How to Produce and Market Insane Amounts of Content
How I publish over 100 pieces of content a month while maintaining a full-time job.
How I publish over 100 pieces of content a month while maintaining a full-time job
In a given year, I work an average of 70 hours a week at my regular full-time job. I also manage to read around 60 books a year, produce around 50 email newsletters, write between 10–20 articles a month, and am active on social media.
Below is what helps me curate insane amounts of content every month.
Understand What Content Is
Content can be anything from sharing a quote on Twitter to writing a full length article on Medium (or another site) to responding to questions on Quora.
Content is about providing value.
This can be specific information related to your business, a critique of something you read, or even a reshare of content you enjoyed. One’s goal is to be as valuable as possible, but you don’t always have to be the creator of the content and it doesn’t always need to be original.
Find your area of expertise and start finding ways to provide value in that field.
Tools are Your Friends
The days of having to manually go in and post something every single time you want to share content is gone. Nowadays, you have apps like Hootsuite, Later, and Buffer which are there to help you schedule content weeks or months in advance.
These apps are your best friend.
Each application has its own unique interface and is able to do things slightly different from the others.
The end goal of using an app, however, is the same: streamline productivity so you can focus on other things. Invest in one that will help you streamline your social channels and publish pre-selected content so you can focus on other things such as writing an article or working on your marketing funnels.
Batch Your Work
When it comes down to preparing your work, separate it into different channel categories such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Newsletters, Articles, etc.
Once you have the work categorized, pick one category and batch that work for the next month. For example, with Twitter, I post a lot of quotes. Using one of the apps mentioned above, I batch produce content that will be published throughout the month, freeing up my month to focus my attention on writing articles.
Not Everything Needs to be Amazing
Not all content needs to be liked and viewed by hundreds of thousands of people. Especially if you’re just starting out, the odds of thousands, let alone hundreds of people finding and liking your stuff is slim.
The key is to just start producing content, even if it is filler content. Today, everyone is looking for more and more content as demand increases. If you’re starting out, following your niche, throw everything at the wall. From there, you’ll see what sticks and what doesn’t.
Once you understand what your growing audience is interested in, start curating and creating the absolute best content you can for that moment. As time goes on, your content will become better and better as you continue to refine your area of expertise.
And don’t forget:
Feel free to throw out a question or two to your followers, they’ll tell you what they want.
It doesn’t need to be a five star piece of content, it just needs to engage your audience and keep them coming back for more.
Creating Content Ideas
Finding ideas for massive amounts of content can be hard, especially when you’re starting out. This is where research from your every day life comes into play. If you read books, listen to podcasts, or go to a cool concert, share it with your followers.
Things that you may not think are related or interesting to your followers may very well be. If you’re reading a book, find one or two principles from the book and write an article on it. Express why it influenced you so much. If you find a quote you like, throw it up on Twitter.
Content is all around you, all you have to do is open your eyes and start sharing it.
Play With Different Modes and Channels of Viewing
Using the idea of posting a quote to Twitter, think about throwing that quote into Canva and making an Instagram post out of it, which you can also then cross-share to either Facebook, Twitter, or more.
Want to spice it up even more? Try using apps like Animoto, StoryChic, or Canva Stories to create animated stories for your Instagram and/or Facebook feed.
Again:
Don’t be afraid to cross-pollinate your content from Instagram to Facebook to Twitter to YouTube.
By cross-sharing your content, your audience on each platform will tell you where that piece of content is performing best and you can use this information in the future to decide where to post certain types of content.
Your Audience is Your Friend
Your audience will tell you what is and is not working. Track your statistics on all of the platforms you use. As your audience grows, you will continue to provide content and value to them. However, if they don’t feel the content is valuable, they’ll let you know.
Feel free to toss out questions to your audience to see what they’re looking for. For example, prior to the New Year, I tossed out a question to my audience on Instagram and asked what they were hoping to achieve through Stoic philosophy in the New Year. I saved their responses and have now found ways to provide value to their needs this coming year. And all it took was five seconds of my time.
Ignore the Algorithms
You don’t have much control over how Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, or YouTube displays your content, or to what people. This can be frustrating at times when you are trying to share content with followers, or gain new followers and the platform only shows your content to a partial amount of your followers.
Your job is create valuable content and share it. Forget the algorithms and just keep creating content people love and want to share. The more content you create that’s filled with value, the more shareable it will become, and the greater your audience will grow.
Also, the more you ignore the algorithms, the more it’ll help keep you sane, and it’ll help keep you focused on the end goal: creating things that matter.