Stock up on Content for your Busy Season


Whenever the busy time is for your small business, you can't avoid it - at some point in the next year, you'll be overwhelmed. Help out your future self by preparing a bunch of marketing content during your slow season.

Having a whole day to spend on content sounds awesome to me. Perhaps not so much to you. If you want a little guidance, here are 10 activities that will set you up for success for months to come.

  1. Write a wrap-up article – a summary of *something* from the past year that you’ve written about several times.
  2. Brainstorm a long list of topics. Nothing is too wonky to put on your list.
  3. Go online and do a little research to get more ideas to add to your list.
  4. Pick 10 article ideas from your list and write a brief point form outline of each.
  5. Pick a handful of those outlines and draft full articles.
  6. Pick 2 of those drafts, edit and proof them in preparation for publishing. (Or send them to your editor.)
  7. Source images to use with your 10 article ideas.
  8. Create promotional social media messages. Assembling and posting messages on the fly takes more time than you realize. Create a database of evergreen promotional messages you can draw from. (Here's one for promoting your newsletter.)
  9. Create graphics to post along with some of those social media messages.
  10. Schedule promotional messages into the future - responsibly. There are so many tools available to help you deal with your routine posting.

During your busy season, you'll be really glad you did this. Remember to pat yourself on the back!

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originally published in Work Better, Not Harder newsletter November 30, 2016

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