How To Start Content Creation

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I can honestly say that I am SO excited that you’re here listening to this episode today, because this is without a doubt the episode I’m most excited to be putting out into the world yet.

You see, when I was brainstorming episode ideas for this month, I had the thought that I don’t think I’ve ever really shared the story of how exactly I got started batching my content. At least not on my own podcast. I’ve shared it on a handful of other people’s podcasts, but not here on Chasing Simple. And I figured it was past time to share that story.

And because I’m always trying to keep things simple, I realized, hey – I do already have this story completely written out for the book. I could just read that story out of the manuscript.

And THEN, I figured, you know what? Why not just read the entire chapter?

So today, my dear friend, you’re in for a treat, because you’re going to hear the rough draft of the first chapter of my upcoming book. And yes, if you somehow missed that news – I’m writing a book and as you are listening to this we are deep in the final edits.

Links and Resources Mentioned in This Episode:

Easily create a year’s worth of content with my done for you Content Prompts
Are you looking to improve your content without spending a ton of time and mental energy doing so? Whether you’re looking for help knowing what to talk about, setting up content systems, or improving your launch strategy, the Chasing Simple Shop has something for you. From A Year of Content Prompts broken up by type of content, to my Launch Strategy Mini-Course – the Chasing Simple Shop is the quick and simple way to take your content to the next level. And you can get 10% off any item by using the code LISTENER at checkout! Just head to amandawarfield.com/shop/ and again, that code for 10% off is LISTENER!
This week’s action step: Start doing some of these tasks to wrap up your year well, so that when you get back in office you’re not only rested, but ready to dive into an incredible 2023!! Set goals, map quarterly plan, and batch January content.
This week’s book recommendation: The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid. Famous actress has had seven husbands, and of course that means there’s plenty of scandal and gossip when you’re in the public eye. She’s decided she’s finally ready to have a biography written, and a young woman with very little experience gets a chance at this dream job. You spend the book learning about Evelyn’s life story, but also about just why it is that this young writer in particular gets the gig.
Find me on Instagram and tell me you completed this week’s action step: @mrsamandawarfield

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Have a comment about today’s episode, or a topic you’d like to suggest for a future episode? Shoot me an email over at hello@amandawarfield.com!

Rather Read? – Here’s the Transcript!

*Just a heads up – the provided transcript is likely to not be 100% accurate

You’re listening to Chasing Simple episode 1 45, and I’m your host, Amanda Warfield. And I can honestly say that I am so excited that you’re here listening to this episode today because this is without a doubt the episode I am most excited to be putting out into the world. You see, when I was brainstorming episode ideas for this month, I had the thought that I don’t think I’ve ever really shared the story of how exactly it was that I got started with batching my content, at least not on my own podcast.

I’ve shared it on a handful of other people’s podcasts, but not here on Chasing Simple, and I figured it was probably past time to share that story. And because I am always trying to keep things simple, I realized, hey, I do already have the story completely written out for the book. I could just read the story out of the manuscript and then I figured, you know what?

Why not just read the entire chapter? So today, my dear friend, you are in for a treat because you’re going to hear the rough draft of the first chapter of my upcoming book. And yes, if you somehow miss that news, I’m writing a book and as you are listening to this, we are deep in the final edits. So with that, go ahead and buckle up and let’s dive on into the first chapter.

I started batching my content because a dog had peed on our carpets. We had just moved into our new home when we very quickly realized that our carpets were not as clean as we’d thought them to be. During our walkthroughs, as my husband and I were moving in our boxes and our furniture, it became apparent that the previous owner’s dog had peed on every single.

Carpet in the entire house, and this is probably a good time to mention that we’re cat people, meaning that as we were unloading all of our things, the very first two things to be unloaded were our cats and cats. Well, they can be a bit territorial. We were very nervous that one, or even both of the cats would sniff those dried up pee spots and decide to mark their territory right over the top of it, which could potentially lead to a really bad litter box habit that would last a lifetime that I really had no interest struggling with.

After running a carpet cleaner in deep cleaning each carpet without any luck, we decided that the only reasonable next step would be to rip out all of the carpet and just start over. So my husband and my dad got to work ripping it all out. I pulled up all of the tacks and the staples throughout the rooms, and then my husband used a giant sander that we rented to sand down the subfloor and hopefully remove the urine crystals.

After it all got sanded down, we kilzed the subfloor to lock in any potential remaining smells. And then we waited. You see, our house had one other problem when we bought it that November. The master bathroom had a leak underneath the bathtub, and the structural integrity was in question. That room had to be completely gutted and renovated all the way down to the studs in the floor, which meant that our master bedroom.

which would be getting brand new carpet, was out of commission until the renovation was complete. And since we wanted to just get all of the carpet put in at one time, that meant we had to wait until the bathroom renovation was complete before we could put carpet in. We moved in during November and didn’t complete the renovation until the next May.

Six months of living in a construction zone and six months of half of our rooms having nothing but subfloor as it’s flooring, including my office. If you’re a podcaster, you may already know where I’m going with this, but if not, sound quality is extremely important for those of us that have audio in the content that we create.

When I first set up my mic, the mostly empty room affected the quality. But that subfloor surely did me no favors. So I gathered up every blanket that we owned and I spread them across the top of my desk, as well as all over the floor in order to soften the echoes and the extra sounds. It wasn’t perfect, which you’d hear if you listen to the early episodes of my podcast. Chasing Simple, but it was a night and day difference from just the subfloor.. So each week when it was time to record my upcoming episode, I’d pull out all of the blankets, spread them around and get to work. Then I’d pick them all back up again and put them away. And as I’m sure you can imagine, that got old quickly, I tried leaving the blankets out, but they ended up just shifting around and getting really dirty from being walked all over.

So I scrapped that idea pretty quickly too.. And since we were a few months in, I was sure that the master of renovation was going to be wrapping up anytime now, and that by the next month we would definitely have our carpet in.. Basically, I was convinced that we wouldn’t have this problem much longer, so I thought, Hey, why don’t I just record enough episodes for the entire next month?

They don’t have a carpet, and I’ll be able to get back to my typical recording schedule and doing just one at a time so I’m not spending all day long recording. And boy, did it feel good to only have to pull those blankets out once in the entire month, not to mention that there was so much relief over the next three weeks and not having to deal with recording a new episode.

and then the next month came and renovations still weren’t done, so I thought, okay, this is going to be the final month. I’ll just record a month’s worth of episodes in one day, one more time. And the same thing happened again the next month, and the next and the next. This renovation took much, much longer than we anticipated, at which point I had gotten adventurous.

My brain loves to organize and systematize things, and after a couple months of batch recording episodes, I had fallen in love with the ability to set aside just one day for recording and not have to worry about it for the whole rest of the month. So I thought, I wonder if I can do that with the rest of my content.

And over the next few months I did just that. Tweaking my systems and processes until I was creating a month’s worth of content in just one week, which left me free to work on my business and not just in it for the other three weeks of each month. Coincidentally, I started to see mega growth in my business around the same time I started batching, and I found that my messaging was more consistent when I created it all at once.

I found that showing up consistently leads to higher engagement rates. I found that when I didn’t need to think about marketing, I had so much more space to make progress elsewhere in my business. Content batching was my gateway drug to an infatuation with content marketing, one that led to years of discovery and growth, a wide variety of clients’ business types to work with in a vastly different bottom line.

And now, my dear friend, may I call you a friend? I feel like if you’ve listened thus far, you practically fought the pee battle, beside us.. So that automatically makes you a friend. In my book, I’m here to share all that I’ve learned with you so that you can take your content from nonexistent or inconsistent to a true tool to grow your business.

Because if you picked up this episode, I’m guessing that your content marketing, it goes a little something like this. You try to come up with some sort of plan each month as far as what you’re going to talk about. You’ve tried buckets, you’ve tried themes. You feel like you’ve tried it all. You can sing every word of the Moana a soundtrack, and yet knowing what to say to your audience, it’s a dusty, empty attic up there in your brain.

Once you’ve finally put something together for your plan, you’ve got to create it. You’ve set aside one day each week to create your content, and sometimes it works. You sit down and you get everything created for the entire week and scheduled to go out. But most of the time something comes up. Your kid gets sick or you get sick, a client needs you.

You’re behind on other tasks. So you put the content off until the last minute and you end every single day, either scrambling to create and post something or shrugging your shoulders and telling yourself, tomorrow you’ll finally post again for the first time in months. Content marketing just doesn’t feel all that important until you realize your client roster is starting to get a little thin and the leads just aren’t coming in like they used to.

So you get serious about creating content again, just until you fill your roster back up. That is, but in your gut, you know that your marketing is important and you want to get a handle on yours. You wanna see growth in client leads, and you want it to just become simple.. And simple. Well simple. Might as well be my middle name, especially if you count the fact that just about 50% of every other female born in the nineties shares a middle name with me.

That’s about as simple as you can get. In all seriousness, two of my top business core values are vulnerability and simplicity, both of which you’re going to find here in this book. If you’re a listener of Chasing Simple, you already know that I’m passionate about sharing the hard parts of entrepreneurship because as much as we would all like to believe that we can hit six figures overnight, most of us has found that that’s just not the case.

Building a strong business takes time and it takes work, and within that time and hard work, there are hard days. and simplicity. Well, I’ve been obsessed with simplifying my life ever since 2018 when I realized that my depression had a cause too much, too much stuff on our home, and too many tasks on my to-do list.

I began by simplifying my life And that quickly spiraled into wanting to spread the word about simplicity to as many people as possible. When I started learning about marketing for myself and for my clients, well, simplicity was always the bottom line. How can I make it as simple as possible while also seeing enough growth?

Do not want to throw in the towel on a daily basis. Promise it as you read this book and hear my stories, you’re going to get the vulnerable truth. I promise that you’re going to walk away feeling confident about your content marketing, and I promise that you’ll walk away with an actionable plan to simplify your marketing so that you can fit it into your business without it taking over your business.

Throughout these next pages, I’m going to take you on a simplicity focused journey to improve your content marketing. We’ll start with it, crash course and content marketing, both so that we’re on the same page, but also so that you’ve got a strong foundation to build your marketing on. Many of us in this online business space started our businesses without any background in business and without an mba.

Personally, when I started out, I thought I was terrible at marketing. Turns out I’m really great at it. I just didn’t have a foundation for what I needed to know.. Then we’ll turn towards growth because the entire purpose of market and business is to see growth. I’ll be sharing the three keys to growth that I found to be true with my own content marketing as well as with my clients.

And finally, we’re going to spend an entire section on consistency because without consistency, none of the other things matter. I’ll share my three steps for simplifying in order to be able to show up. Consistently. And finally, we’ll end our journey together talking next steps. I’ll show you how you can implement what you learned as you read and share a few extra tips for helping get your marketing done even quicker.

My hope is that by laying the groundwork out for you, you’ll be able to take what you learn in this book and run with it that you’ll be able to simplify your marketing so that you can get consistent without sacrificing your needle moving or client serving time. That marketing will stop being something to fear and instead become something fun.

That you’ll be able to fit your marketing into your business without it taking over your business. I’ve already helped over 150 business owners do just that. And now it’s your turn. Let’s get started. Uncomplicate your marketing, shall we? And that’s how I got started batching my content. It really all came down to dog p. So I hope you enjoyed that chapter. If you did and you’re excited to read the book when it comes out in July, your action step for this week and your book recommendation all wrapped into one head on over to amanda warfield.com/book.

And you can sign up for the wait list to be notified when the book does release and when it’s getting close, so that you can get your hands on a copy. And if you are excited, I would love to hear from you. I would love to hear what you thought of this first chapter. I am v ery excited to get this book out into the world, and it has been such a labor of love already, and I would just love to hear your thoughts and if you’re excited to listen.

So again, head to amandawarfield.com/book and you can sign up to be notified when the book releases.

Episode 145: How I Got Started Batching My Content {BOOK SNEAK PEEK}

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