We see questions like that all the time: How can I create content faster? How can I create content that’s more impactful? How can I stop spending hours and hours on creating social media graphics and coming up with new videos and new blogs?
Here at Digitalhacker, we understand that it’s a lot of work to create content on Facebook and Instagram and LinkedIn and Twitter and TikTok and all these amazing platforms. In today’s times, it seems like there’s this added pressure that business owners feel on the limited opportunity and limited window of the Internet where we can reach our ideal clients for free.
Today, we’ll share some of our best content creation hacks so you spend less time creating content, and more time on running your business and doing the things that matter for your brand!
1. Mastery
We see this with so many business owners and they’re just trying to grow everywhere all at once. And that’s just not a strategy that will work. If you know and follow established content creators on any platform, and you’ve had the chance to follow their journey for awhile, you know that they generally focus on mastering one platform at a time. So maybe they’re great at creating beautiful images and they totally crush it on Pinterest. Or they take things to the next level on Instagram before they’re actually on YouTube, and Twitter and Facebook.
You don’t have to do it all. We’re officially giving you permission to select one pillar content channel and that is it. Focusing on mastery is so critical and so important if you want to stand out. Otherwise, you’re going to try to be everywhere and do a really bad job at it. Our advice is to master content creation and master one platform. Stick to it and then when you’re profitable and have a larger team, you can afford to either get people to help you master the other platforms, or you’ll have the time to do so yourself.
We can’t emphasise enough how starting with mastery is so important. And in this aspect, doing less is actually doing more, and it’s going to allow you to be more impactful because you have all that energy focused in one area ,instead of spreading it out across five different ones!
2. Research
Doing the work upfront and researching is so important! Oftentimes when we’re creating content it can be all about what we want to write about and what we want to say. And there has to be a beautiful balance between getting the word out there, your message and your voice, but also writing and creating content around things that people actually care about. It’s easy to get too carried away with your content topics, only creating content around topics that you care about. When it’s so much easier to create content that people care about, because that content will get so much more mileage! You’ll get so much more out of it for the work that you do.
If you notice, you’ll see a lot of the bigger YouTube channels, Instagrammers and bloggers use this all the time. They tap into trends through research and that way the content they’re putting up actually gets them so much more results. So you can either put up 10 different blogs on topics that you really want to talk about but no one’s really searching for, or you can put up two articles around topics that people are really searching for. You’ll get so many more views, sales and leads! So definitely do your research content.
3. Plan Ahead
These days, we’re at a point where some of us have the resources to be able to plan a full quarter in advance. However, others such as solopreneur who are doing it all on their own may only be able to plan about a month’s worth of content. Regardless, a decent amount of planning in advance and having a solid content calendar will help you be ahead of the game. Think of your business like a media company (which is really what we all are in this day and age) and it’ll save you so much time and energy. Instead of just posting things on the fly, plan ahead and create a solid system to put out your content.
4. Batching
What do we mean by batching? Is it in the traditional way where people sit down and create 20 blogs or 20 videos at once? And sure, that could be one type of batching, but what we’re really suggesting is for you to find the batching strategy that works for you. So that might look like sitting down and putting together all of your tweets for the week. Or maybe it’s your Instagram posts. Start small. You don’t need hyper batch right away and try to create everything at once. Start with creating a workflow with micro batching. For example, you can create all of your graphics for social media at one time, or batch write your video creation. Maybe you start with two videos at a time and then you go up to four, and then you increase from there.
That’s going to leave you with the ability to work on the things that matter in your business, things that will move the needle forward and those that have to get done in your brand. It’s really important that you harness the power of batching so you save time!
5. Repurpose
By repurposing your content we’re not talking about sharing the same content over and over again. What we’re trying to do is to actually give your content more mileage! For example, if you’re making a YouTube video you can also turn it into a blog post and content piece. And parts of the video can be chopped down into smaller bite-sized pieces that’ll go into Instagram, Instagram stories and IGTV. You can do the same with your tweets and Facebook posts.
It’s really important that you start building your social media content bank. If you repurpose your content now it becomes so much more manageable, because all you have to do is kind of fill in the gaps with fresh content that you create. Not all your content should be repurposed, but it does really shrink the amount of time that you have to put into creating all new original content. And an extra benefit is that it gives your audience a chance to consume your content on different channels and consume it via different lens.
6. Delegate
This might not sound doable for everybody right now depending on what stage of your business path you’re on. Are you in the launch phase? The hustle phase? Are you in the breakthrough or are you in the scale stage? So depending on what stage you’re in and how much money you’re generating, use delegation strategies that make sense for you. For example, if you’re pre-revenue, maybe you’re in the launch stage, it’s really important to understand that you might not be able right to hire someone right out of the gates because you’re not necessarily generating income yet. that doesn’t mean that there aren’t things you can do to delegate! So maybe you have an amazing partner, mom, dad or siblings that would be willing to take a few things off your plate and support you!
Now when you’re post revenue, you may not be able to afford someone to work for you full-time yet. So you can outsource and delegate on a per project basis. There are websites like Fiverr and Upwork which are really good resources where you can find people who will do simple tasks or even complicated projects for you. So you can start having people create your YouTube thumbnails or edit some of your videos. Or maybe you can find someone to help with transcribing your blog or creating beautiful images.
If you are more advanced and you’re in the breakthrough stage, this is where you want to start bringing in a full-on team! One of the things to really think about in finding the right people and someone to be your right hand person is to focus on finding someone that fits your culture. Because skills can be learned and shared but you can’t change their personality, work ethic or behaviour!
7. Document
Document instead of produce! Leverage this as you go about your day and this is especially practical for those of you who maybe are building your business on the side. Document what you’re doing in your day to day life. For example, maybe you’re an e-commerce store and you’re creating amazing products. Show the behind-the-scenes of how those products are made! Behind-the-scenes can be amusing content and they are things that you can literally do on the fly. It doesn’t have to be this complicated production with all these intricacies, just make sure that you’re documenting that content. It’ll save you so much time and energy!
