5 simple tweaks to save time on your content marketing

Struggling to generate content ideas for your audience? Ask them! That way they're coming up with ideas for you, that they *actually* want, saving you time and brain power. In today's episode, I'm sharing this and more simple tweaks that you can use to save time when it comes to content marketing.

– How using your audience to generate content will help you to meet them where they're at and give them what they both want and need from you.
– Why procrastinating makes content creation harder, and how to use your strengths instead.
– Why quality over quantity is much more effective—even for the algorithms.
– How repurposing your content will actually create more content for you.
– Why keeping your content simple and easy is the key to consistency.

 

 
Five simple tweaks to save time when creating and sharing your content online. I know that this is something that holds a lot of business owners back from consistently showing up online on whatever platform it is, whether it's a podcast, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, or wherever you are creating that content online. The amount of time that can be involved in creating content that is worth consuming can be such a big barrier to doing it consistently. 

And yet, consistency with that content is one of the big things that will grow your audience and not just grow your audience, but will also build that trust with them because if they can rely on you to consistently show up over time, then they are more likely to trust you.

So here are five simple tweaks that you can make to save time with your content marketing.

 

#1: You can save time generating content ideas by surveying or talking to your audience and asking them this one question. 

What three questions do you have about ‘whatever your topic is’. That question gives me so many content ideas. It's how I've made it to nearly 700 podcast episodes without running out of things to say yet and then this way you're creating content that meets them where they are at and it gives them what they want and need from you as well. So every year, I do a little simple survey where I'll ask them, what are your goals for this year? Or what are your goals for the rest of the year? If it's a mid-year survey, I'll ask, what are the things standing in the way of you achieving this? What obstacles are there? How can I support you to achieve this? And then what three questions do you have about building a profitable online business?

That's what I ask. It doesn't have to be a survey. It can be a conversation that you're having with an ideal client or student in your audience. It can be DMs. It can be via direct email outreach. It doesn't have to be in that survey form. 

Now the idea here is that your audience is helping you to generate those content ideas rather than you always having to come up with new ones.

 

#2: Work with your strengths.

When it comes to content marketing, work with your strengths. If it takes you four hours to create one reel because you hate video and it takes you too long to edit it, don't do reels. If you hate podcasting and you put it off because you don't like talking into a microphone, don't start a podcast. 

But if on the flip side, you're really good at speaking into a microphone or you really enjoy talking, then maybe podcasting is a good fit. Or if you like to write, then write. There is no right or wrong content that you need to create just because the algorithm is prioritising one type of content or you think that you should be doing this because everyone else is doing this particular type of content. You don't need to do that. Work with your strengths and it's going to save you a lot of time rather than if you are constantly fighting against yourself to just get it done.

 

#3: Stop trying to be everywhere online and stop trying to post every single day. 

Pick one main platform, not seven different platforms. You don't need to show up everywhere, every day. Not even on Instagram. The algorithm doesn't favour people who are showing up every day anymore. You're better off showing up with quality content, but less often and if you build it into your routine. 

So for example, every Monday you spend an hour outlining a podcast episode and recording it then that's something that's now there every Monday. This is on your calendar. You're going to be able to show up consistently because growing your audience takes time and it takes consistency, but most people lose momentum and then they wonder why they're not seeing growth.

Choosing just one platform and being really consistent with that is better than trying to show up at seven different places for a week and then giving up because you can't keep up with it because it's too much work.

 

#4: Repurpose your content as much as you can. 

So if you are a guest on somebody else's podcast, ask them if you can have a copy of the recording and share it on your show. If you have a podcast like I do, switch the camera on if you want to do video, and then slice it up into little snippets and share it on Instagram and TikTok like we do. We turn each podcast outline into a carousel on Instagram. Each podcast episode becomes an email to the list as well. Each podcast episode gets transcribed and shared as a blog post.

So the only real time that I'm spending on content creation is outlining and recording podcasts and that's really it, the rest is my team. Now, my team helped me to edit the little video snippets. They helped me to write the emails. They helped me to do all of the different pieces, but my strengths are outlining and recording the episodes.

 

#5: Ask yourself, what would this look like if it were easy? 

Okay, we have a tendency to overcomplicate all of it in business, especially content marketing. We think we have to do everything and that it has to be the most complicated process for it to work out. And it's actually really simple and making it more complicated is setting us up to fail because we now have all of these different hoops we have to jump through and all of these different things that we need to do.

So how can you make it easier? Pick out the bits of your process that you have that are feeling a little bit sticky. If you're finding it hard to write an Instagram caption, could you talk into a transcription app like Rev and then use that and edit that into a caption? Could you record a short video while you're out walking your dog in the morning or while you're waiting in your car at school pickup? 

So much of this is also about just accepting good enough. It's about not editing that reel 50 times so that it's perfect and accepting that the first round of edits, the ones that took you 10 minutes, not four hours, is good enough. You can help a lot more people with content that is imperfect than you can with perfect content that is never shared anywhere. 

And then one final little bonus tweak. 

Bonus: Start a content ideas folder. 

So everything that happens around you can be content. All of the little funny stories, all of the little embarrassing moments, all of the mistakes you make, that can all become content in some form.

 

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