If you’ve started to learn about blogging, video marketing, podcasting, and e-book writing, then you know how important content is to attracting new customers for your business.
The problem? It’s easy to get stuck on the content creation hamster wheel.
Your blog, your newsletter, your podcast: they all turn into this monster that you need to keep feeding.
I absolutely believe that content marketing is a great low-cost high-return way of getting new clients and customers for your business online.
However, I don’t believe that you need to be creating content 24/7 in order to be successful with inbound marketing.
Get off the content creation hamster wheel
Here are a few ways that you can liberate yourself from the constant content creation:
- Take a look at what’s working and what’s not working, and reevaluate if certain things that you’re committing to are worth continuing or not. You might be doing a weekly video, a weekly podcast and/or a weekly blog post. If you take a look at your Google analytics, you might realize that your podcast is bringing in the most results. Or, for you it might be video or text.
- Take a look at ways that you can repurpose content that you’ve previously created. Video scripts for these videos get turned into a written blog post. This helps my search engine optimization and it’s also great for people who don’t have time to watch a video or who are hearing impaired. Beyond that, think about how you can repurpose existing material. Maybe it’s putting together an e-book with transcripts of your podcast. Likewise, there are ways to turn written content into more robust audio or video content with a little bit of sprucing up. Different people learn in different formats, so it’s great to have different ways for people to consume your content.
- Instead of creating from scratch all the time, look for ways to leverage what you’ve already created. You can do this by creating a series where you highlight some of the best tips from your past videos or blog posts. You can create a montage video or compilation of podcast highlights. You can link to existing content by creating top 10 lists.
- Have other people create content for you. Asking your audience to reply to a blog post or video with their opinion or solutions to a problem that you know many people in your audience are experiencing.
- Take a break or a hiatus. It’s totally okay to take a break from your publishing schedule and switch things up. If you’re still ramping up your business, and you don’t have a big audience chomping at the bit every time you publish something, then take a break. Use the added energy and time to publish content on another website for added leverage, or to promote your existing content instead.
- Content creation with co-conspirators! If you’re feel stuck when it’s time to create, consider hiring someone to help co-create with you. You can do this by hiring someone to help you write scripts, or even ghost write blog posts. You can also hire someone to help you bring to life older content or ideas that you never finished.
- Create an editorial calendar. This saves you from trying to come up with fresh ideas every week. Consider your marketing calendar and plan your content around your promotions. You can use an idea garden to get started.
- Batching your creation time works well because it helps you get content done… and then you have a stash of content ready to publish, and you don’t have to constantly come up with something new.
- Be generous and link out. Create top 10 lists that highlight other people’s content, so you don’t have to come up with something new. You become the curator and pull together some of the best resources. Bonus points for you because this puts you on other people’s radar.
Those are my tips to help you get off the content creation hamster wheel.
What Are Your Content Creation Time Saving Tips?
Now I’d love to hear how you’ve been able to make the most of your content? Leave a comment and let me know what’s worked best for you and what special tricks you have up your sleeves!
