I started blogging in 2012. My content was the way that most new content creators content is at the beginning: painfully earnest and badly crafted. The blog posts were short, the writing was slightly stilted at times and wildly emotional depending on what I was sharing. There was no rhyme or reason to my content other than I had a story that I wanted to share with the readers of my blog. Then, like most things, my content evolved and got better over time. My posts were clearer, I started growing an audience and I began developing goals for my content. I wanted to create community and empower others by sharing my experience with my (I’m in the personal finance space).
Then there were all the rules around content creation that I kept hearing about if you’re a content creator you know what I mean:
- Always release your content on the same day
- Publish XYZ number of posts a week
- Share XYZ videos a day
- Show up on social media everyday
For the past couple of years I’ve begun to question all the rules because I just was doing things differently.
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Welcome to the Brand Building Lab, I’m your host Michelle Jackson and I help online entrepreneurs design businesses that lead with empathy and intention. My goal is to help support entrepreneurs who are amplifying underrepresented creator content in online spaces as they thoughtfully make money along the way.
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In 2022 I started aggressively batching my work and releasing my content based on my energy levels. Sounds woo-woo I know. But, I’d also heard from other content creators who were finding that consistency could be approached in different ways and that content release schedules were a guideline vs. a rule. If you’re not batching yet, I hope this post will help you make make the switch.
How to Batch Your Content
If you haven’t batched your content before it may take a couple of tries to get into the flow of things. First, you have to have idea of your content flow across platforms. I’ll share some examples below:
- Podcast-If you release an episode a week that means you’re sharing 4 episodes a month. Instead of recording an episode a week, you would design an editorial calendar that helps you mindfully create your content and then sit down for a few hours, a day or a couple of days and record your content. Then you would schedule time to edit the episodes or forward that content to whomever helps you with that task. This type of production schedule gives creators time to thoughtfully craft their show notes, add any monetization components such as affiliate links and market their episodes.
- Blog posts-Batching writing content can be approached in a number of different ways. I am talking about actually writing your content vs. using AI to generate that content. How batching blog posts would work: find out a topic or area of interest that truly resonates with your audience and just write as many posts that you can handle in a day, couple of days or weeks. Again, you’re going back into the content and adding opt-ins for useful resources
- Social Media-There are tools that you can use to release content on social media. Tools such as: MeetEdgar, FS Poster (WordPress Plugin) Smarter Queue or Later. Content creators could schedule 5 hours a month to pre-schedule the content that they would like to share via social media.
- Video Based Content-At this point you get the picture. You would set aside a day and record content. Video based content would include: YouTube Videos, TikTok and Instagram reels. You would record as many videos that make sense for your goals and ideal release schedule.
Why Batch Your Content
In the beginning, it may be challenging to figure out how to batch. Especially if you have other factors that impact your time such as: a job, family, or other obligations that may impact your time. If you have multiple pieces of content that you need to batch, that’s also a piece of logistics that has to be factored in. As you work through this, initially you may feel like your content creation process has slowed down. Once you get into the swing of things you will really notice a huge difference in your workflow. Here’s why you should batch your content.
- Free up your time-In the beginning you won’t believe that batching will free up your time. I’m going to give you an example of how batching a significant segment of my podcast freed up my summer. I recorded a 13 episode season about student loan forgiveness for my Michelle is Money Hungry Podcast. I recorded several episodes in two weeks. Because this segment had guests, I had scheduled all recordings during a two week period (I was only available during that time) in order to make that work-I had to have an editorial calendar because I had to approach my guests far enough in advance in order to give them the time to say “yes” to the dates I had available. Once the episodes were recorded I had plenty of time to edit the episodes. In fact, because I had so much freed up time during the summer I was able to participate in a cool media trip at the end of August.
- Brand Partner Outreach-I made a huge mistake with my Student Loan Forgiveness series in that I should have begun reaching out to brand partners prior to recording the episodes. Having content batched and ready to go makes it so much easier to build in time to find brand partnerships. You already have the content ready to go and then can add in pre-rolls, etc.
- Thoughtful monetization-When I was creating the majority of my content weekly, I would often forget all the monetization strategies that I wanted to add into each piece of content. I felt rushed. In order to manage this issue I created logistics sheets for each type of content. These logistics sheets helped me to remember some key components to monetizing my content.
- Nurturing connections-Share other people’s work and projects. Share resources and opportunities. On my Twitter thread I share opportunities on a daily basis.
- Podcasts: Sharing a resource, affiliate or brand partnerships. Optimizing my show notes.
- Social Media-Sharing posts, services or affiliates that are helpful to my audience.
- Backlinking to supporting content-If you’re monetizing your platform (and I hope you are) backlinking to previously created supporting content should be a key part of your monetization strategy. For example in this post, I would backlink to an episode of my Student Loan Forgiveness season, a post about affiliate marketing or brand partnerships.
Batching allows creators to be a lot more intentional about their content.
Batching Allows Me to Be Unscheduled
I no longer release content on a strict schedule. I do have the goal of releasing a podcast episode each week on the same day but sometimes that just doesn’t happen. Having batched content allows my audience to experience my content in a consistent way when my life is happening behind the scenes.
I now release blog posts and social media when I feel like it. If I have 30 blog posts ready then I just release them. Why? Because I’m focused on building up organic search to my content vs. hoping that people are waiting for my content to release date. Why do I embrace an unscheduled content release strategy?
- Extensive content catalogue-I have a huge catalogue of content that I’ve created on platforms that I own and other people’s platforms.
- People are busy-I’ve met the people who listen to my podcasts, read my posts, etc. They often talk about consuming my content on their time. They may podbinge, or get back to the content when they have the time.
- I paid attention to my own content consumption habits-I am busy and have a lot going on. I also tend to podbinge or will consume previous favorite podcast episodes, written posts, etc. I no longer feel the kind of urgency that I used to.
- SEO and Organic Search Strategy-I’m not trying to go viral. I’m trying to get Google and other search engines to recognize and reward the content that I’m creating. This type of strategy means that I’m focusing: designing evergreen content, answering questions and being helpful to my audience. It’s a long-term content creation and release strategy.
What has surprised me about this content creation approach is the following:
- I’ve still been able to attract unique experiences to grow and share my brand-These include a lifestyle modeling photoshoot in New Mexico (paid of course) and a cool media trip with an outdoor apparel and equipment company.
- I’ve been able to allocate more time to my niche projects-I have 3 niche projects that I have been quietly working on. I’ve been able to focus on them a lot more because I have a more time and an easier content creation strategy.
- I’ve made more money-I think just having more time to focus on monetization strategy has been a huge game changer. Especially as I focus on growing my passive income again after taking a break from it since 2020.
- I’ve had more time available for things that matter-I was able to spend more time with friends and family without worrying about getting my content out on some arbitrary schedule. I have time to foster creative ideas (necessary for what I do) to exercise, read, enjoy nature or reflect.
If you’re thinking about batching your content I highly recommend doing it. But, you’ll need to give yourself about a 6 month window to really feel the impact of those changes. Let me know how it goes!