No doubt, writing blog posts can be tedious and time consuming. And it can be a big problem for blog owners who hold a day job or have a business to run. In this installment of our series, we talk about how to leverage your time to make creating content less time consuming and more productive… So once again, welcome back to another episode of Coffee Break Blogging! 😉

Is This You?

Has it ever bothered you when it comes to your blog that it seems to take a really long time to write content? That writing content seems like the most tedious thing that you could possibly have to do… And it is especially tough for bloggers who are doing this while they have got a full time job or they have got kids or something like that because those things take a lot of time. “I am like a 9-5; sometimes even longer than that!” And it takes just a lot of time. And then you have got time in the evenings and maybe some on the weekends, but do you want to sit down and write an epic blog post that so many people like to call it? Everybody knows you need high quality content and you need to do all these things to get attention but yet it takes a lot of time… Time that we often do not have.

And if you are a business owner; I’m here to tell you, and hopefully you know by now, that a blog is an extremely powerful marketing vehicle if you use it right. It is so much more powerful than a lot of things that you could be doing, but it requires content. And you as a business owner or particularly in a situation where it could be really difficult to sit down and make it, it seems like “well, this is directly leading to my profit”, or maybe you do not think that it is going to lead to anything for quite some time and you are like “Well, I got more immediate things to do.” So one way or the other the content usually takes a bad burn.

Leveraging Your Time

Now as somebody who teaches how to use blogging as an effective marketing vehicle and often we make money with it; this is something that we need to talk about because we need to be making content, I don’t want you to not do any of these stuff because you don’t think you have got the time. Here’s the thing… the secret to this is leverage; looking for points of leverage. Leverage is just a typical English word. If you are not that familiar with it, you can certainly visualize it with like a teeter totter like you would see on a playground or anything with a lever in it.

You could push on one into the lever not all that hard but your lifting power on the other end is pretty good; pretty substantial. That is the idea of leverage. It is the idea to get more return on your effort than you are putting into it. You put in one unit of effort and you get two or three units of efforts back. That is what you are looking for with leverage. And when it comes to your content, you want to be looking for that.

Now in this case, our input is going to be our time and our thoughts because we are going to be writing; most likely. Now here is the thing… that is actually a big part of what we are going to be talking about her; is that we do not need to actually write the stuff. And in fact, this is going to be particularly helpful for you if you do not think that you are that good of a writer. And there are a lot of you out there who want to have content but perhaps you do not think that you are that good of a writer and maybe you are thinking you are a fairly decent writer but it just takes you a long time to do it.

Nothing wrong with that, but again you want to look for points of leverage.

Points Of Leverage

First thing I want to look at is the fact that you can make videos or make audio podcasts. So when it comes to making multimedia, it is quicker. I am recording this podcast right now; it is going to be maybe 10 minutes or so of content; it just takes me 10 minutes to do it and it takes me about a minute a minute or two to outline it before I hit the record button. If you transcribe this; and I have a Virtual Assistant who does transcribe all these, it is going to be several pages long, just of me talking for 10 minutes. So that is one thing that you can be looking at as a point of leverage. If I am primarily interested in the written content, then that 10 or maybe 15 minutes of work that it took for me to create this episode of this podcast with an output of several pages once it has been transcribed for me; that is high leverage. That is a good example of leverage. That is what you want to be looking for.

So if you are not that good of a writer but perhaps you can speak fairly well off the cuff, you can actually record your blog post. You can literally speak it out. And then you can have somebody transcribe it. Now, I personally like having an actual virtual assistant on my team who can do it so I go to the same person every single time and she will do it for me. But if you do not have a virtual assistant yet, there are services that you can use that will transcribe for you; usually around a buck a minute or so or you could even go to Fiverr. And you can pay somebody to transcribe for you on Fiverr. You pay them $5 and they will transcribe it for you. But the thing is, do not look at it as “Ah, I do not want to pay $5 for a blog post” look at it as a return of investment on your time. Because if it would take you 10 minutes to record something, five dollars to have somebody transcribe it for you on Fiverr; but yet it will take you like an hour or more to do all that yourself, pay the five dollars! You are an idiot if you don’t do it. 🙂 It is that simple. Record it on your phone.

You could even do it while you are driving to work. If you are a 9-5 it is a really big problem when it comes to creating blog post; use your smart phone and just simply record your blog post while you are driving in your car. It is not an unsafe thing to do because you are still going to have your hands on the wheel. You could even get a bluetooth mic or something like that so you literally can go the whole nine yards in the car and you can still speak these things out and send them to somebody on Fiverr when you get to work and they can be transcribing that thing for you while you are there. Very high leverage. Same thing with video. We are all carrying these smart phones around with us. They all have got really killer cameras. You can actually record videos with your phone.

Now this is great for you if you are a business owner because some of the great content; if you are running a brick and mortar store or something like that, is behind the scenes type of content or content that shows your staff doing something fun. It shows that you guys have personality. And you can just record those things with your phone. Great blog content. Sometimes with that type of stuff you don’t even need to transcribe anything. Literally the blog post will be your video with maybe a quick paragraph underneath it. But this is the idea of leverage… Utilizing the technology that we have at our disposal. It does not have to be about writing only and in fact, it shouldn’t be; to be honest with you.

Keep An Idea File

Now another thing that will help you is the idea of keeping an Idea File so that anytime that you think of a potential piece of content or a blog post idea, but you are not in a position to do anything about it right then and there; you record it. And again, your phone is a great tool to use for this. You have probably always got your phone with you… Well, record that blog post idea there. And here is the reason why this is a point of leverage and something that will help you with making your writing less tedious… And it is because often the part that hangs us up the most is the decision making on what to actually write about. It is the coming up with the idea part of it. If you remove that to where you have already got that part of it done but all you got to do is sit down and write the thing or record something, you take time out of the equation by doing that.

And we all have blog post ideas that pop up in the most inopportune time. We can’t do anything about it. You can literally be sitting in the middle of a grocery store and something just pops up in your head and you’re like “Damn, that will be a good idea!” You got to record it. One thing I often do is use Evernote. I love Evernote. I actually will sometimes do an audio note right from my phone. It’s got a little microphone thing and I will just record. I’ll speak out the blog post idea and the whole audio file will go up into Evernote and it’s sitting on my computer when I get back. Boom! Easy! And it is free, by the way.

So those are the really big things that you can do. You can capture your ideas when they come, save you time and the decision making part of it when it comes to your content. And then when it comes to actually creating your content; be thinking about other formats… Video and Audio, and utilizing other people to do the written part of it. And especially if you are a business owner; you need to be thinking like this. If you are not doing this because you are afraid to take somebody to transcribe it for you, you are killing yourself. Don’t do that anymore. You need to be making some good content and there are so many ways to do it that do not require you to sit down and write because a lot of us are not that good at it. I’ve gotten pretty good at it because I have done a hell of a lot of it.

But I know there are a lot of people who come to my site who are even inside the Monetization Lab at the site are not as good at writing and it is only because they haven’t been doing that as long. So, utilize other formats. Okay?

Systems

Now the last thing I’m going to do; but we are going to talk about this in the next episode, is that you want to be thinking in terms of “systems.” Creating systems step-by-step processes that you will go through to create your content. But there are things that you could do; systems that you could create for yourself that will allow you to create content at a high leverage fashion. But once you come up with a system that works, it is something like “Oh, that worked out really well”, you need to document it and turn it to a system that you can go out and repeat. If Fiverr is part of your gig like in terms of you are going to have somebody transcribe something on Fiverr and then you find that one person in Fiverr does a really good job for you; save that person. Go back to that same person every time and work them into your system where “Step 1, I pull up my phone I record something; step 2 is I export to Dropbox, step 3 is I post the thing on Fiverr” … I mean, think about it in terms of systems.

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And with that in mind, I will see you on the next episode where we are going to continue talking about high leverage content creation. And I am going to give you a bunch of ideas on how you can create more content, more output with less input and get more done with your content. 😉

I’ll see you on the next episode!