My Top 3 Content Creation Mistakes (And How To Avoid Them)

Have you ever heard of the compound effect - not necessarily the book by Darren Hardy (really great, btw) but the concept itself? The compound effect is the idea that small, seemingly insignificant actions can yield tremendous results over this. This is the concept that many books about habits have been based on - The Compound Effect, Atomic Habits, and The Slight Edge, to name a few. These small changes aren't supposed to be drastic, yet they yield powerful results. You only need to focus on getting 1% better at something at a time.

I wanted to talk about the compound effect today as I reflected on my content creation strategy and how my process has changed over time. When I first started my social media marketing agency in 2020, I will be completely honest when I say - I had no idea what I was doing when it came to creating consistent social media content, never mind building a social media marketing strategy. I knew three things about myself going into this new venture: I had experience generating social media posts daily for myself as a network marketer. I had some experience creating social media content as a field marketer for various brands I represented in the past. I also had experience tapping into other people's "voices" from years of working as a professional actress. Armed with these three facts, a new pink MacBook Air, and the Google search engine, I decided to start my social media marketing agency. I proudly announced it on Facebook and wondered how I would go about finding clients.

My first client was a friend of a friend that reached out to me from that first Facebook post. He had three goals for his social media - sell his book, encourage people to listen to his podcast, and promote his free Facebook community. My process was simple. Every morning, I woke up, looked at his goals, and thought, "What should I post about today?" At first, this strategy worked well for us. He hadn't been posting to his social media consistently, so anything I posted was attracting attention. Within the first three weeks of us working together, his podcast downloads increased by 20%. This felt good at first, but the action on his pages began to dwindle after a time. His posts weren't getting great engagement, the podcast downloads plateaued, and I couldn't tell you if he sold any books. I felt like a failure. At the time, I couldn't tell you what had changed. I posted the same types of content in month six as I posted in month one. Why had it stopped working?

Looking back on this experience, here are three things I learned from working with my first client:

Always start the content creation process with the end goal in mind.

Looking back on this experience, I can identify now that my client's goals had shifted over time, and I didn't know. He no longer identified with his brand that I was so vigorously promoting but we weren't communicating regularly. His content no longer reflected who he was, but it also wasn't serving his audience. We were constantly "selling" without providing any real value.

My content creation process with my current clients looks a lot different - we check in with each other every month and always start with the client's long-term goals and monthly intentions. I write them across the top of their content marketing spreadsheet, so it's always right in our faces while we're creating. This ensures that we create content that supports their goals and not get distracted by other "shiny" things.

Keep your content creation plan flexible.

When we talk about a content creation strategy, you may have heard people talk about content pillars or buckets, or themes. These things can be beneficial when creating content - especially if you're starting - however, in my experience, they can also be limiting and distracting if you're not using them within an overall content strategy. Let me explain. When I started posting for my client, he said, "I want you to post about my book and podcast." That was it. Those were the only instructions. So, I created a weekly schedule like this: podcast, book, podcast, book, podcast, book, personal. So the pillars were: podcast, book, and personal. These often led to a hard ask like "download my podcast or buy my book." There was rarely a - "Hey, thanks so much for being here in my community. Here is some free valuable information for you. I would love it if you could share it with a friend." 

Here is my suggestion - when you're creating content for yourself or another client, use the following buckets: educate, entertain, and enroll.

• educate - These add value - tips & tricks, checklists, tutorials - these are what people will save.

• entertain - These provide enjoyment - humor, memes, gifs, reels with fun transitions - these are what people will share.

• enroll - These get them invested in you - share your why, tell a story, personal posts - these might get less "engagement," but the people that read these are more likely to invest in your business because they know, like, and trust you.

These three categories work for literally any post - whether it’s a photo, infographic, reel, or whatever. As long as you have a good mix of these that you're producing, you'll continue to yield results.

Stop creating social media posts by the seat of your pants.

Would you bake one muffin at a time? Would you create a giant mess in the kitchen to produce one lonely chocolate chip muffin? NO! We bake muffins for days - dirty the kitchen once, clean up once, and bask in the delicious sweet fruits of our labor for breakfast multiple days in a row! Creating posts on the fly or carving out time every single day to post something on social media is a surefire way to waste as much of your time as possible. Creating social media content is very similar to creating ANYTHING else. I like to plan my content out a month at a time, but when I first started "batch creating" content, I could only focus on one week at a time. Start where you're at. Carve out a time in your schedule to put on a big old pot of coffee and plan out your social media post for the near future. Trust me - this will save you time and energy.

While we’re on the topic of saving time and energy, I hope you can learn from these mistakes that I've made as you embark on your own content creation journey. If you struggle with creating consistent social media content, check out my free step-by-step workbook, How to Create Consistent Content Again and Again: My Tried and True System That Yields 30+ Original Social Media Posts Every Single Week. It's the same system I use to create content for all my clients every month, and I want you to have it! Click here to grab it now!

I know it can be challenging to learn something new, so I want to acknowledge you for being willing and share this quote with you before I go. It's from The Compound Effect by Darren Hardy:

"Creating new habits will take time. Be patient with yourself. If you fall off the wagon, brush yourself off (not beat yourself up!), and get back on. No problem. We all stumble. Just go again and try another strategy; reinforce your commitment and consistency. When you press on, you will receive huge payoffs."

Just think about how you can get just 1% better with your content creation each day, and by this time next year, it will be a breeze.