3 Tips to Make Content Creation Easier

Welcome to another Entrepreneur School one on one episode. In this episode, I'm going to talk to you all about content creation because it's something that as entrepreneurs, we know that we have to do. Sometimes it can be totally draining, sometimes uninspiring, we don't know what we should be talking about where we should be talking about it, how to plan how to make it all work. And I have some systems and tools, and some tips for you around creating content to boost your online presence to create connections with your audience, and ultimately to help you get more clients. So I hope you're ready. Let's dive in.

This is the Entrepreneur School Podcast where we believe you can run a thriving business and still make your family a priority. This show is all about supporting you the emerging or early stage Entrepreneur on your journey from solopreneur to CEO while wearing all of the other hats in your life. My name is Kelly Sinclair and I'm a brand and marketing strategist who started a business with two kids under 3am, a corporate PR girl turned entrepreneur after I learned the hard way that life is too short to waste doing things that burn you out. On this show, you'll hear inspiring stories from other business owners on their journey, and learn strategies to help you grow a profitable business, while making it all fit into the life that you want. Welcome to Entrepreneur School.

I have asked hundreds of entrepreneurs what they think the first thing they should do when they start a business is, and most people will say, social media. And I'm totally on board with this because it is a free way to start getting exposure and building an audience and finding your voice. But I also want to challenge the idea that you have to be everywhere online all the time, in order to grow your business, because that is exhausting. It's not sustainable. It's not exciting. And it's not going to work for you forever because of those reasons. So certainly as well. Content Creation alone is not the only way that you can find clients. So putting all of your effort like 100% of your effort into this tactic is not advisable. But it's definitely something that you need to be doing alongside other marketing tools and tactics in your business. And in today's episode, I'm going to walk you through my top three tips for creating content online, and also share what I learned by doing over 100 Live videos on my Facebook page.

So here's why content creation matters for your business. The obvious one, first of all, is visibility. Right? Your clients are already showing up on these platforms. And they're looking for people like you, people who offer services like you do people who provide products like you do, they're looking for you already, and they are already there, so you can get their attention.

So the second reason why content is important is that it helps you build trust. So this is an opportunity for you to both show your personality and your expertise and help people get to know you and want to work with you. You can talk about what you're an expert in, you can talk about ways to work with you, you can share your personality so that they know that you're not going to annoy them. If you're a sort of a coach or like you get to know them a little bit behind the scenes. Know what you have in common from a personality perspective, from a values perspective, all of these things are really important.

One of the most important things, though, I think, which is completely overlooked when it comes to creating content, is that the act of creating content will help you build confidence. So you get used to talking about what you do, you get used to going deep on topics that are related to your area of expertise. And that transfers into your confidence, which allows you to have better conversations with potential clients, you will literally sound smarter at what you do, the more that you talk about it. So practice, practice, practice, practice. And that's one of the things I'm super excited about getting onto this podcast and getting into a content creation rhythm, again, is allowing me to continue to have conversations and explore in depth about the topics that I am good at in the areas of marketing and branding.

So the last piece I just want to share before we dive into some tips on how you can make content creation easier. And what you should be saying is, when you're creating content, it helps you build momentum. So this is a huge win. When you do something when you put something out there when you create a piece of content, whether it's a social media post, a YouTube video, an email, or even a podcast episode like this, that act Creating content is going to help you feel momentum. It feels like you did something. And even in a day where your biggest win might feel like I got both my kids to school with lunches and water bottles today, hooray. You also put out a piece of content that can contribute to helping you feel like you're making progress, like you're doing something towards the goal that you have with your business. And that is super important to be able to zone in on those wins in your business.

Hey, I just want to pop in for a second and chat with you a little bit about content creation, you know, that thing that you know that you're supposed to do in order to get visibility and find clients online? And you know, you're just not finding time to actually do that thing? Because it can be overwhelming to think about? What am I supposed to write? What videos should I be sharing? Where am I going to have the time to make all of the beautiful graphics that go along with having a lovely Instagram page, all of the things? Well, I made for you a tool called The Simplified Content System. And inside of this, you're gonna find exactly what I use to be able to plan and create all of my content in an hour a week. So it's a calendar that you can edit, that you can put in what you're doing where for any kind of platforms, whether you're using Instagram, other social medias, whether you're doing email marketing, whether you're on YouTube, all of it can go in one place that links nicely to this beautiful caption document. And I've also created a number of trainings and templates for you to make it even easier to get your content out and into the world so that you can be seen, so that you can get clients and so that you still have time to go to all of your kids sports activities. Okay, so you can grab it at entrepreneurschool.ca/content.

Okay, well, let's dive into a few tips around content creation. The first one is to choose topics, okay? So sketch out for yourself, what topics you might actually want to talk about. And these should be related to what you do. So I would suggest we've, sometimes people call these content pillars, you may have heard that before, I would suggest picking a maximum of three. And they can be fairly broad, to allow you to just be able to categorize what it is that you're talking about when you're going to create any kind of content. So I'll share mine with you. Generally speaking, I talk about branding, marketing, and entrepreneurship. Again, these are huge categories, because branding can cover any number of things like visual brand, brand, message, brand, strategy, lots of things related to branding on my branding formulas and stuff like that. And I'll do episodes specific to that marketing, which would be the tactical pieces around the ways in which you can, when I'm teaching this, there'll be ways that you can reach your audience, connect with them make sales, and then entrepreneurship. For me, this is an important one. And really a critical part of the whole podcast is talking about the journey of entrepreneurship, why it's different, how to navigate the different pieces of what you might experience during the day as an entrepreneur, and just sharing some of that behind the scenes. To me, this is one category where I can create a lot of relatability with potential clients and with listeners. So those are my three topics. So that's the first tip, choose your content topics, or your content pillars.

Tip number two, is to choose your platforms. Okay, so if you search right now, you will find that there are close to 100 social media platforms. And you probably don't even know what all of them are, and I certainly don't. And that's ridiculous. Legit ridiculous. We do not need to be on all of these platforms in order to grow a business. Because remember, ultimately, this is what your goal is, create some online visibility, create an online presence, be able to develop relationships so that you can get clients that's the real purpose of doing that. So think about the platforms that you want to be on. And the first factor in that is where is your audience, you should only consider platforms where your audience is already hanging out. So knowing deeply who your audience is, is really important here. You can find online if you do a little research, you know who the main users of the main social media platforms are so that you can kind of guide yourself as far as demographics and locations and things like that, and who might be using these things. So definitely, that's the first filter. The second filter for choosing your platforms, is what you're willing to keep up with consistently. Okay, you will not find me on Tiktok right now, because I am not interested in learning another platform and creating content for another platform, and making sure that I'm like showing up in another place, because I just don't have the energy for it. And that's okay. Some people might say that I'm crazy, because of course, my audience is on Tik Tok, and probably yours is too. But if you aren't interested in using it yourself, you're not going to, you're not going to show up. And if you don't show up and create content with some kind of consistent schedule, then you're not going to have any success there. You're going to show up like four times like I do on LinkedIn and be like, how come I'm not creating any relationships on LinkedIn? Well, it's because I'm not showing up there. That's the truth. Okay. So think about your platforms based on where your audience is, who they are, and what you're actually willing to use.

You do not have to be everywhere, all the time to start with for sure. Which takes me into tip number three around content creation, which is choosing your cadence. And cadence is the frequency at which you will show up, how often are you going to be posting on different social media platforms, or sending emails or whatever it is you're doing. And I want you to set an appointment in your calendar, so that you can build a habit around creating your content. For me, I like to do this on Mondays, I like to spend about an hour thinking about what I'm going to post for the week, drafting it out using my simplified content system, to map it all out, get it all written and ready to go. So I know what's gonna go on what days and where it's gonna go. But when I first started my business, I was doing, like, once a week, and that was what I was willing to commit to at first. You know, sometimes people will say, have to be five times a week on social media. But you know, what, if that's just too overwhelming for you, like think about it, like, if you were trying to go to the gym after not going to the gym, and you're like, Oh, I'm gonna go five days a week. Now, knowing you're not like you're not, let's be honest, let's do something that's realistic, so that you can turn it into a habit and increase the frequency as you start building that muscle as it starts becoming easier for you. Because if you start once a week, I'm going to share my story now of how I did 100 Live videos on Facebook. I didn't do those 100 videos in 100 days, I did those 100 videos over two years, showing up every single week, once a week. In my calendar, Wednesdays at noon, I turned on Facebook, I went live, I created about a 10 to 15 minute video and I practiced, the more that you show up and practice creating your content, the easier it gets back to what I talked about when it comes to confidence, and also competence building, the more that you talk about what it is that you do, the more that you talk about the areas of expertise that you have your content topics, your content pillars. So I showed up every week I created this, you know, calendar event for myself, I also made it a Facebook event. So people in my audience could know that I was going to be showing up every single week to do these Q and A's to do this little mini training. And what happened? Well, let me tell you, none of these videos went viral. None of them became like a million views. I didn't get hundreds of clients. I didn't even get hundreds of followers probably from it. But the act of doing it was so important to learn how to one speak extemporaneously from you, which is something that I knew was a skill I wanted to build. I'm literally right now looking at about five bullet points and making this entire podcast episode. And I don't think I would be able to do that if I hadn't done those 100 Live videos. So creating the consistency having that as a regular thing and then just committing to it. Right and so at first my content cadence was just showing up that one time per week, talking about whatever it was I was talking about on that video, and maybe doing like a summary post talking about what I talked about. So I didn't have to create, you know, five new pieces of content. And then eventually once that got easier after I moved away from having to write out pretty much an entire script before my video to five minutes beforehand, getting on a sticky note writing down three bullet points and then managing to make a 10 minute video out of it. Once they move into that easier flow of creating that content. I also got better at creating more content for more platforms, so I expanded onto Instagram, I expanded to, you know, multiple posts per week on these platforms. And that was something that I did over time, once I got to a point that it felt like I could add more. And so that's what I would recommend for you is that you set something that feels realistic. And then once that becomes doable, and it is a habit for you add on to it, add on to the frequency that you're showing up, add on to the number of locations and platforms that you're showing up, you can let it grow.

So just to recap, our tips for content creation. Number one, choose up to three content topics or content pillars, for your business brand. Number two, choose your platforms based on where your audience is, and what you're willing to actually do. And number three is choose a cadence, that frequency that you feel like you can commit to and actually put it in your calendar.

So again, the simplified content system can definitely help you with that. So you can check it out on our website, and in the show notes. I hope that you are feeling a couple of things after hearing this episode one, content creation is important. And two, content creation is not as overwhelming as you thought before. So go out there start creating content leads. As always reach out if you're having any challenges with this. I would love to help you out, talk through what some of your content strategy might look like. And I will catch you again on the next episode. Thank you so much for being here. I can't wait to chat with you again soon.