Many content creators have no problem with creating new content. They create blog posts, podcast episodes, YouTube videos, and other forms of content. The problems for these individuals lie within content marketing.
It’s common for content creators to see marketing as a necessary but mundane task to perform in order to keep their content brands afloat. Even though content creators understand how important it is to market their content, few find the time to promote their content. Most content creators are just too busy creating.
There is a difference between being busy and being productive. Creating content is a productive activity because all content brands need content to survive. However, excessive content creation can turn into busy work.
A content brand is successful when it has a constant flow of content that is constantly getting promoted. In this blog post, you’ll discover how to find the time for content marketing.
Change Your Mindset
Before we talk about finding more time in your day to promote your content, we need to talk about the mindset. Many content creators view marketing as a necessary evil. These same people view content marketing as something that takes them away from creating new content.
Instead of viewing content marketing as something that takes you away from creating new content, view content marketing as a way of increasing the impact of your existing content. View content marketing as the avenue for spreading your message.
Changing your mindset to make content marketing enjoyable and fun will allow you to more easily implement the tactics I’ll discuss now.
Make Sacrifices
During Episode 77 of the Breakthrough Success Podcast, Dave Jackson talked about making sacrifices to maintain and grow his podcast while spending more time with his family. His solution was to make sacrifices in his existing schedule so he could repurpose some of the time in his day.
As the Cleveland Browns weren’t doing very well at the time of the interview (and at this blog post’s publication), he stopped watching football on Sundays. This was normally a Sunday tradition, but now he had an extra three hours in his day.
Sacrifices like these add up. I recommend looking at your current media consumption (TV and the web) and reducing the amount of time you spend consuming other people’s content. You can use this time to promote your content instead.
Establish A Routine
Content marketing is vast and filled with options. You can promote your content using social media, and that subset of content marketing also contains many options. Even when you pick a single social network, there are still plenty of tactics to choose from. For instance, Facebook presents its users with paid advertising, groups, organic reach, messenger, and more.
And that doesn’t even include things like influencer outreach, getting on podcasts, writing guest posts, collaborations, and growing your email list.
You need to choose which content marketing tactics you’ll implement. Then you need to establish a routine that allows you to habitually perform the tactics you choose to focus on.
Here are some ways you can establish a routine:
Choose a time each day to perform individual content marketing tasks.
Stack a bunch of tasks together and always do them in the same order.
Batch the entire work in 2-3 days of the week so you have the other days free.
Integrate content marketing into your content creation (i.e. reach out to influencers and ask them for opinions/resources that you can then include in your content).
Maintain A High Level Of Energy
Your energy determines how effective and efficient you are with promoting your content (and performing any task in general). If you stay seated too long, you’ll get tired, and the energy lag will hurt your ability to promote your content and pursue more challenging tasks.
Every 25 minutes, I get up and walk around for five minutes. I don’t look at any screens during this time. After the five minutes, I’m back to content marketing. This timeframe is based on the Pomodoro technique which provides a five minute break for every 25 minutes of deep, concentrated work.
I prefer to walk around during these breaks as this allows me to refresh and have energy when I sit back down.
Some of the simpler ways to maintain a high energy level are to eat the right foods and get enough sleep. If you feel tired, take a 10-15 minute nap. Naps help you feel more refreshed which will make it easier for you to tackle bigger challenges.
In the end, you’ll have the most energy if you’re doing work that you love doing. However, you need to keep your bodily needs in check to ensure you’re not burning yourself out, and as a result, not performing at your best.
Delegate More Tasks In Your Business
Chances are you perform a variety of mundane tasks. Even if they are necessary for your business to grow, they are mundane nevertheless.
Some people would fit content marketing into that category, and if you do, then delegate it by all means. However, there are certain parts of content marketing (i.e. relationship building) that should not be delegated to others.
To determine what you need to delegate, write a list of all of the things you want to do for your business. After you write that list, write a list of all of the things that you actually do for your business. Delegate all of the task that aren’t on both lists. If you have a tight budget, delegate the one task that takes the most time and is the easiest for you to explain to a freelancer.
In Conclusion
Content marketing is critical for the success of any content brand. We all know it, but our actions speak differently. Some content creators enjoy creating the content but see marketing as a necessary evil.
By finding more time in your day to promote your content, you’ll reap the rewards of added exposure and traffic to your content.
What were your thoughts on these tactics for finding more time to engage in content marketing? Do you have any time saving tactics for us? Do you have a question for me? Sound off in the comments section below.
