Choosing your Teylu Topic

A Teylu Topic should overlap between sharing what you know and love and your audience’s wants and needs. If you already have a network interested in what you do, consider what are you’re already being asked about, or what your most popular resources are.

You can find topics that people are already delving in to with a little market research: Explore what people are discussing in forums (e.g. Quora and LinkedIn), purchasing online (eg Amazon lists), responding to with similar content, sharing on social media. Companies like Buzzsumo can even do some of this for you.

You are trying to identify a specific pain point people have.

But choose something you enjoy to maintain your quality and motivation.

Know your audience

Your audience is made up of people who are keen to talk within a Teylu setting about something that matters to them. But you need to know more about them than that Think about who is most keen to hear what you have to say and to explore it further themselves. Where are they from, what is their role? Industry? Age? Education?

Outline some milestones

Breakdown your Teylu Topic into parts or milestones. Think back to when you learned what you want to share. What was your experience? What was your learner’s journey? If you can give people different milestones to work through in each Teylu this will structure your topic for the Teylu format, and ensure there is enough depth to suit a Teylu cycle.

If you have a long list of milestones, you should consider whether the Topic is too broad and in fact should be narrowed down into more than one Topic.

Name your Topic

What do the users hope to have gained by the end? This should be conveyed in the name.

It needs to balance your understanding of who the user is and the transformation they hope to achieve as a result of going through it.

Craft your Content

For the first version choose a simple, affordable way forward to test your theory and then build from there: progress over perfection.

Whilst every Teylu meeting doesn’t need to be a milestone, each Teylu meeting should ideally have one major takeaway point of discussion.

Use short, digestible content. This is particularly helpful if users want to revisit the content and find something specific. It’s far easier to scan a 3-minute than a 30-minute video.

Content types that can be used include video, audio, slides, images, text or documents for download. If you’re going to use video, prioritise the audio over the video quality, use good natural lighting if possible, think about the background and make direct eye contact at all times (unless you’re demonstrating something of course).

Creating a Mini Teylu Topic

Do this after having created your main Topic. It needs to be something that will generate interest in your whole Topic and be genuinely useful for a one-off conversation. In terms of detail, you should imagine your Mini Teylu is given away for free. As such, it only needs only be text-based; don’t invest considerable resources creating fancy, well-produced media for this. If you have it already and think it would be applicable, then great. Perhaps it’s one specific section from your main Topic.

Offering Bonus Content

Consider whether you want to offer bonus content to those that purchase your Topic. A recorded interview, access to resources, shopping lists, templates or perhaps even time with you in person are all great options.

But don’t do this for the sake of it: your bonus content needs to add to the Topic’s message.

Test Your Material

Run your material by someone you trust but not someone who is just going to tell you nice things. Is the language accessible? Are there some questions begging to be addressed? Is it user-friendly?

Credit: The Teylu Topics are managed through the Teachable platform. This article is a recrafted collection of advice from Teachable’s Course Creation experts that is relevant to the Teylu group dialogue format.

How do you create your Teylu Topic?