The Secret To Consistent Content Creation For Social Media

Today, I’m going to show you how to build a sustainable content creation model.

Investing in content creation is the single greatest marketing opportunity available today. 

When I started in marketing 25 years ago, there was only one way to reach your audience - buy media. There’s no such thing as free organic reach for billboards, radio or TV.

Today, you can reach millions of people through the social networks built on the internet. Digital distribution is free. All you need is content. 

But it’s hard to publish consistently whilst running a business or working a regular day job. Many small business owners and solopreneurs invest their time on the issues demanding their attention and miss out on the content opportunity.

Investing in content creation has more upside for your business than anything else you could be doing right now.

Content will scale your business to unimaginable heights. Here's how you can become a more consistent content creator.

1. Pick one platform

Don’t make content for every social media platform. Pick one.

Choose the platform that's most popular for your target audience. Build a realistic publishing schedule you can stick to. 

Start with the goal of publishing once a week. Establish a routine before increasing to 2-3 times a week. Keep adding more content until you're publishing daily.

You’ll get better results going deep on one platform instead of shallow across a few.

2. Curate content

The easiest way to develop a consistent publishing schedule is to harness the power of content curation. This involves sharing other people’s content that you think your audience will like.

Curated content has one enormous advantage over original content, speed. It’s much faster to share a funny tweet or helpful article than write one yourself. 

If you think you’re not creating value by sharing other people’s content, think again. Being a publisher doesn’t mean bringing original content all the time. It means giving your followers useful content on a regular basis. This is a skill.

It's the difference between being a pop star and a DJ. People want to be original like Beyonce. But Carl Cox made huge money playing other artists' music. 

Add your own spin to the content you’re sharing with your caption. Use a few well-chosen words to show your originality and provide your audience with your unique insights.

Curating content is a great way to show your personality and connect with your audience regularly without draining your time.

This tweet from Jon-Stephen Stansel took five minutes to find and format for LinkedIn. It reached over 6 million people.

3. Leave comments

An even faster way to make content is by commenting on other people’s posts. (Yes, comments are content.) 

Comments are a powerful way to build awareness for your brand by tapping into attention that is happening elsewhere.

A comment you leave on a popular post will reach far more people than a 1,500 word article you publish on your own profile page.

Find popular people or popular posts and leave thoughtful, engaging comments. Then interact with everyone in the comments. 

This is the quickest way to grow an audience. It’s what I did when I was getting started.

LinkedIn now prompts you to turn your comments into posts.

4. Say it again, and again, and again.

Once you’re sharing content consistently, you’ll see which topics resonate with your audience. Pay attention. 

Take those topics and now find new ways to say the same thing.

Content is like music. Most songs are about love. There are millions of songs about love. Yet artists are coming up with new ways every day to tell this same story.

Treat your content the same way. Take a theme and create a short word post, longer article, image, video, slide share or pdf. Get creative and experiment. 

You’ll see people respond to different styles of content, just like people respond to different music. 

You don't need to find more things to say. Find more ways to say it.

Here is an example of taking one idea and expressing it in different ways. The idea of not ghosting candidates is communicated in a graph and a simple quote. One idea expressed two ways. Both performed well.

Wrapping Up

Content allows you to distribute your message on social media for free. Committing your time to this process will unlock incredible opportunities for you and your business. 

The most important part is staying consistent. One post won't achieve much. But one post every week will have a huge impact over a year.

To achieve that, you need a sustainable content model.

Here’s how:

1. Pick one platform and commit to publishing consistently.

2. Share other people’s content, adding a thoughtful and original caption.

3. Comment on popular posts.

4. Look out for themes that resonate and find another 100 ways to say it.

Stay consistent and be patient. 

Social media is like a casino that costs nothing to play. Stay at the table long enough and eventually you'll win.