won’t go into detail here. It was titled Industrial Automation: Hands On (not my choice) and formally published in 2013.

I have published 4 more since then, mostly through my own company. My first book was released in Portuguese and is used in schools in Brazil and Portugal, and my Advanced PLC Hardware and Programming book was released in Chinese.

My Training Website: After my office was destroyed in a tornado and Covid-19 hit two weeks later in 2020, I started recording training videos. I put one series on Udemy and put a few more on my YouTube channel, then started learning how to build a subscription-based content website from The Membership Academy.

The Automation Academy has been running for about 4 years now, and I put written and video content there, mostly related to industrial automation, PLC programming, and job training. It is on my business website www.automationllc.com/join/. There is also a social media site, IO Central, attached to the site but open to the public.

My Webinar: Closely related to the Automation Academy is my monthly webinar, Mastering the Machine. When learning how to keep members engaged from the membership training I received, one suggestion was to hold regular events so members could interact with me and each other. I have held 86 of these Zoom webinars so far, currently doing about one a month.

There have been a lot of different topics, and I have also interviewed various people in my industry.

Other YouTube Videos: There are 134 total videos on my YouTube channel, which can be found at https://www.youtube.com/@automationconsultingllc3994. Some are just random thoughts or video of machines and events, others are the previously mentioned webinars and training videos.

And More: I also have a personal account (~5800 followers)  and a company page (~900 followers) on Linked In and a Facebook group for the Automation Academy with about 8700 members.

About Podcasts: I travel quite a bit and listen to audio podcasts. My favorites are by Tim Ferriss, but I also listen to others occasionally.

A good podcast makes time go by fast when driving. I never considered doing one myself because I thought my main topic of industrial automation and machine building really needed video and pictures.

The event I attended last evening to see Chris Guillebeau was sponsored by the Nashville Podcasters community. I got to talk to several podcasters during the event and am considering starting a separate primarily audio-based podcast on general topics. I will probably title it Mastering the Machine even though it may not be as focused on machines and industrial automation. After all, aren’t we all sort of human machines that need to master ourselves?

Stay tuned for more…

Do you need help with content creation? Need to know how to get started, how publishing works, how to edit video and create graphics? I can help! While I have been l am known for teaching programming and other system integration topics, I have been doing various types of content creation for 15+ years now. Hit me up!