How to create content when you’re busy [Batching, Automating & Repurposing Content 101]

Content marketing can be time-consuming if you do it the wrong way. Luckily, there are some hacks to streamline and simplify your content marketing, so that you can get on with growing your business. Here is how to create content when you're busy and how to use batching, automating and repurposing to speed up your content marketing.

 

My favourite small business content marketing tools

• Planoly
• RecurPost
• Tailwind
• Airtable
• Zapier
• Stencil
• Canva

 

 

How to create content when you're busy

Today, we’re looking at batching, automating and repurposing content.

Oh, we're all so busy these days. There are things to do, places to see, clients to keep happy, customers to serve, products to make and ship. Small business owners usually start content marketing with good intentions, but these good intentions have a tendency to slip as soon as they get busy and life starts to get in the way. The key thing with content marketing is that you need to be consistent. And, yes, this means you still have to create content when you're busy. 

Content marketing doesn't have to be that time-consuming. If you do it smartly, that is. If you do it the wrong way, yes, there is definitely potential for it to take a long time. 

3 ways to save time on content marketing include batching, automating and repurposing. Now, let's look at each one in a bit more detail and how they can help you to create content when you're busy. 

Batching your content marketing

Batching your content is, essentially, when you set aside some time to do a bunch of the same, or similar, tasks – rather than switching from one task to the next. So, for example, writing a whole month's worth of blog posts in one afternoon.

Setting aside a few hours to schedule a whole month's worth of social media posts is far quicker than posting each day at a time. Once your brain gets into the mindset of writing captions and sourcing images, you'll find things start to flow a lot easier. Plus, it reduces clutter on your to-do list, and it saves time setting up each task and switching between tasks.

Not only does batching your content save you time, it means you can simply create the content, schedule it and then forget about it for another month. This completely removes the motivation factor from whether you post. So, you know how some days you just don't feel like writing a blog post or sending out an email newsletter? If you've already created and scheduled these things, then they'll happen, regardless of whether you feel like it or not.

This is something I've been working on and I'm trying to make a conscious effort to do so with my podcast episodes, so I'll keep you posted and let you know how much time I end up saving.

You can also apply batching to other parts of your business, like replying to your emails in batches.

Automating your content marketing

There are lots of little bits you can automate in the content creation process. The simplest one (and one that you might be doing already) is social media content. Instagram only recently enabled auto-posting, but that means that you can now literally set-and-forget all your social media posts for the month and get on with running your business.

These are my favourite tools for social media scheduling:

• Planoly is great for Instagram
• RecurPost works really well for Facebook, LinkedIn, Facebook Groups and Twitter, and
• Tailwind is wonderful for Pinterest.
• Airtable is great for planning out your content calendar

Social media posting isn't the only thing you can automate. One of my all-time favourite apps is Zapier. You can use it to connect apps together and create little workflows. For example, you can link up your blog feed and your Facebook page, and it’ll create a workflow so that every time you publish a new blog post, it automatically posts it to your Facebook page.

Or, you can use it for curating content on Instagram. You can set up a workflow that saves any new photos you like to a Dropbox folder then you can just upload them from a Dropbox folder into Planoly and there's your content sorted.

Or, you can set up an alert email that gets sent to you every time someone mentions a particular hashtag. This is super useful if you've got a branded hashtag and you don't want to be checking it every day, because it means you don't miss the content.

Yes, you still have to do the creation part of your content yourself, but automating some of the little repetitive tasks can save a lot of time and help you to create content when you're busy. 

Repurposing your content

Lastly, once you've created your content you need to repurpose it. If you're publishing a blog post, promoting it once on Facebook, Instagram and whatever other platforms you're on, and then leaving it at that – you're not pushing your content to its potential.

Think about every large piece of content you produce. Be that a blog post, a video, an e-book, whatever. Think of them as a collection of little snippets of content. One blog post could give you enough captions for, potentially, 10 Instagram posts. You literally just need to copy, paste and tweak it a little.

A blog post could also be copied over and shared as a Linkedin Pulse article or a Medium article. Or, you could take a collection of blog posts and compile them into a downloadable PDF ebook. A video could be broken into short snippets and shared as 10 separate videos on Instagram, or you could extract quotes from the video and turn them into pretty little Instagram graphics using Canva or Stencil.

Recycling your content

And, lastly, as a bonus tip, you should definitely be recycling your old content. Old content often gets forgotten about and just left to rot on page 22 of our blogs, but you should be trying to squeeze as much value out of old content as possible.

Your new followers probably weren't following you six months ago when you first published that awesome blog post full of value and they probably won't scroll to page 15 of your blog to read it. So, use an app like RecurPost to keep recycling your old content. You add each blog post into a library once, schedule how often you'd like to post from that library, and it will automatically push them to your chosen platforms.

So, there you have it – a few ways to simplify, streamline and optimize your content marketing, so that you can create content when you're busy and get the most out of your content once you've created it.

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