Speaker 1: I can bet that you're a small business owner or a content creator and you feel like you are stuck on this never ending loop of always having to create content. Maybe you feel like you get a couple of days ahead only to realize that you don't have any social media posts scheduled for next week. And the last thing you want to do is create a post for Instagram. The hardest part of content creation is actually maintaining consistency on the platforms that you want to show up on and maintaining consistency isn't having to use like an expensive software or investing in some really expensive coach. It's actually just all about building a sustainable workflow that you can implement in your business. And luckily we're going to dive into that today. Before we dive into actually creating a workflow, let's talk about what it actually is and why you need one. Basically it is just a system or an approach on how you create the content, the steps that need to be taken, any team members that need to be involved. And it's the way that you take a content idea and turn it into a published piece. And you might be thinking, is this just some ridiculous step that I need to take for no reason? No, I want to break down two different scenarios for you here. Scenario number one, let's say you create five posts per week. And in scenario one, you sit down to create your content each and every day. It's going to take you a ton of time to brainstorm that idea, to plan that piece of content, to get yourself ready, to get your equipment ready. Then maybe you have to create the visual, edit the visual, write the captions, schedule and post it. And again, this is for like a simple piece of content, not necessarily like a big YouTube video. This could just be like an Instagram reel. And if you add that all up, it could take you almost two hours just to create one piece of content and multiply that by five. Because remember, again, you want to post five times a week. That's 10 hours of your week dedicated to just five Instagram posts. Now in scenario two, we've created a workflow and a system. And yes, a lot of this does come down to batch creating content, but the secret here is taking certain tasks and doing them all at one time. You don't necessarily have to complete every single one of these steps all at the same time, but you want to think about it this way. When you start brainstorming content ideas, rather than just spending 15 minutes trying to find that one content idea, I know you go and scroll through Instagram or Tik Tok to look for inspiration and that's okay. But just imagine if you could take that same amount of time and just go ahead and knock out all five ideas that you need. Once your brain is in that mode of like coming up with content ideas, it is so much easier to come up with just four more. Same is true for planning your content. And then let's say those five posts you want to record five reels, setting up your equipment once and getting camera ready once. It's going to save you so much time rather than having to do that each and every single day. And again, batching the visual, editing the visuals, writing the captions and scheduling and posting. Again, what you're going to want to do is you don't have to take every single part of this process and do them all in one day. If that feels overwhelming to you, what you can do is break this up into days or throughout your month or anything like that, that works for you as a small business owner. But you can see how much time you say in the same amount of time that would take you to create one post and scenario one, you could knock out at least five different posts. So now how to actually create a content workflow for your small business. And I have a little activity for you. The next time you sit down to create a piece of content, just focus on creating one thing and write down every small little task that you do throughout that process. Even if it seems like irrelevant, I want you to write it down. Like spending five minutes crawling through TikTok for inspiration or looking back at your phone notes for those content ideas that you wrote down. I want you to write down everything that you have to do to make that piece of content go from a random idea all the way through to a posted piece. And then once you have this entire list written down, I want you to go through each step of the process. I want you to figure out the things that you can lump together. Maybe some things that you want to outsource. Like for me, it's video editing things that you absolutely hate doing that you can eliminate or maybe find a tool to help you. For me, that's hashtag research. I love to use an app for that. So write down some notes about each step of the process and how you feel about it. And this is how you're going to start to see your workflow form. You can then take it a step further and figure out when you want to accomplish each of these tasks and start to put it in your favorite task manager. My favorite is Asana. Okay. I want to give you an example of what my content workflow looks like. And before we dive in, keep in mind, I do create a ton of content and I do have support through my content manager. And it just taken me years to get to this stage in my content creation game. So don't feel like you have to compare or try and do everything that I do. I just want to break this down in a way that's easy for you to understand and kind of give you a point of reference on a workflow that is pretty complex. So the first thing to note here with my content workflow is that I get a full month ahead when it comes to my YouTube videos, but when it comes to social content and newsletters, I'm only batching about a week ahead. That's the foundation of my workflow. So once a month, I actually sit down and create all of my YouTube videos like I'm doing right now for me, I noticed that I absolutely hated forcing myself to get hair and makeup ready to bust out my camera and feeling forced to almost sit down and create these longer form videos each and every week. That felt so overwhelming for me. So now I just take a few hours out of my day once a month and batch create all for YouTube videos. And a few days before recording, I jump into air table to go through and script all my videos, figure out all my content ideas, know what I need to say and start collecting any other assets that I need in order to show up and create these YouTube videos all in one day. And I've nailed my process down that that planning session may only take a couple hours. And then the recording session may also only take a couple hours. So all in I'm spending maybe three to four hours a month on my YouTube videos. So on recording day, like today, I've already done my hair and makeup. I've already set up my camera as you can see. And I filmed those four videos along with any additional clips that I might need. And then I upload all of these assets into descript and Google drive where my content manager is going to need to pull them from. So that is my monthly workflow for my YouTube videos for my hero content, this big piece of long form content that I then pull a lot of my other social media content from. So now moving into my content workflow on a weekly basis on Monday, my content manager will sit down and start to edit the YouTube video. That's going to go out for the next week. She'll also start to pull out a ton of different short form clips, start to pull out other content ideas of things that I've said in the YouTube video and how we can repurpose them into like maybe an Instagram carousel, a LinkedIn post, things like that. So that by Wednesday I get to sit down with all the content that she's pulled, everything that she's edited and I can go through and give like my final seal of approval, maybe tweak a couple of things and then create any additional content that I think we might need to supplement that YouTube video or anything that I might need to kind of fill my content calendar for the next week. And then on Thursday she sits down to create other assets that we might need like reels, covers repurposing some of this content for LinkedIn and she starts scheduling the YouTube video. At the same time I am writing the newsletter. So by Friday everything is scheduled and ready to go out for the next week. That is her main goal by Friday is to just have everything scheduled, YouTube video and newsletter goes out on Monday. And then having all of my social content for the next week scheduled. And that's what works best for me. So you can see that I've broken down this process into a couple of different days, figuring out what we need to batch and where. So a content workflow for you, your workflow does not need to be as complicated, especially if you're a solo entrepreneur and doing this all by yourself. If you're just wanting to show up on Instagram for your small business, maybe sit down on a Wednesday and just create all the feed posts that you need for the next week and then start to like come up with ideas and script your reels, then record the reels on Thursday. And then you're done. You can have all of your content done and ready to go. So you're not having to create it more so in the moment. Maybe you absolutely love creating content on Tik TOK, but you still have a nine to five job and you're really trying to make it as a content creator. And you need to find the time to organize and come up and record all these content ideas that you have. Maybe sit down on a Saturday morning when it's nice and quiet with your cup of coffee and write down all your content ideas, maybe script out some of the videos you need to record so that on Sunday, maybe you can find the best light at the best time and just sit down and batch report all the videos that you need that will get posted throughout your busy workweek. Either way, just find a workflow that works best for you. The main thing to remember with your content workflow is realizing where you can save time. For me, it's sitting down and recording all these YouTube videos all at once because that's what saves me time, but that might feel overwhelming to another small business owner. But honestly the thought of having to do my hair and makeup every single week and sit down in front of this camera makes me want to throw up. Once you have your workflow all figured out, let's dive even deeper into batch creating your content. And I actually have a free guide for you. My content batching guide is at the link below. This is a completely free resource that is going to help you start to save time and start to batch your content in an effective and systematic way. I will see you guys next week. And if you found this video, helpful, don't forget to hit subscribe.