Hey, I’m Sunny Lenarduzzi. How do you create AMAZING content, build a business and have a life? In this video I’m sharing my TOP 4 content creation hacks to save time, be more productive and build authority for your brand!
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I’ve always been a really creative person. Ever since I was a kid, I was always acting and dancing and thinking (or trying to think) and drawing. And everywhere I turn on a daily basis, I’m inspired to be creative by people and places and things.
But, the biggest challenge that I face in growing my business is that I have less and less time to actually be creative and create content which does make me the happiest.
And I know that I’m not alone in that.
But that really is the golden question, isn’t it?
How do you manage a business, manage to have a life, and not have to be attached to your phone or your camera all the time, but still do the thing that you love most in your business? Which is being creative and creating really good content.
I’m going to show you a few tricks of the trade.
So, these are my four content creation hacks.
HACK #1 – CONTENT MAPPING
Hack #1 is what I like to call “content mapping.” So, this is going to help you with the rest of these hacks, because immediately, as you’re watching this, you’re going to come up with a bunch of different ideas.
All with one keyword in mind.
What I mean by this is, basically, what you want to do is go to Google and type in any keyword that’s related to what you do, and your niche, and what your audience would be interested in.
For example, I’m an entrepreneur. Let’s say I want to talk about mindset. I’m going to type in “mindset habits.” Immediately, all of these pop up and these are all potential topics for content that I can create content around. But, more importantly, this tool right here, which is called Keywords Everywhere, it’s a free Chrome extension, brings up a ton of relevant and related keywords that you can create all different kinds of content on. Whether it’s YouTube videos, or doing an Instagram post, or tweeting about these. And it shows you the search volume.
You can do a video on how to have a happy mindset, fixed versus growth mindset, winning mindset. All of these different titles work for different kinds of content.
Plus, if you look at the topics that come up in Google, it shows you all of these different places around the web that you can use as examples of content that you know is proven to be highly engaged, highly searched, and getting solid traction. So, you can use that as an example of what you want to create your content around.
So, you take it one step further. Click on one of the articles, go to the very bottom, and you can go to their social channels and see what other kind of content they’re sharing that’s getting super-high engagement. And that will help you create your own spin on it, or even take these articles and create your own pieces of content around them.
HACK #2 – OUTSOURCING
Hack #2 is outsourcing, which I know feels far-fetched when you’re first starting your business, because why should you have to pay anybody to help you with your content, especially when you’re not making a ton of revenue?
But here’s the thing. The more content you make, the more your brand builds, the more awareness you have, the more authority you have. So, it is really important. Plus, I know you’re also busy building your actual business on your own.
So, when I was first getting started, I actually started outsourcing little things here and there in content creation, just to take some of it off my plate, so I could focus on building the business.
I would go to Fiverr, a great resource for outsourcing and get my thumbnails made. I also used Fiverr in the beginning to have my videos edited.
Another great resource is Upwork, where you can hire any kind of freelancer to help you in the content creation process.
And then another really quick little Ninja tip, is a resource called Help a Reporter Out. It’s haro.com, and basically what you can do is go on there, and if you’re writing a long-form post, or you’re guest-posting on a big publication, or a guest blog spot, you can actually go there and name the title of what your post is going to be on as a job posting, and have people contribute aspects of that article. Basically, other people are writing the article for you, you give them attribution and you can link back to their social handles or their website, and the article gets written without you having to do all of the legwork. So, it speeds up the process and makes it a lot faster, more effective, and even builds more authority with more people in that article.
And then the other piece of this is that when I first started on YouTube and started creating video content, I did it all myself. I edited, I shot, I did it all on my own. But I am the first to admit, none of that is really my genius zone. I got by for as long as I needed to, and it’s absolutely okay and perfectly fine to do that, because it’s more important what you say versus the production value on YouTube.
But, as I grew and as I had less and less time to actually create the content, it was important that I had help and had someone who was a genius at that piece of filming and editing. Which is where Jerr Bear comes in 🙂
So, I now have Jerr, who does all of my editing and shooting, and takes care of making the videos look golden. And as the business grows, and as you’re creating even more content, it is really important to have help on that front. But when you’re first starting out, those three resources are a great place to go. So Fiverr, Upwork, and Haro.
HACK #3 – BATCHING
Hack #3 is batching. I cannot talk about this enough. I know I mentioned this before, but I’m going to go into detail of how exactly I batch my content for all of the platforms that I use.
For Instagram, I write a lot of my captions in one fell swoop ahead of time. So, I’ll do it on a Friday morning for the entire next week. And then, if something happens that I want to post about, post it on the go, which does happen, I at least have back-up content that puts me way ahead of schedule, keeps me consistent.
I write posts them in the notes on my phone, or I put them in Asana, which is a project management tool that we use in the business.
The other thing I do is for Twitter – I will actually gather quotes from across the web, or I’ll hide them in my notes on my phone, or store them in the notes on my phone, and I’ll use those and I’ll schedule them using something like Hootsuite for months and months and months to come. We also schedule a lot of our YouTube videos for the next six months on Twitter, so that way we always keep active. And then I can also just talk to people one-to-one, and have that be my on-the-go content on that platform. But at least I have a base of scheduled content that’s batched way ahead of time.
The other thing is photo shoots. I do not have photos taken of me on a daily basis, by any means. We do pretty much one photo shoot a quarter, and that gives us enough content to go on for at least a few months for all our platforms, all of our branding, as well as our Instagram account.
And finally, video content. I certainly do not do the one video a week thing, and have to shoot on a weekly basis, because that takes a lot of time. And I don’t get into that creative flow, really. And I want to make sure that I’m doing all my videos at once so I stay in that flow, I stay super-creative, and it’s easy and efficient for me to get them all done. And then they get sent off, and Jerr Bear takes them to get edited and polished and published for all of you to see. So, we usually spend a whole day, or at least a couple of hours, shooting a ton of video content at once for YouTube. And then it’s all set to go.
So, that’s how I batch. And it’s way more efficient, plus it keeps you in your zone of creative genius.
If you’re doing something creative all day, as opposed to trying to do something creative once a week or trying to fit it in when you can, which you just won’t fit it in with everything else going on. And that’s when you start to lack consistency. So, that’s the secret of batching.
HACK #4 – REPURPOSING
The fourth hack is repurposing. Now this is a life saver, and will make your life so much easier. And all that you’ve got to do is base it off of engagement.
Say you post something on Instagram and you get a ton of engagement on it, and the caption just really captivates people. You can then take that and turn that into video content on Facebook, or even a livestream. So, that’s one way of repurposing.
Another, and one of my favorites, is that I am not the most skilled writer. I don’t really like having to sit down and write long-form content. It’s way easier for me to speak what I’m thinking, and then have someone else transcribe it and just format it into a long-form piece of written content.
So, a great resource for that is Rev.com, which I also use to transcribe all of my YouTube videos. They turn it around, they say in 24 hours, it’s usually within an hour. So, you have this whole long-form piece of content that you didn’t have to write yourself. It’s just the thoughts that came out of your head. So, that’s a great way to repurpose content.
Another way to do it is if you do a livestream and you have a couple of points that really hit home with people, and you get a ton of engagement. Turn that livestream into a written piece of content, which you then can take micro-content from, and create memes, you can create tweets out of it, you can create Instagram captions out of it. So, one piece of content can be repurposed a whole bunch of different ways.
Plus, I’m not sure if you’ve noticed this, but I’ve noticed lately that a lot of the big influencers on Instagram are taking their most popular captions and just using different photos, but repurposing the caption once or twice a week. And that same caption continues to hit new audiences and continues to drive a ton of engagement. So, again, a great way to repurpose on Instagram.
Now, you also can take a video like this. And what we do is, we take this video and we turn it into Instagram stories, and we also turn it into Instagram posts. So we’re taking this long-form video and turning it into micro-content for Instagram, stories as well as Instagram posts in the feed.
These are my four content creation hacks, so you can actually build a business and create content and also have a life. Which is really, really, really important.
If you’ve enjoyed this and if you want to share your content creation hacks, let me know in the comments section below. I would love to hear from you and we can all help each other out with making content creation more fun, more creative, and more efficient. Because that’s what we all need as entrepreneurs.
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Thank you so much for watching!
-S
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