Content Queen Mariah

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219: Easy content creation: when does it get easier and save me some time?

Mariah MacInnes

When does this save me time? 

A question I got in a content marketing workshop last year… 

Short answer - strategy.

Long answer - When you put together a plan and action steps, it gets easier with time, skills and knowledge. 

We will be going through the three things you need to make the content creation process in your business easier and more time-effective. 

If you LOVED the episode, make sure you share this on your Instagram stories and tag us @contentqueenmariah.

✨ BUILD YOUR CONTENT STRATEGY NOW - ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠GET BOOTCAMP⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

KEY EPISODE TAKEAWAYS 👇

  • The three things that makes content creation “easier”

  • The three things that makes content creation less time consuming 

  • The positive impacts of content strategy for your time and business 

SHOW RESOURCES 👇

If you like this episode, don't forget to share it to your Instagram stories and tag me⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ @contentqueenmariah⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠!

Other than that, enjoy - chat next week 💕

PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION

This is episode 219 and I'm talking all about easy content creation and when does it get easier and save you time. Welcome to the Content Queen podcast. I'm your host, Mariah, entrepreneur, storyteller, digital nomad, creator of Content Bootcamp and founder of Content Queen. I'm here to teach you how to share your unique story, create content and market your business with strategy through the channels that work for you.

Each week I'll deliver a story to help you connect to a powerful strategy around marketing, business and content creation. I will also be joined by amazing souls and entrepreneurs who are here to share their own journey along with actual steps to help you take your business to a whole new level to amazing storytelling, powerful aligned marketing and content strategy.

Let's do it. Hello. How are you? Hope you had a nice long weekend.  Um, it is the countdown is on until we're back in Australia. So currently we're in a new country and I hit my 30th country uh 30 countries at 30 which was  Two days three days four days ago a week ago. Can't even remember can't keep up But i'm now in bolivia  in South America.

So we traveled from Peru. We went to Machu Picchu for my 30th. It was, it's been amazing couple of weeks, but yeah, we're in our last like three weeks of our trip. Uh, we don't have too much planned, although Mitch and I have booked ourselves an Airbnb, sort of like just out of the city of La Paz, which is the capital and fun fact, the highest  city in the world, like capital city of a country in the world at 2, 000.

3, 900 meters above sea level. So I got sick in Cusco so that, and then I could, you know, Cusco was 3, 600.  So anyway, that's a fun fact for you. So we're high, we're close to the sun here. Anyway, we booked like a retreat space just out of the city or not a retreat space, an Airbnb, and we're calling it our retreat space because at the start of the year, Um, we did this really cool, um, goal setting thing, which was, um, shared from Katie, who was on the podcast a client of mine, she shared a blog on like the one goal and how you write out, uh, 12 goals, I think it was 12 or 13, 13, and you then burn one every day between Christmas and new year.

Okay. And then. On like the 6th you take whichever goal is left and that's your goal for the year. So we're booking a, we booked an Airbnb to do like our own little retreat and I'm going to do my goal which was to write a book this year and like obviously not finish it but work on it and Mitch really wants to play soccer back home when we go to Australia so he's going to do like a little pre season training camp.

So that's going to be super fun, I can't wait to share more about that but that's a really good way to get things done, right? It's like Lock yourself away,  away from society so you can get it done. So I'm very excited for that.  But anyway, onto the show, which is about, um, a question I got in a workshop.

When does it get easier? It saved me time. Um, which I imagine, yeah, is what you're all thinking when it comes to content creation.  And basically, the person that asked this question, yeah, they come to the workshop, um, because it was about content strategy, and, you know, during the workshop, sort of, that came to her, like, okay, it takes me so long, like, when is it going to save me time?

And basically, Implementing and putting together the strategy and then a couple of other things that I'll share definitely helps anyone with anything in general, not just content marketing, get better. And it take us less time. And I want to share a story of my own experience with podcasting. So I had my first ever podcast in 2008.

2018, I launched it  and it was basically because everyone at work said, you love to talk. So why don't you just start a podcast? I was like, oh, that would be fun. I had a blog at the time. I was kind of just yet,  I guess, building a portfolio and learning the journey of content creation. And I had a blog since 2013.

Um, so yeah, I was just having a play around with different types of content and I loved listening to podcasts.  So I set myself a goal, August one,  every day for 30 days. Or was it September one? I think it was September. I can't remember the exact if it was September one or August one. Anyway, at the end of the 30 days, I was set to launch my first podcast episode.

So basically what I did every day for 30 days is I learned something about podcasting and then it got to the point where I'd recorded my first episode. Now editing that episode took me so much time, like ridiculous. I was editing every um, I was like, yeah, over perfecting it. Right. So.  That took me a lot of time and I would think to myself, Oh my God, this is a very time consuming hobby, essentially,  but I loved it.

And I started to realize that with time, I became quicker at getting what I wanted to say out. I got quicker at editing. I got less perfectionist about everything because I was more confident what I had to say.  So basically from the time of,  launching my first ever episode to the 20th episode when I did stop to do more content queen stuff.

It wasn't taking me that long to record, edit, find guests, all the process was just so much quicker because I knew what I was doing. And basically the message of this episode is when you put together a plan and action steps, it gets easy with time, skills, and knowledge. So I'm going to go through. three aspects of this and basically what it is going through in this episode is the seven steps to my content strategy, which I've shared quite a few times.

But if you want to learn more and dive deeper into content strategy, because essentially that is the short answer, then you can check out my workshop, which is for free. And it's in the show notes, but basically,  you know, that, that concept of like, um, spend money to make money.  It's the same thing. Spend time to save time.

So it's like when you get a new hire and you have to onboard them. You have to like when you hire a VA or a content marketer or a social media manager anything like that, it's not a process of, Oh, okay. I hire them and my life gets easier. No, you have to invest a bit of time in them first to set up the onboarding, show them how you do things because how you do something and how another business owner does something can be totally different.

So the experiences are not the same for that entrepreneur or for that.  or social media marketer  to, you know, put in the same things into place.  You know, it's about doing things like filming videos, showing them, giving them passwords, access, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah. You take time to save time.  So basically the first thing you want to do is  the research element.

So that spend time to save time, get to know your audience again. Spend a bit of time getting to know them again. It is always changing. When you first started your business and you built out your target audience, you probably did it a little bit quick cause you wanted to get started. You probably know a lot more now.

I'm pretty confident you know a lot more about your audience now. So spend a little bit more time to continue to get to know them.  So your target audience and understanding your target audience. I saw this like super interesting stat on content marketing about how the most effective content marketing campaigns involved target market or target audience research at the beginning.

Right? So if you don't know them, you're not speaking to them. It's not really going to save you time in the long run because the more you know about someone, let's like, for example, your mom, your dad, your sister, your brother, your It's easier, maybe, potentially, for you to pick out a gift for them or something that's going to make their life better than it is maybe a friend or like an acquaintance, um, or your best friend versus, uh, you know,  an acquaintance or like, um, you know, just a friend.

It's easier to pick out a gift and will take you less time than it would for the other person because you know them, you know them better, so it saves you time creating content for that person when you know them. like you understand them so you know what to create. Then you want to set your goals because this keeps you on track and basically you're not running in a thousand different directions.

When you understand your goals and the vision of your business and then of course your marketing and your content marketing, you can understand your goals. what direction you need to go in. So you're not saying, Oh, I need this or I need that. And when you get a video on social media from a guru telling you, if you don't jump on this or you don't do that, your business is going to fail.

You can keep cool, calm and collected because you know, Hmm, probably not going to work to my vision. So don't need to engage in it. So don't need to waste hours learning a new platform or hours learning a new type of content creation or marketing or system or platform because I understand my goals.  It keeps you on track.

It stops you from going down crazy paths. And it happens a lot. And this is what happened with threads. And I did a video on this quite a while ago. And basically it was, you know, people like, Oh my God, threads, what do we do? And I remember clients saying like, what do you think? I said, look, our strategy is this.

So this is what we're gonna go with. And yeah, we could look at threads, we could repurpose. I currently was in Europe at the time, so I didn't have any access to it, but I said, you know, have a play around. And people stopped posting on it very quickly. And I know some people that still use it and love it, and that's great for them, but it wasn't in alignment to the strategy that we were creating.

The target audience also wasn't really there.  And then the last one is understanding the platforms that you wanna show up on and that your audience is at, right? When you understand this.  It's, you know, you go, okay, these are my platforms. These are ones I like. And generally what we like probably we are quote unquote better at or understand better.

And it takes us less time to navigate.  If we're jumping on a new platform every five minutes, we're relearning something. So we're wasting time. over the long run. Unless, of course, we need to spend time to save time or spend money to make money because it's something that's going to be of value to our business.

But understanding the platforms that you want to show up on, your audience is at, is the way to go because then you start to understand the platform and the strategy you want on that platform. You're not like, hmm, what can I post on this platform? You understand it, you get it. So that is the first part, which is sort of the research, the strategy, the roadmap.

You're starting to build a roadmap on where you need to go. And when we have a map, we know the best way to get there, the quickest way to get somewhere. So again, saves us time. We're building skills. We're building knowledge.  The second part is building out your own schedule. Now this is still part of building a strategy.

So this comes down to being aligned with your sales goals. So what kind of campaigns or things are you launching? Because this will help you create the content ideas  and what you're going to create.  Then you can build out your Monday to Sunday schedule on where you're going to show up, when, and what types of content you're going to create  over time.

So you know when you're sharing something on Mondays, you know what it is going to be. You don't have to try and think of that. And then of course, if you know what you're selling, And you combine that together. You're not thinking of content ideas all the time. And when I say understanding what you're selling, it's not just, Oh, well, I'm selling this product.

So I'm just going to talk about this. It's all the topics and all the concepts that surround that offering, the educational parts of it, the stories around it, the testimonials you have about it, like the topic in general, not just what you're actually selling.  So then you can start to build out your own schedule in terms of when you're going to show up where, and what types of content you're going to create.

Now, in terms of execution, you then want to decide, okay, what is my day to day schedule going to look like? When am I going to have time to actually map out this content? Now, I want to share a quick story with you around how I navigated this myself, because I wasn't doing it very effective in 2021. 2021, I would schedule most of my stuff on a Monday.

I don't know why.  And I get to Monday and I've got to record videos. I've got to write captions. I've got to, you know, brief.  Canva graphics and this, that and the other. And I had a team and it was just draining. And it would take me double the amount of time to do it. I wasn't energized. The content,  what I was producing, wasn't really doing it for me.

And I was just like, I don't understand. Um, at the time I had a client shout out to Leticia Andrek and I have shared this blog many times. I'm going to share it again. She was, we were working on, she was providing me the information for this blog on the energies of the week and how essentially each day is an alignment to a planet and that planet gives off a certain energy,  right?

So for example, Monday is moon day and moon is feminine, which is about relaxing and you know, like just.  not pushing, right? And I was trying to do everything on a Monday. So when I learned these, I built out myself a little bit of a plan and it really clicked when she said to me, Wednesdays are my days for podcasts because that is the day of mercury and mercury is about communication.

I was like, Oh, okay. So I switched some things around. And what I did was Mondays was about planning. So just like a big picture stuff. And that's why lots of people have like Monday CEO days. So I started planning, spending a little bit, like a tiny bit of times going, okay, I know what I'm, my podcast is about.

Let's just like put together a bit of a plan on what the social media is going to look like, you know, maybe do some podcast show note, high level plans. Right. So I would do that on Monday. Tuesday was a really active energy day for writing. So I would write my social media captions, blogs, news, newsletters, things like that.

Like I would just schedule time for writing.  Wednesday, communication was recording videos, recording my podcast,  doing those sorts of things. Now, don't get me wrong, this isn't perfect every week and of course traveling doesn't make it easy, but I try to stick to this as much as I can. And then Thursday was a really creative day.

So that's when I would create any kinds of visuals and things like that. And I use this with my clients as well. And then Friday was like more of an admin day. So I'm going to do a graphic on this on social media so you can save it and potentially copy this day, but think about when you're most active and got the most energy and try and  The days of creation on those days.

And as I said, doesn't have to be a whole day of writing. It can be an hour or two, or it could be half an hour, depending on what you have to do. You know, my planning is only like 15 minutes or 10 minutes. It's not an hour, two hours, three hours, four hours. It's like a short amount of time. And I started implementing this across my clients.

And it just made my energy better and I just found that I had more creative energy, more flow and I saved a lot more time. I was like taking double the amount of time on a Monday to write something than I would on a Tuesday because I was just like full of energy. So that also helps you save time. And then the last thing is, um, Part of the strategy is your own stories, thinking about your own stories, stories, you know, stories of clients.

This is going to help you save time with content ideas because your story, you know, your story, or, you know, the story of your clients, when you implement storytelling into your content, it makes things easier and it saves you time in the long run. Because  You don't have to go searching for things.

They're already within, in your mind. So that's step two, which is building out your own schedule and the strategy, the content ideas, what you're going to be talking about, and of course, embedding your own content ideas. But I am going to  switch to a little, um, note from Amy, Amy Trout, who was on our podcast episode, I'm going to say 174.

If it's wrong, it's going to be in the show notes. And this podcast episode was about time saving, um, and you know, things just taking us too long because it was a question that I got. And she was so awesome in that podcast episode, but she's launched a book and she has a really special gift for you listening.

So I'm going to hand over to Amy so she can share what she's going to share with you. And I will be back very soon.  Hey, it's Amy Traw, host of the Motivated CEO Podcast, and I'm here with a surprise for your podcast listeners today. I'm gifting listeners a free copy of my new book, The CEO Method, An Entrepreneur's Guide to Business Success.

Here's how. Just take a screenshot of this episode and share it out to your Instagram stories. Make sure to tag us so we see it. And we'll send you the link to grab your free copy. Now back to the show. So as she said, if you share it on your stories, tag her at Amy Trowell. Um, I will put it in the show notes or, and also tag at content queen Mariah.

You'll get a free book. I've got the link for you. So make sure you tag us and you'll get the book. Super exciting. And now we're onto the third part, which is book.  Processes. Processes help us save time. And in my seven step content strategy, we've got repurposing, navigating processing, and measurement. The first step is  repurposing.

Repurposing of course helps us save time. So it is about not just creating content for Instagram, content for Tik TOK, content for Facebook, content for Twitter. It's about creating content and seeing where it can fit in other places. So as I've mentioned before, my podcast gets repurposed into many different types of content across many different platforms.

It's not a matter of me just copying and pasting. I'm using creative in different ways to repurpose in content bootcamp, which is our signature course. And I'll program and I'll put the link in the show notes. We just finished the live round, but if you join now. You'll get invited into the next live round anyway, so you won't miss out.

But basically, I talk about direct and indirect repurposing. And I show you how you can, of course, direct repurpose and how you can indirectly repurpose. Now, it was really interesting. I was going over some old videos that I had of, um,  my workshop that I had hosted, because I used to do these workshops live.

And this was like, I'm going to say a year ago nearly. And I had this really cool clip of me talking about repurposing. And I'm going to remind you all that not everyone's going to see your content across multiple different channels. In fact, you're lucky that between 10 and 20 percent of people will see your content, let alone see it on other places.

So repurposing onto other channels is not a crime. Um, it's not going to, obviously we do it smarter, so we're not like,  downloading with watermarks from Instagram downloading TikTok with watermarks and posting to Instagram. There's a lot of different smart ways to do it. But basically when you post across multiple different channels, you're the only person that sees everything.

And maybe like your number one fan, but your number one fan is your number one fan. They're not going to judge you. And even repurposing content that's performed well, loads of influencers do this. And when they want to break, they actually repurpose content that they have posted yet.  And see how it works.

And I do this as well. And it's just really smart. It's a really smart way to create content.  The next one is processes. Now, if you create social media content, a podcast, a newsletter, a blog, next time you do it, I want you to write down every element that it takes to make that happen.  Right? So when you're doing social media, of course, you have to plan out what you're going to do.

put together, write the captions, put hashtags, emoji, or whatever you want, the visual, film the video.  And then you can allocate those tasks to different days in alignment with your schedule.  But when you have processes, it makes it easier, right? So I don't have to spend time thinking about what I have to do every day.

It's in my ClickUp. I just get up, I click on it. It has this space called.  everything, literally it's called everything. I'm looking at it now and it's got today and it's got the tasks that I need to do today. And they've been allocated based off me writing down everything that needs to happen to make anything happen in my business, not just content.

And then they've got allocated days. And then when I hit done, it schedules it for the same time the next week, not time as in  between this time and that time, although you can do that, but it just. is for that day next week. And if I get to that day next week and I don't have space for it, I can move it.

But essentially I have provided myself with the tools for success because  I'll never forget when I went to this, um,  in person talk for International Women's Day when I worked in corporate and it was just like time saving,  um, guru that was talking and she was amazing. Um, and she mentioned how it takes us up to 20 minutes to task switch.

Or, when you come back from lunch, at least 20 minutes to get into the headspace to work on your next task.  So setting up processes and procedures takes away some of that time of thinking what I've got to do next, getting organized, like it's there, it's ready for you. And it's in detail to the point of in that task, if I click on it, it's got links of where I need to go to make that happen.

Now you don't have to go that, that far. extreme, but it's just, I'm trying to eliminate myself getting distracted because I do get very distracted. Like literally I will start something and then go to something else like, Oh no, because I'm trying to find something I get distracted.  So that helps creating a process for yourself.

And then if you ever want to outsource in the future,  you've got something that you can send to someone and be like, Hey, here's how I do X, Y, Z. You can follow this process. So it also helps when you're onboarding someone, right?  And then the last one is measurement.  Because when we measure, we work out what is working, what isn't.

Now I've got two stories to share of how I saved time with two clients and made more impact  based through measurement. So the first one was a client where we do a post where we share the podcast and we share the tile, which is a different tile every week.  And then we share the show notes, which are already being created.

So that's a post that's like very repurposed and we're like, Oh, does it actually have impact? Like it's a very easy post to create. And that was what was getting the most website taps from Instagram. So we immediately know that that post is worth keeping and it is less time consuming. Like creating the design is already done.

Creating the caption is already done. It just needs to be scheduled.  Right. And the two tiles, like it's a carousel and the two, two of the tiles is very similar or the same. So that saved us time. I had another client who's creating and spending so much time on Instagram, like a ridiculous amount of time on Instagram.

It was like, I just feel like it's not really working out for me. I feel like I've got this, like, I need to be quote unquote, good on Instagram or successful on Instagram.  And I said, okay, let's look at the stats. And we worked out that a lot of her.  email list was built and her website traffic was coming through YouTube, which yes, of course, YouTube could be a little bit more time consuming, but she could focus her energy on it and loved it.

And actually it wasn't much of an editing process, so she could decide to outsource that editing process because she knew she was getting her return on investment.  Then we could repurpose that content onto Instagram and spend less time on Instagram, but still have content on there and lead them down the funnel, which wasn't email list or buying.

It was actually YouTube, which is more of a softer place to land than to buy something.  So that's where measurement can come into play. It can save you time because you can stop doing maybe tasks that are taking you a long time and get little impact, but it also shows you that maybe some that take a little time have massive impact.

So they are the steps, the seven steps, which you can, we go deeper into the workshop, it is free, check it out, but  To save time, you have to spend a little time building a plan and a strategy. It doesn't have to be the most perfect strategy in the world, but get something down because when you do,  it gets easier because you gain skills and knowledge, which will save you time.

Just like anything that we do. And as I mentioned,  at the start, my podcasting, editing, everything to do with podcasts takes me half, if not, uh, a third of the time that it used to when I first started. Because everything takes us a long time when we first start. We're learning, we're navigating. If you have been creating content for a long time and it still takes you ages, and you don't have a strategy, that would be why.

And if you're not measuring your content and finding out what's working, that would be why.  And if all of those things you've got and it's not still taking you a lot of time, send me a message and let's look at what you're doing in your processes and we can put together a bit more of a plan. If you don't have a strategy at all, and you want one, there's multiple ways you can do that with Content Queen.

I do one on one sessions where we put together the strategy together, or we've got Content Bootcamp, we can do it at your own pace and then join the live around. So I'll put them in the show notes,  but long story short, if you don't have a strategy, it's going to always take you a lot of time to execute.

building out your schedule to work with you, not against you. It was definitely working against me in 2021 and now things take me a lot less time because I'm working to my energy, which I think is super powerful. But be a content queen or king and remember that developing your strategy and story develops your business.

Thank you so much for joining me today. Please don't forget to share this with all your business and entrepreneurial friends. Could do this by adding it to your Insta stories and tagging me at content queen Mariah or just tell them about it. If you share this with them.  If you rate and review though, it does help me get more  guests on the show because people reach out when they see us in the charts.

So it allows me to continue to deliver content, amazing content for you guys. So if you could rate and review, that would be amazing. If I sound a little puffed, it's because of the altitude here and I can't remember talking this much. Since I've been here. So thank you for being patient with my, my altitude, but follow us on TOK.

And let me know if there's any topics you want me to talk about. I will make that happen, but I'll talk to you very soon. Bye.

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