“How do I come up with a content creation strategy? I'm struggling with all of the content that I need to create and don't know where to start.”
Does this sound like you?
I want to share with you the content creation strategy that allows me to create a month's worth of content in a couple of hours.
I'm sure you've thought, at least once or twice, “how do I even go about creating content and how do I make sure I can repurpose that content?” Because that's a key point in this strategy. Repurposing content.
In a previous video and post, I talked about how to make the most out of planning your workweek, and part of this process fits into that strategy.
An Easy Content Creation Strategy 
I'm a huge fan of time blocking and batching, so let’s talk about batching this content creation process. It starts with the following steps.
Step 1: Define Your Theme Buckets
At Hustle & Groove, I talk about three main topics:
- email marketing
- productivity
- side hustle related stuff
Whenever I'm sitting down at the beginning of the month to create content for the month or two ahead, I think about those buckets. It's a lot easier to create content if you focus on just one bucket, one topic at a time, so I choose a different theme each month.
For example, this month I'm talking about all things side hustle related. Next month I'll probably talk about productivity. And in the month after that, I'll go on to email marketing. Then I’ll loop back to side hustle the month after that.
Your goal is to figure out what your main topics are and what you want to talk about because it will make creating content so much easier if you focus on a theme each month. So that is step number one.
Step 2: Idea Creation
Step number two is opening up my content creation board in Trello and seeking out all of those topic ideas specific to the theme for the month. Sometimes I start creating topic ideas from emails that come in, or blog posts that I've written in the past that people have commented on or had a question about.
Questions from subscribers are a good starting point for content creation ideas. You immediately know someone is looking for answers, and if one person is looking there are many behind her. It’s an audience waiting for information that you can provide!
But the other thing that you can do is to think about the posts that you already have. Consider how could you potentially expand on those or dive deeper into them.
Once I've got those ideas, I create a whole bunch of cards in my Trello board and I outline the ideas. I'll open them up and in the description area, I put a bunch of bullet points about the things I want to cover for that blog post. It only takes about 10 minutes to map out that content.
I post to my blog twice a week. So that means that I need to come up with a minimum of eight pieces of content for the month. I generally come up with more so that I'm always ahead. I generally outline 10 to 12 blog posts at the beginning of the month.
Figure out what your posting schedule is. A month's worth of content might only be four blog posts for you. It might only be two. So you could actually batch three months worth of content if you wanted to in under an hour.
Step 3: Batching Your Content Creation
The next part is batching, which is exactly what we touched on above. I set aside one day at the beginning of the month to sit down and come up with the ideas and create the outlines. I'm batching all of this. I'm doing it all in one of my focused time blocks, which is normally about 90 minutes.
It really depends on how much content you need to create for the month ahead. It might take you two hours to decide on the topics and create your outlines. The point is to batch it all in one go, then it's ready for recording.
Step 4: Repurpose Your Blog Content
The repurposing piece for me is that my blog posts are turned into videos. You could also choose to create other content such as a Slideshare, quotable images, infographics, an ebook etc.
I have a YouTube channel, which you obviously know about because you're here hanging out with me.? I actually record the video first and then get them transcribed using a service called rev.com. I send off all of my videos (which I’ve batched!) and they transcribe them word for word.
When they all get sent back to me, I hand them over to my VA to convert into blog posts. She needs to change some of the wording, so I'm not necessarily using the exact same words in a blog post since speaking and writing can be a bit different. But she'll go through and make those initial edits, I'll review, and then she schedules them out.
And that's how I strategically create a month's worth of content—10 to 12 blog posts in my case—in less than two hours. It is definitely about planning and not leaving it to the last minute.
Flashback! Here’s what I used to do?
I wasn't always this organized… I used to sit down each week and go, “what am I writing about today?” when I first started my blog and quickly found that it wasn’t very productive. Sometimes, it would be months before I wrote another blog post!
So if blogging or putting out content is something that is part of your long term strategy, you need to plan for it. If you want to be able to pump out content on a consistent basis, batching this stuff and planning it out ahead of time will make your life so much easier.
Don't forget to grab your FREE Blog planning template and video tutorial here.
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Your Action Step
Your immediate action step is simply to review this post and accompanying video and figure out how much content you need to create for the month ahead and then pick a day, outline, and then batch the creation of it.
That's all you need to do to implement a content creation strategy!
