How did you get on with simplifying your social media approach? Posts pinned? Objectives nailed? I do hope so because that’s going to make you feel a whole lot calmer, strategic (which we LOVE) and streamlined.

If, by any remote possibility you haven’t got around to reading my first post on Mindful Marketing about social media, (I mean, seriously, what else do you have to do!? (Joke)), you may want to catch up. Here’s a link to it.

So, this post is all about content creation. In general, the business owners we know who struggle with content creation fall into one of two camps.

First camp: Stressed out, fed up of feeling chained to an overwhelming schedule/hamster wheel of constantly creating stuff, low on ideas for what to blog about next.

Second camp: not bothering. This particular item has slipped off the top of the wibbly-wobbly stack of tasks teetering over and out of his or her mental inbox, onto the floor and under a filing cabinet.

But, as we all know, content creation is one of the best ways to hook your ideal client into your world and keep them there.

So, how can you get your creative mojo back and make this seem easy. How about a good ole The Marketing Architect framework to put around the process?

Here are our three golden rules for content creation. Don’t stray far out of line on these and you’ll be, er, golden.

1. Keywords

Now, we are not SEO experts. It’s WAAAAY too technical, ever-changing and, basically, secret squirrel for us to know all of the details. But, we know about keywords.

Keywords are the search terms that Google uses to build it’s search engine algorithms. You want to make sure that you are using and embedding the most popular keywords for your content area in your written content (or in the landing pages housing video) so that you appear in the google results, when that particular keyword is searched.

First you figure out which topics you can and want to write about, next you identify which keywords are most popular for your chosen topics. You can do this by using an online keyword generator such as Moz Explorer.

For example, if we planned to write about email marketing, we could search for this phrase and find out that the top three most popular keywords for this topic are: ’email marketing strategy’, ’email marketing templates’ and ’email marketing campaign’. Each of which gets between 200-500 searches per month in the UK, so we should focus down on one of these aspects of email marketing and use the correct keyword in the title, the first sentence of the blog post, and at least 3 more times in the rest of the blog. 

2. Editorial calendar

Editorial calendars are not just for magazines. Having a schedule of what you’re creating and when, seems like a lightweight suggestion, but it can be a game-changer. When each blog post, or social media graphic, or video you plan to create over the coming months is mapped out with a delivery date and any details that need to be ironed out in order to create it, it will bring a sense of calm. Replacing that ‘what the heck am I going to write about this week?’ feeling instantly.

It’s easy to do. Simply create a table. Add a row for each week or month (depending on the length of your publishing cycle) and then a column for each piece of content that you create on a regular basis. There might be a column for blog posts, Facebook lives, sections of your newsletter, stories for Instagram, LinkedIn, testimonial graphics for LinkedIn, whatever.

Fill in each gap with topic ideas. If you can tie your topic ideas to other key dates in your business calendar, such as a sales launch or an upcoming webinar you’re hosting, so much the better. You can also use this to spot any bottlenecks and times when you aren’t available to do the creation yourself, and will need to get extra help. You can also use this table to work out where one piece of content could be repurposed into something else and save you time.

3. Writing Schedule

Once you know what your content creation ‘load’ is, you can allocate parts of the creation process in time chunks through your week. For example, Pip likes to draft her blog on one day, edit the next day, then write the accompanying email wrapper and locate a nice image on the third day.

Knowing that we have this work for our regular blog spread through the week makes it far less overwhelming. And, if we know we’re going to be out of the office all day on one of our key content days, we automatically know we have to rebook it in elsewhere, instead of having to write it at ten pm when we should, by rights, be watching episodes of Love Island.

So, what do you think? Is that doable? Are you feeling calmer this year? I do hope so. Share your thoughts below! How do you stay focused and reduce your workload when it comes to content creation?

Stay tuned for more Mindful Marketing, next time: Brand identity