Complete Your Life + Biz New Years Resolutions: Your Guide to Content Creation

This January, we’re tackling a lot of things that you might have life or business resolutions around. While we don’t always love the word resolutions because it’s contrived and overused but it’s important to set intentions around things you want to see improved! Without it, you’ll always make the same mistakes!

We’ll go through 4 topics I heard discussed the most through the month of January in case you have similar resolutions! Let’s set an intention to do better!

Guest Blog Post by: Hailey Dale, of Trunked Creative

Momentum. Almost all of the growth in my own business has come as a result of creating momentum with my content.

But where do you start with creating the momentum you need to bring your business from where it is now to where you want to go in 2017?

The answer is two-fold that can summed up in a couple of words: Consistency and Intention.

In this post, I’m going to give you the low-down on creating consistency with your content (Content 101) and on creating an intention for your content (Content 201).

Content 101

The first step to creating consistency in your business, especially with your content, is to get real about what consistency means to you. My version of consistency (centered around my weekly blog posts) might not be your definition of consistency.

I would suggest starting with a lower and more realistic number that you can maintain easily and then increase the frequency or add on different content types and channels once you have your basics down.

So how do you define your perfect content consistency equation?

Welcome to the Regular Content Bundle

I always suggest beginning with building out your weekly {insert any regular time interval here} content bundle, which will include the essential content types: a blog post (doesn’t have to be written, can be video, audio or any format as long as it’s posted on your website as a way of bringing people to your website to read/view/hear it), a regular email to your list and some social media.

To define your content bundle, answer the following questions:

1. What are you publishing regularly on your blog (usually a written blog post, podcast episode, or video)? And how often?
2. How often are you telling your email list about what’s on your blog or sending a regular newsletter?
3. What social media channels are you using? Is there a regular posting schedule that you use or could use?
4. Any other content types that you produce on a regular basis?

So going through these questions, my weekly content bundle includes:

• 1 blog post
• 1 newsletter based on blog post
• 3 tweets (2 scheduled per day, rotating) based on blog post
• 2 Pinterest graphics based on blog post
• 1 Facebook and Instagram post based on blog post
• Other = Daily theme posts in my 2 Facebook groups

Once you have your bundle laid out, you’ll be able to find opportunities to streamline your processes and build templates, which will make staying consistent less of a hurdle. And try to resist feeling like you have to do all the content things, you don’t. Focus on creating content you enjoy and you’re much more likely to be consistent and get results from them.

Your Go-To Tools for Consistent Content:

• Social media scheduler (CoSchedule, Buffer, Hootsuite, etc.)
• Canva for Work (templates and storing your brand info will save you oodles of time)

Content 201

The next level resolution in building content momentum in 2017 is to be more intentional with your content.

How are you connecting your content to your overall business, sales and marketing strategy? After all, as business owners, we’re not creating content just for the heck of it, we’re using content as a tool to build our businesses.

The easiest way to be more intentional with your content is to create an evergreen sales funnel. One that will take new readers to subscribers and then after providing value and building a relationship with them, making an invitation to work with you or purchase one of your paid offers.

The high-level components of your funnel and the journey your new leads will takes goes from:

Funnel to Email Sequence to Offer

Let’s break each of these basic sales funnel components down:

Your Offer:  

• Can be anything – a service, a product, an infoproduct, a subscription, software.
• Have your offer in place first before building the rest of your sales funnel components so you can ensure that all pieces lead back to your offer.
• Another question to ask yourself is what urgency can you add into your offer? Could be a special bonus, a discount, extras – as long as it motivates people into taking action right away instead of waiting until later.

Your Freebie:

• What can you create that will give prepare your new subscriber to take the next step into your paid offer?
• The format doesn’t matter as much as providing your potential customers with something they actually need or want, or that it serves as an audition for your paid offers.

The Email Sequence:

• How will you lead your new subscriber from your freebie to your paid offer?
• You’ll want to include a mix of emails that provide more value and emails that showcase how your paid offer can be used, before you make your urgency-based offer to them.

Once you have these pieces in place (and confirm that they’re working by testing and tweaking them until they are), then all you have to do is build up your traffic to the top of the funnel using content marketing. The sales piece of your content puzzle will be mostly automated and taken care of by your evergreen sales funnel.  

Your Go-To Tools for Intentional Content:

• An email service provider that lets you set up automations and segmenting rules (ActiveCampaign, Drip, ConvertKit, Infusionsoft, ClickFunnels, etc.)
• A tool that lets you set up expiring offers and redirects traffic (Countdown Monkey, Timerlay, etc.)

How will create more momentum in 2017 with your content? And how will you put that momentum to good use?

I partner with small business owners every day to build their content empires by helping them craft… irresistible blog & newsletter content, engaging social media strategies, plus creating content campaigns, overall strategies and systems. You want your business to do more than just stand out. Deep down you see your business as your way of helping make the world a better, more beautiful place. That’s where I come in.I’m here to help you reach your business goals (in the most direct way possible) AND to help you have more fun while doing it! For me – business is about connection, passion and alignment. These are the types of businesses I serve best.