Creating content consistently is no small feat. It takes time, effort, and more than a bit of planning – especially if you’re a small business owner or consultant, or working full-time while trying to manage your own content on the side.
It’s easy to feel overwhelmed when thinking about how to juggle brainstorming ideas, crafting posts, and publishing them everywhere regularly. But with a clear plan in place, content creation doesn’t have to be hard.
When Zoetica Media founder Kami Huyse launched her business many years ago, one of the first things she did was start a PR blog to connect with others in the industry. Soon she was part of a vibrant communications community where people shared best practices and referred opportunities to each other via word of mouth.
“A lot of this is about building a community around your brand,” says Kami. “Social media is awesome but social media is a vehicle to grow your community and grow the people that you are going to be working with.”
But even though Kami understood the power of community, creating content consistently to grow her community was still a challenge. She knew she needed to devise a system that would help her.
Reasons Why We Don’t Create Content
Knowing the reasons we may not be creating content is important so we can be aware of traps to avoid. Here are the four Kami identified:
1. Doing All Or Most Of the Jobs Yourself. While she understands that at the beginning “it's definitely the way you have to go,” she also suggests that “you need to start thinking almost immediately about how you can…shorten what you do… [or] find some help.”
2. Creating Everything From Scratch.”You may be able to do it for a while,” she says, but eventually, “are going to hit a road bump.”
3. Feeling Fear, Overwhelm, or Obligation. “I sometimes was worried about what people would think about me,” she shares. “I was worried about my peers judging me, I was worried about so many things.”
4. Feeling Uninspired. “[If] you're feeling uninspired, you're just not going to create the content that you should be creating,” she acknowledges.
How To Make a Robust Plan for Consistent Content Creation
Kami created a four-step process to ensure everyone can consistently create content, even when everyday pressures build up.
Step 1: Something Has To Give – Create White Space. “You need white space, you need to have time, like when you're out on a walk, when you're taking a shower, when you're just sitting around thinking,” she explains. “ The point is you need some white space in order to have the ideas that you need to get.” She suggests finding time by using the Eisenhower Matrix (sometimes called the Eisenhower Box) and placing tasks in either the Decide, Do, Delegate, or Delete category.
Step 2: Create Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) and Set Up a Content Generator. “You want to put together your operating instructions for your business. [Ask yourself], what is the pathway you take to get your content out?” Kami recommends. “The reason why it's important for you to write it all out and put it somewhere is because someday people are going to take pieces of that process for you and you're going to sit down with them and you're going to try to teach them your process.” Meanwhile, the content generator is “where you're going to keep all of the information that you have so that you can just put it together [when you need it].”
Step 3: Crush Your Fear, Overwhelm, and Obligation With Accountability. “For me, if it's not on my calendar it's not happening,” Kami says. “If I haven't made a commitment to it, it's not happening.” She also admits that “I kind of work to deadlines, I'm really much better at working to deadlines than anything else.” Find what works for you – anywhere from starting early and completing work way ahead of a deadline to waiting until a deadline is looming to finish things – and schedule your tasks around that.
Step 4: Uninspired? Not Sure What To Post? Create your Brand Voice. Kami says it’s important to create your own brand voice so eventually people can help you create your own content. “You need your own brand voice to be defined,” she says. “Why? Because guess what? If your brand voice is defined, other people can write for you and sound like you.” AI can be a valuable tool in this process as well, she explains. “And now with AI on the scene, I mean you can take this brand voice, put it in an AI, say ‘write a promo about this, this, and this, and in this brand voice.’ Having that brand voice nailed down is really critical,” adding that, “I have an entire brand voice process that I’ll be going through soon…. You walk away with your brand voice nail down so that you can use it to hire other people to help you.”
Conquering your Brand Voice Means Easy Content Creation
Kami believes that once you have a brand voice, “creating content becomes extremely easy.” That’s why Kami regularly offers free, hands-on workshops developing brand voice and vertical video creation, as well as a Smart Social Mastery group that focuses on developing that authentic voice from start through development.