Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Subscribe: RSS
Content Batching Tips: Stop Waiting For Inspiration To Strike
One of the top reasons business owners tell me they couldn’t possibly batch is because they prefer to create their content only when they’re feeling inspired.
And while in theory that’s great, in practice, you’re actually doing more harm than good by waiting for creativity to strike in order to create your content.
So today, I’m covering why you should stop waiting for inspiration and instead learn how to bottle that inspiration when it does strike – and still be able to successfully batch your content.
Links and Resources Mentioned in This Episode:
- Want even more help simplifying your marketing and business? Love the Chasing Simple podcast? If so, I want to invite you to join me on Monday evenings at 4:00 pm Pacific time/7:00 pm Eastern time for my weekly YouTube Lives. Each week I’ll have a topic for the week, but after my short 5-minute teaching, you’ll have the chance to ask me questions about your marketing and get an answer from me in real time. Until now, the only way to get this kind of access to me was through my membership, courses, or 1:1 services. But now, all you have to do is show up live with me on Mondays! You can find my channel by searching for my handle on YT – @mrsamandawarfield or by heading to amandawarfield.com/youtube/ – I hope to see you Monday!
- Chasing Simple Content Planner
- Episode 212: Steal My Annual Survey Strategy
- This week’s action step: Create your content bank.
- This week’s book recommendation: Winter in Paradise by Elin Hilderbrand
- Find me on Instagram and tell me you completed this week’s action step: @mrsamandawarfield
Did you love this episode?
Don’t forget to subscribe so that you never miss an episode! Also, if you would be willing to leave a review on Apple Podcasts, it would mean the world to me. It’s such a small thing that can make a big difference in helping me spread this message of simplicity to other overwhelmed women.
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
One of the top reasons business owners tell me that they couldn’t possibly batch is because they prefer to create their content only when they’re feeling inspired. And while, in theory, that’s great, in practice, you’re actually doing more harm than good by waiting for creativity to strike in order to create your content.
So today, I’m covering why you should stop waiting for inspiration, and instead, how to bottle that inspiration for when it does strike, and still be able to successfully batch your content. You’re listening to episode 218 of the Chasing Simple Podcast, and I’m your host, Amanda Warfield. This episode was brought to you by my book, Chasing Simple Marketing, and you can grab your own at amandawarfield. com / book.
How do I find time to create content without overwhelming myself? Where should I even be showing up in my marketing? How do I come up with fresh content ideas? Where should I be focusing my marketing efforts? What is lead generation anyways, and how do I do it? Are launches still a thing? And most importantly, How do I put it all together to market my business strategically?
Can I really grow my business without spending all of my time marketing? These are some of the questions that float around in your head. When you think of marketing, welcome friend, this is chasing simple where practical marketing strategy meets simplicity. I’m your host, Amanda Warfield, simplicity focused content marketing and launch strategist, speaker, educator, and author of chasing simple marketing.
I traded in my classroom lesson plans for helping creative entrepreneurs sustainably fit marketing into their business without it taking over their business. So that they have time to grow their business, take time off, and live the life they dreamed about when they first decided to go out on their own.
When I’m working, you can find me working with one on one clients, such as the Contract Shop and Rebecca Rice Photography on their marketing strategy and copywriting, or helping my students simplify their marketing and launches. And when I’m not, you can find me spending time outside with my husband, Russell, Reading in our hammock, watching Gamecock Sports, traveling, or forcing our cats to snuggle me.
If you feel overwhelmed by marketing, you aren’t alone. Many entrepreneurs find marketing frustrating, overwhelming, and simply an obligation. They know they need it, but they don’t enjoy how easily it can suck up their time when what they really want to be doing is the thing that they started their business to do.
Which is why I’m here to help make marketing simple and less time consuming so that you can spend less time on your marketing and more time growing your business and doing what you love each week. I’ll bring you transparent conversations, actionable steps, and judgment free community to encourage and equip you.
So grab yourself a cup of coffee or whatever your drink of choices and meet me here each week for love, support. Practical tips and advice on uncomplicating your marketing and business. Let’s do this entrepreneurship thing together, shall we? Want even more help simplifying your marketing and business?
Love the Chasing Simple podcast? If so, I want to invite you to join me on Monday evenings at 4 p. m. Pacific time, 7 p. m. Eastern time for my weekly YouTube lives. Each week, I’ll have a topic for the week, but after my short 5 minute teaching, you’ll have the chance to ask me questions about your marketing and get an answer from me in real time.
Until now, the only way to get this kind of access to me was through my membership, courses, or one on one services. But now, all you have to do is show up live with me on Mondays. You can find my channel by searching for my handle on YouTube, at Mrs. Amanda Warfield, or by heading to amandawarfield. com / YouTube.
I hope to see you Monday! In theory, waiting for inspiration to strike in order to create your marketing materials sounds great, right? You are able to sit down and make sure what you’re putting out is really high quality content and is really getting your point across, it’s helping your people, it’s, you know, it’s the best of what comes out of your mind.
Sounds great, right? However, the problems So, multiple problems with waiting for that consistency to strike are there many. And ultimately, waiting for inspiration to strike is going to do more harm to your marketing and your business than good. The harm and the cons will outweigh the pros and the benefits.
First and foremost, what happens when you’re feeling inspired and you can’t step away? What if you’re in the middle of volunteering in your child’s classroom, or you’re in the middle of a family walk, or you’re out and about running errands? There’s so many life things that could happen and interrupt that inspiration, or I guess more accurately, the inspiration could interrupt.
But make it impossible for you to actually sit down and create that content, right? And so then the inspiration is lost and that time slot is missed and you don’t know when you’ll get another one. The, I guess, part B of that same issue, that same stance, is that you can’t control your inspiration. You can’t decide when it might happen and not only is this frustrating just on a typical normal day to day week to week basis, but what happens when life What happens when you are so overwhelmed and you’ve got so much on your plate that, well, guess what’s not going to come visit?
Inspiration. That’s going to be the first thing to go. And so not being able to control when you feel inspired, what happens then when you’re not inspired and you’re not inspired for a long period of time? Well, you’re not consistent, right? Even if you’re getting inspired on a decent basis, you’re likely not going to be consistent because, well, your inspiration probably isn’t going to produce often enough and help you create enough content to stay consistent.
And what does it mean when you’re not consistent? Well, it means that you’re ghosting your audience. You are, if you’re ghosting them and they notice, you’re eroding the foundation of know, like, and trust that you’ve built with those that you already have built a foundation with. You erode that foundation, but you’re also not, if you’re not consistent, you’re not building know, like, and trust with new people.
And even within that point, you’ve got, okay, I’m inspired and I’m going to spend 30 minutes creating this amazing Instagram post and it’s going to get me engagement and blah, blah, blah, blah. But then it disappears within a day. And so you waited until you were inspired. You created an amazing post, high quality.
But did it actually really move the needle in your business? Probably not. Because your marketing is not your business. There’s so much more to your business than the marketing aspect of it. And marketing is both an art and a science. And the inspiration, that’s the art side of it, right? But, What often happens with our inspiration is we get inspired about different things and different topics.
And so what ends up happening is we’re inconsistent, both in how often we’re showing up, but also in the topics we’re talking about. Our topics are kind of all over the place when we’re waiting for inspiration, which means that we’re not moving people through the customer journey. We’re not moving people through the buyer’s journey.
We aren’t strategically showcasing our offers in our business. We don’t have that strategy, that science side of the marketing. And without that, you may grow followers, but you’re not going to grow your business, most likely. For all of those reasons, and probably many more, we cannot wait for inspiration to strike in order to create content.
We can utilize and bottle the inspiration that we receive and that comes to us to help improve our batch week and our marketing. What in the world does batch week have to do with this? I’m glad you asked. So when it comes to batching, we want to create a month’s worth of content in one week. Well, that is it.
Not a small amount of content. And so if we can bottle our inspiration, we can help leverage that inspiration during batch week, which makes batch week a whole lot easier. Now you might be thinking, you just said don’t wait for inspiration, you just said you can’t control inspiration, what are you talking about?
What I want you to do, when you feel inspired, instead of sitting down and creating the content itself, go to your content bank, Write down what your ideas are. Write down all the things that are swirling in your head in that moment when you have all of these ideas and you’re super inspired. Write it all down, brain dump it out into your content bank.
And then, wait, don’t create the content. But when your next batch week comes around, what you’ll do is you’ll open up that content bank and you’ll go, okay, here is. What I need to be talking about, here is my pillar topics. Here are, within those pillar topics, the different offers that I’m trying to lead to.
You look at your strategy and what you’re trying to talk about essentially, and then you look at the content bank, the content that you’ve curated when you were inspired And you go, okay, what makes sense for where I’m at in my strategy right now? Take that, that piece of content that you were inspired by, right?
You were inspired to write down and utilize that in your batching. And so that way, batching, you’ve already got ideas and it becomes so much simpler because you have ideas that are great because they came to you when they were inspired. So you’re able to bottle that inspiration and say, okay, here’s what’s next.
Here is this great piece of content, this great idea I have. I’ve bottled it. I’m not losing it, but I’m just not using it right this second. And then when it comes time to batching, you’ve got the art, you just add the art to the science aspect of it. So what should a content bank look like? I like to create mine in Trello.
Any project management tool should work for this realistically. I know some people like to do them on their notes app or in a Google doc. Those can work too. If that works for you, great. I love the user interface of Trello because what I do is I create lists and then cards. And I like the ability to move the cards around.
I like the ability to add images or links or attachments or whatever it may be that I want to add to a specific idea as I’m feeling inspired. And I just love that ability and I find that I can do that easier in Trello versus my Notes app or a Google Doc. So what I do logistically with my content bank is I have my Trello board.
The board is just called Content Bank. Within the board, I have a list for each of my pillar topics in my business. So for me, my pillar topics are simplifying your content creation, simplifying your marketing strategy, and simplifying your launches in your launch runway. So those are my three main pillar topics.
So I have a list for each of those, but then you could even take that a step further and you could go, okay, well, simplifying your content creation, I can talk about batching, right? I can talk about how to save time with creating content. I can talk about the importance of showing up consistently and consistency within those main lists.
I can have other. list as well. Or I could create a new list. I could create three lists or four lists for each of the main lists. But I also will add things like this would be really great to talk about this specific year during the holiday season, right? I also, outside of doing, okay, this specific year I’d like to talk about this thing at some point or during this specific quarter or something like that, I also use my annual survey, which I talk about in a previous episode really recently, I’ll link to it in the show notes if you want to listen to it and snag my annual survey strategy, but I take the results from my annual surveys and I put those.
in my Trello board as well. And so what I do is I have 2024 requests, 2023 requests, so on. It’s like each year I create a new list. And then within that I have a card that says questions about marketing strategy, questions about content creation, questions about launching, questions about offer creation and ask me anything.
I’ve also got just Just random questions that don’t really fit into any of those that I’ve been asked. And I take all of the responses in my annual survey. I Add them into each of these cards, and then anytime I get a question during the year as well on Instagram, or in person, or whatever, I will add it to these too.
And that way, I can always go back and say, okay, what questions are being asked about this specific thing? Okay, I am strategically needing to talk about content creation. So what are the questions that I’ve been asked recently about that? What am I seeing patterns of? So not only do I put all of my ideas as I’m feeling inspired into my content bank, I’m also putting in all of the questions that I’m asked and the bulk of those coming from My annual survey, but if you have the chasing simple content planner, there’s also in the back a place where it’s like questions.
I’ve been asked. You can jot those down as you get them within that and then go into your content bank once a month when you’re doing batching and go. Okay, what questions do I need to move over from my Okay. Content planner into my content bank. So by doing both my My inspiration and what people are asking about I’ve got that art and that science within the content bank itself and then the final thing that I do within my content bank that you can decide if you would like to do is When I repurpose a piece of content and I’m not using All of the repurposed content initially.
So, okay, if I have a blog post or a podcast episode or a YouTube video, typically what I like to do is I like to take one piece of long form content and repurpose it into two emails and at least five social media captions. I’m not going to post five social media captions all at once back to back to back though, about the same piece of content.
And so what I’ll do is I might use one or two of them. And if I create extra, I will put. Those already written captions in my content bank as well. And so then when I come to a batch week where I’m like, I don’t have the time or the space right now to do a full batch week, I can copy and paste content that I’ve already written fully out and use it in that batch week.
Those are the three big ways that I use my content bank to help simplify my batch week. Your action step this week is to start your content bank if you haven’t already. Go ahead. And even if it’s just as simple as you’ve opened up your project management system, you’ve created a board for it, and you’ve started a couple lists, it can be that simple.
And your book recommendation for this week is Winter in Paradise by Elin Hildebrand. I did not expect to love this one as much as I did. I read a lot of her books, and more often than not, they fall around the three star range for me. Sometimes she has a really great one that I really, really love, and I, I know I’ve recommended more of her stuff before, but often I’m like, yeah, it was good.
It was worth the read, for sure, but didn’t blow me out of the water. This one I found so intriguing. It’s about a wife whose husband all of a sudden dies in an accident, and she realizes after his death that he’s been leading a double life, and it’s this whole thing. Um, and I won’t do any spoilers, but I’ll link to it in the show notes if you’re interested.
Again, that’s Winter in Paradise by Helen Hildebrand. And until next time, my friend, I hope that you’ll go out and uncomplicate your marketing and business.
Thank you so much for joining me here today, friend. You can find this episode show notes as well as all the resources you need to simplify your marketing over at amandawarfield. com. If you liked what you heard here today, be sure to subscribe to the podcast so that you never miss an episode. And if you could take a moment to leave a rating and review, it would truly mean the world to me.
Ratings and reviews are the number one way that you can support a podcast and ensure that it sticks around for many more episodes to come. I’ll see you next time, now go out and uncomplicate your marketing and business.
+ view comments . . .