Five Ways To Stop Overthinking Content and Start Creating Content

I’m here to tell you to STOP OVERTHINKING CONTENT. You know you need it, but you might not be creating it, right? Content is queen, so it’s time to stop acting like you don’t need the queen in your life. Content or content marketing helps you tell your story, engage your audience, and ultimately (YES) close more business. How?

• It attracts more people like you (or more people who like you) to you. Why? The stories you are telling resonate or are more relatable to those who are engaging with you. This is a good thing!
• Content validates what that referral said about YOU. woo hoo! So when your client or colleague sends someone your way to work with you, and then they read about your story and see all of the knowledge you are sharing through your content, they KNOW you are the one they need to work with.
• Content also warms the cold leads. And, as I mentioned in number 2, it can close the warm leads as well. 

All in all — content tells a story, builds a connection with your audience, warms up those leads, and this ultimately leads to more business. You may already be creating content, and if so, that’s great! But if you are not, WHY NOT? 

Let me guess. It might be one of the following reasons: 

• You don’t have time
• You don’t know where to start
• You don’t know the type of content you should create
• You don’t even really know what content is
• You don’t know what to say

Well friends, that’s why I am here. I’m here to tell you — STOP OVERTHINKING CONTENT. I know it can be scary, and you might not know where to start. That’s totally understandable. You need to focus on your business and doing what it is you do well. I get it. BUT — marketing your business is also an important part of growing your business, and in turn doing more of what you do well. And I’m a fan of making it as easy as possible for those potential customers to buy from you. I want them to KNOW you are the right choice.

So here it is. My 5 ways to stop overthinking content and start creating content.

1. Identify the type of content YOU can simply create, that you can commit to, and keep up with. If you are just getting started, pick at least 1-2 types of content that you can work with. Here are a few examples: audio, video, blog, photos, gifs, graphics.
2. Identify the platforms YOU know how to use and can maintain on a regular basis. I recommend at least 1 social media platform and 1 email marketing tool. If you can squeeze in a larger content piece like a video blog, a written blog, a podcast, an online course, to name a few, I do highly recommend just 1 of those as well. Again they don’t have to be highly produced, but just a valuable piece of content that can be shared on social media, to your email list, and then be further repurposed. If you want to start smaller, that’s okay too.
3. Create a content calendar. Let’s say you are going to create 1 video blog post per week, share it on LinkedIn, and email it out to your email subscribers. To make sure you are efficiently creating content, repurposing it, and creating a strategy behind it, you have to have a calendar! You can’t create content without a calendar. I use Airtable for all of my content planning. There are free and paid versions of Airtable, but I assure you, you can have everything you need in the free version if you are managing your content yourself. Airtable also has content calendar templates that you can adapt to your needs. Within the content calendar, you should plan the following: when you will shoot that 1 video per week, and also when you will share it. 
   1. Video Blog: The topic, when you will shoot it, when you will share it, and the platform(s) you will share it on.
   2. Social Media Platforms: Indicate the day/time you are sharing it on your selected platforms.
   3. Email Marketing: Determine how often you want to send a newsletter out to your audience. Is it 1x per month or more? For example, if you want to send something out 2x per month. In each newsletter, you can share a quick few sentences about each video, include 2 of the videos, and a link back to your website so they can learn more about you. Repeat this 2x per month.
4. Repurpose your content. In number 3, we figured out what you are going to create 1x per week, but I recommend showing up in front of your digital audience a little more than that. There’s no one size fits all for this, but whatever you can do consistently. For example, maybe it’s 3 times per week. So what are you going to share the other 2x per week? Here are a few ideas — You can pull a quote from what you said in the video and use that in a standalone social media post. You can also share a comment from a viewer of your video, sharing what they like or what they learned from your video! People are always proud to cheer you on, so share their words of encouragement! You can also share a behind scenes photo of you recording that video and guess what — share the video again! That’s just a different and creative way to do it that doesn’t look exactly the same. These are a few examples of taking the same piece of content and making it into three more pieces without very much work. Don’t forget to indicate these items on your content calendar.
5. Batch your content. Execute your calendar’s plan. The easiest way to execute this is to plan 1 day per week or even per month that you plan out all of your content for the month. You’ll figure out a rhythm that works for you. With the calendar guiding your plan, you will take the guesswork out of it, and develop a habit of planning, creating, and executing that will surely have your audience taking notice.

I hope these tips helped take the guesswork out of creating your own content. Remember you can start small, but just start. Have any questions for me about creating a content plan, content marketing, or what we do here at TB Media Group? I’m happy to help, just send me a message.