It kind of goes without saying: being an entrepreneur goes hand-in-hand with having a never ending to-do list at any point in time. The amount of things and tasks that go into building a profitable and sustainable business can be a lot to handle from bookkeeping and taxes to hiring a rockstar team to website management. So when something new comes along, it can seem like you can’t possibly do any more than you’re already doing. Take content creation for example. Add this into the mix and that feeling of content creation overwhelm can start to sink in big time. You might even find yourself wondering: how the heck am I supposed to find the time to keep up with it all?

Since starting this site years ago, I’ve learned a few things that have helped me ditch the content creation overwhelm. Let’s get to it.

Content Creation Can Bring Huge Benefits To Your Business

When you’re already packed with tons to do, creating consistent content for your brand is usually one of the first things that gets easily pushed to the side. For most people (especially if you’re just starting out on your brand building journey), it doesn’t feel quite as essential as more immediate tasks like project deliverables or fulfilling orders.

But the next time you feel yourself falling succumb to content creation overwhelm, it’s worth remembering what exactly content can do for your business. Because it’s all in your strategy, really.

To start, creating content is one of the most effective ways to ensure that you have more clients, projects, or orders lined up in the pipeline. You don’t want to start working on building your group of prospects only after your current projects or orders are done. So you can create content to attract more traffic to your brand. For example, let’s say you want to start a blog. Blog posts are a great way of getting more words on your website, which in turn, can help you rank higher in organic search and attract more site visitors.

Content is also a highly effective way to strengthen your brand authority and position yourself as the go-to leader in your space. You can also use it as a tool to humanize your brand, connect with your audience emotionally, and remind people that—business aside—you’re a person, too.

Building your site up with more and more content value over time also gives people a legitimate reason to come back to you regularly and check out what else you have to offer. When your audience is trained to expect insanely good value from you regularly, they’re going to realize that your paid content is reeeeally worth it. And if your website is structured properly, you can lead these higher quality leads right to your paid offerings and premium products and get them to convert (chaching!). 

3 Ways To Minimize Distraction and Kick Content Creation Overwhelm

Even though you know that content is key to upping your value prop, I get that it still seems like an unattainable addition of  being “just another thing to do.” Consider turning to one of these 3 techniques that have been vital to helping me and my team maximize content and minimize distraction:

1. Templates, Templates, Templates

At the risk of sounding like a broken record, templates are one of the most valuable tools in an entrepreneur’s toolkit. From contracts to invoices to (yes) content creation, templates can drastically improve the quality of your time and efforts across your business. My rule of thumb? If you have to do something more than twice, automate it (i.e. create a template for it, document it, etc.). There is no use in recreating the wheel if you don’t have to and once you realize this, you can adjust how you run your business which will pay off big time. 

We use templates to create visual content regularly like social graphics or lead magnets and content upgrades. We also use framework templates to create things like written blog content and mapping out our launch and sales funnel content. For example, there are certain elements that we include in our weekly blog posts to make sure each one is optimized like a compelling headline, main takeaways, keywords, etc. So the template we use makes it easier to run down this list, fill in these details, and create super valuable and effective content each week. Templates also ensures that the quality of our content remains consistent across our entire brand.

Start slowly and work through all of the business processes that you find yourself spending too much time in, and find ways to streamline them with templates. Template-optimizing your business can be a massive time saver… making more space to create better content.

2. Batch Work It All

We’ve all probably gone through life and business in the defense of multitasking. I certainly have. But, I’ve also figured out that multitasking simply doesn’t work as well as I’d like to think it does. You may THINK you are being productive when you tackle many projects at once, but unfortunately that’s not the case. Thankfully though, batch working has solved for this.

Batch working is a type of productive working style where you divide your workflow into different days or hours dedicated to one topic only instead of jumping around from task to task. In other words, it’s a highly-focused, topic-specific form of working.

By going heads down on certain things in my business for several hours at a time or during dedicated days only, these “content sprints” have allowed me to:

• Condense a lot of work into a short, simple, and predictable timeframe
• Group similar tasks together so I’m not jumping from one task type to the next (ie. creating all of your graphics at once, sourcing your images, batch writing all of your blog posts, all of your scheduling, etc.)
• Focus fully on other areas of my business for 3 weeks of the month without stressing about my content
• Show up and market my business in real time because all of my “business as usual” items are taken care of

Long story short: I’ve been able to take that “content creation time” every week and use it to now  increase my productivity, lower my time spent, work in a state of focus instead of scrambling.

How can these content sprints work for you? In so many ways. In fact, if you crank out content on a regular basis, batch working can help you immensely. From blogs to Instagram captions to weekly emails, Youtube videos, whatever it may be… Batching what you are working on allows you to operate from flow state, working on the same thing to create crazy amounts of content. Once that’s done, you can then take it out of your mind for weeks at a time. Sounds pretty excellent, huh?

3. Outsource What You Can

I have two running lists in my journal that I keep up with regularly: a Keep Doing list and a Hell No list. On the Keep Doing list are things that I do in my business that are going smoothly and I feel confident in having ownership over. On the Hell No list are things that, after having done them myself or at least attempting to, make me feel like I am banging my head against the wall. One is a list of tasks that fall under my Zone of Genius. The other is a list of tasks that it would be far more productive and beneficial to have a specialist or generalist handle for me instead. The goal here is to free up bandwidth and purposefully identify the things you need to cut and those that you need to keep.

As your business grows, you’ll eventually find yourself at the point where you’ll need to hire for outside support… especially when it comes to your content creation. Things like video editing, copywriting, and designing graphics can take up a lot of time and might not be the best use of your time as the CEO of your business. So hiring specialists who can get the same tasks done at a higher quality level and in a fraction of the time will only help your business move forward. And by outsourcing those types of things, you’re able to stay the visionary of your company instead of the workhorse and work on things that you actually do enjoy doing. 

The Breakdown

If you’ve noticed one consistent theme in all of my content, I hope it’s this: with a little intention, you can completely overhaul your value creation process. When you take that intentional focus, you can create a consistent and successful strategy that truly takes your business to the next level. Get started with my free 12-page guide and checklist that walks you through everything and breaks it all down.