No doubt, content creation is hard. I’d be lying if I said it’s very easy to do especially if you want to create amazing content and you want to do it fast. Now there’s a lot that goes into content creation itself, from:
- planning
- creation
- post production
- distribution
Now, all of this takes time. For example, even planning alone, is a huge time sucker, right?
Because you’re curating, or creating your ideas, coming up with new ideas for your content. Then you have to structure your ideas into more meaningful content and meaningful ways you can post that content.
If you are creating content, especially if you’re doing it as part of your business, as an entrepreneur, as a business owner, then I really do feel sorry for you. You can’t afford to be sitting down and wasting time, creating all this content when you could be out there spreading and distributing your content and getting it in front of your audience.
You have to be posting content consistently over time to really start seeing the results, unlike paid ads, where you can run campaigns, launch them and then double down on them as soon as you see the results.
Content marketing doesn’t work like that. But it does work and it needs to be part of your marketing plan.
So in this article I show you three ways that you can start saving time while creating more content. Here’s a video to help you stop wasting time, and instead save time:
Batch and schedule your content
Now, this is especially useful if you want to stay consistent with your content marketing.
Batching and scheduling your content means you take out a few hours, for example, during the week, could even be a fortnight where you execute your content plan.
It’s not about ideation… It’s not about planning… It’s not about strategizing. It’s all about EXECUTING. Ideally you’d want to have all your ideas, all flushed out, all planned out during the week for example. But when it comes time to execute, you literally sit down and you create your content.
You can do this on a weekly basis then you can do it on a fortnightly basis. You could even do it on a monthly basis, but the goal is to sit down and bulk create your content.
However, it can be tempting to post your content as soon as you create it. You may create three, four videos for social media and it might be tempting for you to post them straight away. Don’t do that.
Instead, schedule your content in so you can drip post it over time. So, if you are a type of person that likes to create content on the go, then I would strongly urge that you keep on doing that… because more content is obviously better when it comes to content marketing, but also allow for batching and scheduling your content during the week or during the fortnight or even during the month.
Now there’s nothing wrong with posting content on the fly. The problem is, especially if you’re a business owner or an entrepreneur that well things happen, right? You get busy and there’s other things to do in your business. So, you may struggle with being consistent.
Make sure your content is ready to create
As part of bulk creating your content, it’s always important to come up with ideas before you sit down to create your content.
During the week you should to be noting down your ideas in your favorite note taking app. So when time comes you can sit down and create your content. That means coming up with your ideas and penning them down as soon as you get them during the week. The last thing you want to do is sit down to execute on your content and run out of ideas to create!
Use Templates
Once you’ve got your content created. It’s very easy to reuse the same content for future content. Whether that’s images, blog articles or whether it’s even videos, you can create a template for almost everything.
Good examples include:
Quotes that you turn into images: use a template to have your styles, font, layout all set, so you can save time the next one you create.
Videos: Get your script template sorted out. Some video editing tools even let you save templates for your videos so you can apply same styles, branding, layouts across different videos.
Blogs: Create a structure for your blog, for example Intro, Index, Image placement, Headlines. You can set this up once, so you don’t have to think about these again and again every time.
Headlines: Keep a database of common headlines you can use for various content.
Repurpose Your Content
Repurposing content lets you leverage existing content to create more content. It’s not about regurgitating your content where you create your content once and then just spam or post that across all your different channels.
There are two parts to repurposing it. The first one is spinning your content. The second one is branching your content.
Spin Content
Spinning your content could be, for example, turning a video into a podcast. Turning it into a Blog article. Grabbing a little snippet or highlights from a long form video such as a Facebook Live video and grabbing 30 seconds to 60 seconds so you can Post it on Facebook as a Reel or as a Story.
Other examples of repurposing content include:
- Grab quotes from your articles to tweet or turn into images
- Summarize a listicle video into a carouse post for Instagram
- Turn an article into an Keynote, E-Book, series of posts for social
- Turn a YouTube video into a square video for Facebook
Branching Content
Branching content on the other hand, is a way for you to create more content by using existing ideas. For example, if I were to go through this article, I would highlight certain keywords and certain sub topics where I might feel that my audience might want more information on.
For example, I’ve just talked about repurposing content by spinning it. Now that sub topic alone, could be its own video. It could be its own blog article. Or I could turn it into a couple of Facebook or LinkedIn posts.
So, branching content allows you to generate more ideas out of existing content.
So there you go, you have three ways you can start saving time while creating more content while NEVER running out of content ideas.
- Creating by batching, and scheduling your content in bulk.
- Make sure you use templates
- Repurpose your content