Best of 2022: 5 ways to make content creation less time-consuming

Content creation is a critical component in the digital product world, but it doesn't have to be a time drain on your business. Regardless of your preferred platform, today I share with you my tips on creating content with ease…

In this episode we cover:
– Audience participation – not only gives you tonnes of ideas, it ensures your content is meeting your audience where they are at!
– Work with your strengths in content creation – if you don't enjoy it, don't do it!!
– Show up consistently on one platform well!
– One piece of content multiple ways
– What would this look like if it were easy – avoid over-complication syndrome!

 

In today's episode, I'm talking about five ways you can make your content creation less time consuming because coming up with content ideas, creating them, and sharing them. It can be a real-time drain, right? 

 

Regardless of what platform you are creating and sharing content on, whether it's Instagram, a podcast, a blog, YouTube or TikTok, any of the content platforms. It can take quite a significant amount of time, especially if you waste time in the wrong spots or get stuck on some of the pretty common tripping hazards when it comes to creating content. 

 

5 ways you can make your content creation take less time

 

#1: Survey your audience as a way to create great ideas

To generate more content ideas in less time, what I recently did was sent out a mid-year survey asking my email list a bunch of questions. And one of the questions I asked was, what three questions do you have about growing your audience? What three questions do you have about starting a podcast? And what three questions do you have about launching digital products?

The answers that I got to these questions have given me a couple of hundred content ideas. Like it's way more than I thought I would ever get and that has saved me so much time because where I would typically jump on my computer and jump into the planning table that I use to come up with episode ideas and brain dump them in there.

But now it's great because I have the exact things that my audience wants to know and even though I've already surveyed them in the past, I tend to survey them about twice a year. I noticed the questions they are asking are different. They are evolving over time as their awareness changes as their businesses change.

So that has been, for me, such a helpful way to save time when creating content ideas. And it also means that the content I'm creating meets my audience, where they are at and it gives them what they want and need from me as well.

Now for you, this doesn't have to be a survey form. If you don't have a large audience, that's okay. You can have conversations with the people who are in your audience, have conversations with your clients, and with people you're talking to online and find out what questions they have.

It can be on Instagram, or DMs, you can do this in your emails, wherever you find it really easy to communicate with somebody in your audience and the whole idea here is that your audience is generating those content ideas for you rather than you constantly having to come up with new ones.

 

#2: Work with your strengths

If it takes you four hours to record one reel or one TikTok video because you hate video and you struggle to edit it and you can't dance and you can't find the perfect song to go with it, don't do it. Don't do reels. Don't do TikTok.

If you can't do it quickly, if you hate podcasts, if you hate talking into a microphone and you put off podcasting or recording podcast episodes because of that, don't do a podcast. If you find that it takes you three hours to edit a single YouTube video, don't do YouTube. That is if any of those things is taking you a long time to do and you find yourself resisting it because it just doesn't feel enjoyable, it's probably a sign that that's not playing to your strengths.

But on the flip side, if you enjoy talking into a microphone or enjoy writing, or you find that you enjoy editing video, then go with that, go with what you enjoy and what feels good to you rather than feeling like you have to start a podcast because everyone's doing a podcast or you have to be on TikTok because everyone's doing TikTok.

There is no right or wrong content to create. There's no right or wrong platform to be on. And if you work with your strengths, it will save you so much time rather than if you're constantly having to fight yourself to get things done and you'll also enjoy it a lot more.

I've really learned to love content creation because it now works with my strengths rather than forcing myself to do something I don't enjoy and then struggling to be consistent with it as a result.

 

#3: Stop trying to be everywhere and stop trying to post all the time

Pick one main platform, not seven. It used to be that a couple of years ago, people would say, well, you need to be on every single social platform. You need to have a presence on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

That's kind of exhausting and let's be honest, you can repurpose your content across all of those platforms. But it takes a bit of time and energy to build a real community on any platform and if you are just sharing content on it, you're going to struggle to build that community.

So pick one main platform where you can show up and you don't have to post there every single day. Even on Instagram, the algorithm does not favour quantity anymore, it favours quality. It used to be many years ago that the more often you posted, your content would appear at the top of the feed.

This is no longer the case and anybody who is telling you that you need to post more often is telling you to follow a broken, outdated strategy. I would much rather you show up with quality content less often and if you build it into your routine.

But unfortunately, most people lose momentum because they are trying to be everywhere and they are trying to post all the time and they are trying to come up with fresh content to share on every single platform which is exhausting. It is absolutely exhausting.

So no wonder you're losing momentum and no wonder you are not seeing growth if you can't be consistent with it. So choose just one main platform and be consistent with that and then if you want, take that content and repurpose it elsewhere.

 

#4: Repurpose your content

There are other ways to repurpose your content as well. For example, if you are a guest on somebody else's podcast, ask them if you can record it as well on your end and if you can share it. Maybe on your podcast, if you can share that podcast episode on yours. Or if you can use the video from that zoom recording as some video content for social media, that's repurposing too.

Turning those emails that you send to a newsletter into an Instagram caption or vice versa. If you find it easier to write an Instagram caption than an email, maybe you can take that caption and expand on it as an email you send to your audience.

Maybe if you are videoing your podcast or you just want to turn your webcam on while you're recording, maybe you can turn that into a YouTube video or an Instagram reel, or a TikTok video, or you can transcribe your podcast into a blog post.

So there are so many ways you can get extra juice out of each piece of content that you are creating.

These are my strengths and I enjoy doing them sometimes when I get a little burst of motivation or when I feel like it, I will record an Instagram reel or experiment with a TikTok video.

 

#5: “What would it look like if it were easy?” (Tim Ferriss's book, Tribe of Mentors)

What would this look like if it were easy? In Tim's book, when he sat down to write the book Tribe of Mentors, he started over-complicating the process and he then came back to this question. What would it look like if it were easy? And to him writing that book, the easy way to do it was to interview people who were killing it in their space or in their game and to take their interview answers and turn those into a book.

We often think that writing a book has to be somebody sitting there plugging away for months at a time in their little writer's cave. But Tim asked this question, what would this look like if it were easy? And it turned into him interviewing people and taking their interview responses and collating that into a book.

So this comes back to content because we have a tendency to overcomplicate it all. We think we have to do everything and we think it has to be the most complicated process for it to work out.

And we think it has to be perfect. But the process of content creation and sharing it is actually really simple and when we over-complicate it, we make it more likely to fail because we're adding unnecessary steps. We're making it harder for ourselves.

 

Bonus Tip: How can you make the process easier?

For example, if you are somebody who struggles to write an Instagram caption but you can talk really easily, download the rev app on your phone and dictate your caption into that. Just talk into that and then either edit it yourself or ask a VA or somebody on your team. If you have a team to edit that into a caption.

Or maybe if you don't like the pressure of sitting down with a camera and recording a video, maybe you record short videos while you're walking the dog each morning, or while you are sitting in the car waiting to pick your kids up from school.

Accepting that good enough content is good enough. It doesn't need to be perfect and when I say quality content, rather than quantity content, quality doesn't mean perfect quality means that the topic is something worth talking about. It means that the content is valuable to the person reading it or listening to it or watching it.

Not that it has perfect sound quality or perfect lighting for your videos or perfect camera. I mean, some of my best performing content has been stuff that I've just recorded on my iPhone with no lighting, nothing fancy, no microphone, anything like that.

So good enough is good enough. We need to accept that rather than wait for it to be perfect and that means not editing your caption or your blog post a million times. You can help way more people with imperfect content than you can with the perfect content that's never been shared anywhere because it takes you too long to edit it and create it and get it out there.

 

 

 

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