If you’re magnificent at getting your clients’ strategic content created and published, but repeatedly fail at making your own see the light of day, it's time to turn things around!
Prioritizing client needs is often necessary, but that doesn’t mean you should overlook the importance of promoting yourself and your business. Showcasing your unique skills and demonstrating your expertise boosts your credibility and also widens your reach. By building a strong reputation, you don’t just reassure existing clients that they’re in good hands, you also attract new clients who want the same valuable experience.
In a recent livestream, Zoetica Media founder Kami Huyse explained how PR and marketing consultants can put an end to their content visibility woes.
Start by Giving Yourself Some Grace
More than most, creators understand the power and necessity of putting content out there. So when they're not following their own advice, it’s hard not to get frustrated.
Kami recommends cutting yourself some slack and recognizing what’s going on in your business and life. “Give yourself a little bit of grace, because some of this is you are just overtaxed, over busy, maybe you have too much on your plate, I totally get that,” she says.
Be Clear About What’s Required
She also recommends becoming clear about core elements that will help you create the right kind of content that garners visibility. Add value, overcome procrastination, and figure out the best way for you to get noticed.
How To Add Value
“You as a creator of content have to add value to your audience, you have to be interesting or have some emotionally-laden content and maybe also be practical. I like to be practical, that's just me,” she explains.
She suggests considering the following questions to determine how you specifically can add value:
- What is your expertise?
- What is your passion?
- What are the methods you use to help get people the results they want or need?
“If you can mix your expertise and your passion together, that is going to be much more interesting for your audience to listen to, to hear, to read about,” she says. “What is your focus and what is your method to deliver results?
Overcome Procrastination
Procrastination can tie you up in knots, if you let it. “You see what’s on the other side, maybe even know how to do it, but you just are not making the time, you're not getting over the hump.”
Kami recommends scheduling and accountability as effective ways to beat procrastination. “You need to pick a time and put it on your calendar. I'm not joking. Right now, I want you to open your calendar and I want you to pick one hour during the week – and make it repeating, every week the same hour when you will be thinking about these things,” she says.
If you’re like many people, you may be wondering where you’ll find the time in an already overextended schedule. But Kami argues that “anybody has one hour [a week]. I know that many of us sit on the couch, we watch a television show at night… there is some time in your schedule, even if you don't think so.”
In addition to creating a weekly recurring time block, you need to set up an accountability system. “Having another person or a group to be accountable with is really, really important,” Kami advises. “It's really a benefit to you to do something like that, to have an accountability partner that's willing to do that with you or join a group like our Smart Social Mastery Program.”
Systematize Content Creation
You also need to decide what content to create in order to position yourself as strongly as possible and attract your target audience’s attention. You can create original content every time, or repurpose original content and thereby extend it across several platforms.
“It can be different every time, it doesn't always have to be the same,” Kami says. But her preferred approach is to create one main piece of content and then use that in several different ways. “I do this livestream every Thursday, this is the basis for all of the content in my agency. We do the Smart Social Secrets livestream, my team writes it up as a blog post, and we're even making them into carousels on Instagram at Smart Social Secrets.”
Use the content style you feel most comfortable with. “At the end of the day, this is a way for you to decide what you want. So it doesn't matter. If you love to write, go for writing… choose what you want to do, and then batch create.”
Batch creating is one of Kami’s secrets to content output. “Batch creating is so critical…You can come up with many, many, many ideas very quickly…. I'll sit down and make three or four outlines for videos and I get ahead of it. I'll go and I'll create the thumbnail and get it all put together.”
Ditch Perfectionism
Additionally, don’t go for perfection. Having high standards is important, but waiting until something is ‘perfect’ before you release it is a surefire way to ensure you’ll drip out content at only a snail’s pace.
“It doesn't have to be the perfect piece of content, it just needs to get out there so you can have a conversation,” she says. “I think people don't realize it's not so much about the content you put out there, but the conversation that it causes you to have with your audience or with people that are listening in.”
Participate in the Share Economy
Highlighting other people in your content is another recommendation Kami feels strongly about: “You can actually talk about other people in your content and then tag them about it and say, ‘hey I chatted about you’ or ‘I highlighted you in this.’ or you can share their content. So you don't always have to make all the content yourself.”
“Having that kind of share economy is really cool because then people start to pay attention to what you are doing because you pay attention to what they are doing and take an interest in them,” she says.
Remember to also visit other people's platforms. “That's one of the biggest things you can do with content creation, honestly, is to go and comment on other people's stuff, because you can comment about what you got out of it, what you liked, and you can really make a connection with people in that way.”
Kami shares additional tips in her livestream replay. To learn even more about how to create visibility for your brand and business, access her free minicourse Pathway to Visibility at bit.ly/pathwayvideoseries.