Completing things at the last minute and forcing creativity is not a sustainable or effective way to run our businesses, let alone our social media. But sometimes it’s just hard to know how to get it prepared and synchronised in a stress free way. This week’s episode is all about sharing tips on how I batch and repurpose content as a way to inspire you to find what works for you!
Prefer To Read? Here’s The Blog Version…
Hello, my loves Welcome. back to the podcast. So today, on the day this episode launches on the podcast, I am in Mexico City! However, I am recording this episode in New York because I Batch podcast episodes and I record them all at once when I know that I am either going to be traveling or I have a lot of work coming up, or I’m gonna be really busy. And so, because I have this process down pat, we’ve been releasing a new podcast episode every single Monday for the past over three years (check out the first episode here!)
So this concept of effectively, batching and repurposing content is what we are going to be talking about today on our Digital Nomad Society calls. We have many members struggling to stay consistent on one platform, you know, let alone a few. And so if you want to be a content creator, if you want to grow your online brand, but you’re struggling with consistent content creation and effective batching, this episode is going to be for you.
Create With Purpose & Solidify Your Offer
The first thing I will advise you with any social media strategy or any online business strategy is to have a purpose to know why you are in business and how you are going to make a return on your time, energy, and financial investment into this one platform. And what I see a lot of new creators do wrong is they are creating for just the sake of creating. Like they don’t have an offer or a product or a service, and it’s almost like they want to grow this business, but they have no idea how to monetize.
And when you don’t have offers in place that people can buy, or any offers where people can sign up with you, you’re basically just creating, hoping that it’s going to monetize, but not having any idea how. And then you get burnt out, right? Because there is no purpose behind the content creation. Even if you’re just starting out, in all of my intensives and private coaching, we create your offers, whether that’s working with a hotel and creating services around that, whether it’s creating a membership or a masterclass, having an end goal of what you are trying to drive traffic to and what types of people, so who your ideal clients and customers are, having all of those defined is going to make your content creation strategy so much easier because you know exactly what you’re working towards, right?
It’s not just like, I’m gonna post every day and hope that, you know, miraculously one day in three months, someone’s going to give me $5,000 a month, or I’m gonna make $10,000 a month. Like you’re trying to connect the dots here. So the first piece of advice is to have a purpose, have an offer, and if you don’t know what that is. Take time to know what you would like to be in business for and what you would like to get paid for.
Posting In Real Time?
Another struggle that one of our members mentioned on our Digital Nomad Society call is that they don’t know whether or not they should be posting live videos, live content when they are in a location. And this concept is so baffling to me because we as creators feel this pressure that we need to share everything in real time.
We almost feel like it’s taboo. if you go back on content from a few years ago because it’s kind of like cheating and you’re not really there, but I guarantee you the people we follow, they’re not posting in live times all the time, right? And we don’t mind. And when you start digging up content from the archives and repurposing them, A, it makes your job so much easier. And B, you’re not holding yourself against this like imaginary standard that everything has to be live. Take this episode for example. I’m very transparent in saying that I am in New York right now, but when you see my stories or when you see my other platforms, I’m probably gonna be in Mexico City or posting content from when I was in the tropics.
Things do not have to be in real time all the time and don’t feel guilty when you’re not able to sustain something that is happening live all the time. You don’t have to. I give you the permission slip to dig up old content, create a sustainable posting schedule for yourself where you’re able to use all of the unused content from before or even, you know, reuse the content from before.
I say this too, when you are writing Blog posts, let’s say you have a Blog post from last year that no one read, you’re able to resurface that and share that as new content. And we’ll get into that in the second half of this episode when I talk about being omnipresent. But in this first half of the episode, I’m going to teach you how to Batch and make this process, make this workflow a lot easier for you.
Focus On One Platform
My next piece of advice is to focus on one platform first, master your workflow, outsource when necessary before adding on another. I think where a lot of people go wrong is they get so excited with creating their social media platforms and they aim to be consistent on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, blogging, Pinterest, and so many platforms altogether where they end up burning out and you end up seeing, you know, minimal traction on any of them instead of a lot of traction on one.
And the thing is, when you try to chase two rabbits, you’re not going to catch either one. Stick with one platform first. Get the hang of content creation, optimize your content, engage with the audience, build that up first, and then you can always direct traffic from that onto your other platforms.
Whichever one you start with is up to you. Pick one that feels aligned, that feels easy. Personally, I started with Instagram, but I have clients who start with TikTok because they feel like they grow faster and they see more traction there. Other clients they love podcasting (check out my blog on how to start a podcast if you’re also interested) and that is something that they can stay consistent with. Stick with one, create a consistent posting schedule, and then think about repurposing, you know, three months down the line. It does not have to be perfect from the beginning. Done is better than perfect and you want to just focus on what is working before moving on to other ones and spreading yourself too thin.
How To Batch Content
So with that being said, let’s dive in to exactly how you can Effectively Batch content. And in order to understand this, we need to first set a posting schedule for ourselves so we can estimate how much content we need to Batch and pull together. So let’s take Instagram as an example.
Knowing How Much Content To Batch
I always encourage people to post three to five reels a week if you’re looking to grow your account, because reels are the main formats of Instagram content that is displayed to people not already following you.
Your reel has a really high chance of being shown on the reels tab. So being shown to a cold audience, being shown to people who have no idea who you are versus your other content, like your stories or static photo posts or carousels, those are only shown to your existing followers. So if you are looking to grow, spend all the energy that you would spend, spend all the time, you would spend, instead of creating a photo, look at creating reels. And so if you are aiming to, let’s say, post five reels every single week, we essentially need a content schedule for you Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday of posting one reel every day on weekdays.
Don’t Create From Scratch
And then the main kind of like light bulb moment here is we’re not going to sit down on Monday, create brainstorm, you know, start a reel from A to Z and get it posted in that one session and then Tuesday go and do the same. Because if you are creating from scratch and you are essentially brainstorming from scratch five times a week and trying to post it in that one to three hour increment. However long you know that reel takes you, that is not sustainable. Do you see how you’re just setting yourself up for failure? If you’re writing down in your planner, I’m gonna post five times a week, and then you’re like, I’m just going to sit down five times a week and then get a reel posted in that timeframe.
Most of the time this doesn’t work. Like I’ve never seen it work with any of my clients. Maybe you know, one out of a few hundred this works for them, but a lot of times what I see is you get burnt out and I’ve been there because it’s not sustainable. So knowing that you want to ultimately end up at five reels a week, what you do, we need to work backwards from there. We need to not only just post the content, but we need to Batch every part of the workflow for the Instagram platform. And I’m using Instagram as an example, but we’ll dive into other platforms if it’s for Instagram. We first need to not only Batch the content, as in Batch the reels ready to be published, but before then we need pools.
Pool Your Ideas
Pools of real ideas and audios that you can recreate. We need pools of content that you can pull together and create a reel with. And if we are taking one week as an example, we would need at least five audios already planned out. We would need five specific real ideas that we either can recreate or we can create from scratch, which would mean we need to have all of the content for those five reels, batched, and ready to go before the week even starts. And we know that not only does it take having all the content and creating and shooting all the content, but it also takes post-production.
It also takes editing and matching it to the audios and adding text over it. So if you break down every single step of what you need to do in order to create a reel for a week. You should recognize that there is a lot of time involved before the actual week starts, before the actual posting. And once you can wrap your head around that, then you can accurately budget the time needed beforehand in order to get all of those steps done and to get all of those pools created. And once you know which pools, so pools of audios, pools of real ideas, pools of reels to be created, pools of content, we need to make sure you are organized where you can efficiently find all of the content, all of the audios, all of the filters you need in order to create that reel.
My Instagram Idea Pooling Process
What I do on Instagram is I save all of my real ideas into a saved album on Instagram. I also then save all of my content that can be used as reels into its own separate Apple album. I also have a separate album specifically for reels ready to be posted, and then sometimes I save it as drafts. I also have saved audios in like the audio library on Instagram. This is going to look different for everyone and this is probably going to look different for you.
What I also see is people try to recreate what’s working for me, and they find that it doesn’t work for them. They forget to check the saved collections. They maybe start a collection and then a few weeks later completely forget that it even exists. Some people don’t use albums on their phone. For me, I use my Apple albums a lot. I also use my Notes app a lot. So my notes is where I have all of my ideas for my Blog posts and all of my podcast ideas. Use the platforms you normally use a lot. Try not to introduce anything completely new when you’re doing this. We’re not trying to add more to your plate, we’re just trying to kind of organize what you’re already really active on in a way that works for you and have an intentional organization strategy where you know exactly where to go for each and every one of these steps.
Other Idea Pooling Processes
From personal experience with my podcast, what works really well is pulling ideas for content to talk about, whether that’s from listeners or from friends or from just questions I get asked a lot. I pull them all and I just have it in a note on my notes app on my phone. Some questions are submitted by listeners and I immediately know to go into my archive of ideas and add them in immediately.
I also do this with testimonials. I take screenshots and I have a almost like immediate ingrained reflex to add it to its corresponding folder in my online workflow.
Your content ideas can also circle around promotions and launches that you have coming up. Whatever you want to create content for, it should be listed somewhere instead of just relying on your mind to remind you or to take care of it. We wanna make sure you have every piece organized. And lastly, putting it all together instead of sitting down every single day to record something new. So instead of, you know, every Monday sitting down to record a podcast episode, I look at my list of ideas. I decide sometime throughout the week what my next three to five podcast episodes are going to be if I need to invite anyone on the podcast.
And then I sit down one session and I record them all. I’m not trying to divvy up my recording sessions throughout the week. I want to get in the flow when I’m in a podcast recording flow. I wanna get multiple done at a time and ultimately, you know, it gives me free time because I’m going to Mexico, then I’m flying to Asia, and I just know that I don’t wanna be frantic towards the end of the month and I’m going to save myself by doing everything.
Repurposing Content
Now, once you have a lot of content in your archives, what you can now focus on is being omnipresent on all platforms. And I’ve gotten this question where it’s like, Danielle, how are you so active on so many different platforms?
And the key is to have a content calendar so you know what types of content you need to create from scratch and what other existing content you can repurpose. You don’t always have to create from scratch. You can, like I said before, repurpose content from months and years ago. You can update old content and just bring it back into focus.
I recently updated my Visit Macau blog post from like 2017 or 2018, and I shared it with my email list because to them, unless you’ve been following me for more than six years, you’re probably not going to remember. And even if you were, there’s a chance of you wanting to reread it again and just refresh your memory. It’s basically new content.
Once you create one piece of content, you can now have the bandwidth. Once you get that workflow really flowy in that one platform, you can now have the bandwidth to just repurpose it. So when I create Instagram reels, it’s really easy for me to just download the reel and upload it to TikTok and upload the same exact video to YouTube shorts. When I launch a new podcast, it’s really easier for me to just have a template for a weekly newsletter and update the podcast so that the new episode gets released.
Do you see how in many of these instances, I’m not creating a new newsletter from scratch and a new Instagram reel and a new TikTok or YouTube short? We wanna make sure it is sustainable and doable for you, especially if you are currently not working with a team yet, so I know how much energy and time it takes. We wanna focus on one, and once you feel confident, you can then expand and pull up all of that old content and just Repurpose it to live content. Remember, done is better than perfect.
My Content Calendar Template
And if you are interested in having a content Calendar template, I will link the exact one I use in my business to stay omnipresent. And you’re also going to have the chance to purchase a hundred Caption Ideas so that you get an idea of what content you can post next with a purpose. And like I said before, done is better than perfect. You do not need the perfect strategy before getting started. You don’t have to have a month’s worth of content laid out. We’re just trying to learn step by step where step improvement at a time, what you can do better, how you can then start batching and repurposing more and more. Maybe just start with, you know, two pieces of content and find something that works for you.
But once you see how much time and energy it saves you and how much more money you’re making because now you’re driving your traffic somewhere, it’s all going to come together and it’s going to feel so good. Let me know, if you have any questions? My dms are always open and I will see you guys in the next episode.
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