A New Approach to Creating Content: 48 pieces of content in 6 weeks

Whether you’re publishing blog articles, recording podcasts, or distributing photos and videos across social platforms, we can all admit that creating content is a lot of work. It’s time-consuming, doesn’t always generate an immediate ROI, and yet we always need more of it.

So we asked ourselves: what’s the most efficient and effective way to create more content in less time? What we came up with is a little unconventional, and dare we say, aggressive—but it will free up tremendous time for you to actually focus on operating your business for the rest of the year. Welcome to the 6-week strategy for creating a 48 weeks’ worth of content.

The first step is figuring out what your content will be about.

Week 1: Map out the various topics

Let’s say you want to publish 4 blog articles per month, a total of 48 articles for the year. Write at least 25 topics that your customers are interested in.

How do you determine what your audience wants to see? You can refer to sites like Quora, Reddit, and Facebook groups to see what people in your industry are asking. AnswerThePublic is a fantastic tool that gives you content ideas by turning keywords into questions you can answer.

Even better, your actual customers should be the main source for helping you create your content topics! For example, a travel agency might want to share ways to maximize travel using points. From that, you can create multiple related pieces of content:

1. Hotel brands with the best rewards-redemption programs
2. Airlines that grant the most points per miles traveled
3. How to earn bonus points with credit cards

Repeat this expansion process for each topic, and you’ll have at least 50 pieces of content! Not a bad approach, huh?

Week 2-5: create your content

This is the time to buckle down and put your ideas into action. Meet with photographers if you’re getting photos, or put pen to paper if you’re producing written words. Turn your ideas into tangible output. Depending on the size of your team, you can delegate this or outsource the work to freelancers. Even if you’re a team of one, remember that you have one and only priority: create all your content in these 4 weeks. No excuses for getting it done.

We also recommend content splintering: an approach where you take one main piece of content (pillar content) and repurpose it for distribution everywhere else—podcasts, Instagram, Twitter, you name it.

For example, say you produced a video that didn’t generate as much engagement as you hoped. Well, you shouldn’t just stop there and give up. Instead, break it up into shorter clips to repost on IGTV, create memes for Twitter, extract one quote and expand on it in an Instagram post. By splintering content, you maximize and extend the life of the original piece of content. There’s no need to recreate the wheel. Work harder, and smarter.

With all that said, your first piece of content should be completed by week 5.

Week 6: schedule your content calendar

We realize that this timeline is incredibly aggressive and can seem daunting, but we promise it will save you a huge headache down the road.

Now that you have all your content ready to go, it’s time to schedule it for publishing. You’re in the home stretch! At the end of week 6, you’ll have your entire content calendar scheduled for the year. You can take a trip to Mexico without worrying about having to create content for the next 10 months knowing that all your content will go up as scheduled. Isn’t that a relief!

So there you have it. There is no time to waste. Set hard deadlines for yourself, get serious about your content strategy, and you will find ways to get it done. Instead of thinking that you have 52 weeks to spread out all your work, accelerate your timeline to 6 weeks. Make no excuses, and you’ll feel great knowing that you have all your content scheduled for 2020.

Do you need help creating your content calendar or executing your content strategy? Contact us today and we’ll take care of that for you so you can focus on serving your customers.