Three time-saving content hacks for your small business
My whole business ethos is to help small business owners save time. Having been a small biz owner since 2012 and juggling it alongside a full time job, I’ve found a lot of ways to help manage the workload and save time so I can focus my priorities in the right places.
As small business owners, we have a lot to juggle and we wear a lot of hats. We are content creators, admin assistants, account managers, dispatchers, customer service reps, photographers, bookkeepers, designers, makers… the list is endless, right? Your time is precious and there are only so many hours in the day! There’s a lot of tropes here but it’s all true. Today I’m sharing three of my top hacks for saving time and helping you get to grips with elements of your biz that suck it all up, so you have a bit more time to focus on the tasks you actually love doing.
CONTENT HACK NUMBER ONE
Batch tasks together
Now this doesn’t mean you have to bulk all of your jobs into the five hours you have free to work on your business. It means working smarter and re-ordering all your tasks into categories, and bulking those together instead.
Posting on instagram is a great example. So you want to post three times a week but scramble on the day to get something ready and post on the cuff. Bulk batching your work helps save you time so you don’t have to panic, take a sub-par photo with hashtags you’ve used before and leave the post in the hands of the algorithm. By bulking tasks together, you’ll be scheduled way in advance and the last minute panic will be long gone! At the beginning of the week, (or further in advance if you can!) work out your content schedule (I’ll come back to this later). Plan out the posts you’d like to share and some notes about what you’ll write about, as well as what photo you can use. If you’re stuck for ideas, try searching Pinterest for content ideas or sign up to my mailing list where I share content ideas in every email.
With your content list planned, you can group the tasks you need to make it happen. Set time aside to take ALL the photos you need for the instagram photos you have planned out, and take them in bulk. Utilise a sunny afternoon and batch create and edit the photos so you have them saved and ready to go for when you need them. Likewise, write all of your captions in one go, and research your hashtags together too. Not only will this save you time instead of having to do it three times a week instead of one, your content will be more strategic AND you’ll feel like an absolute boss for having things ready to go.
Switching tasks actually takes a lot of energy and is a massive time-suck, so doing similar things all in one go makes sense. Plus with things like taking photos or writing, you can time these activities around the weather or your mood. Great lighting? Batch take some photos so you don’t have to panic when you need something and the light in your house is super dark. Not feeling like being in front of the camera? Head to the notebook or laptop and pen those next five instagram posts instead. Work smarter, not harder. You’ll be surprised by how simple batching tasks is but what a huge difference it can make to your business!
CONTENT HACK NUMBER TWO
Rework or repost old content
Up until a few months ago, everything I posted on my social channels, my email marketing and my blog was completely new content. I didn’t post the same thing twice on Instagram. I didn’t repurpose old blog content that had a wealth of knowledge in it but I’d only shared on facebook once back in 2013.
If you’ve been creating online for a long time, think about just how much good stuff you’ve put out into the world and that 99% of your audience probably hasn’t seen. Not only are your audience not scrolling back through your feed or your blog to the very beginning to see the early work but they likely weren’t following you even when you shared it that first time. And even if they were? Were they on Twitter when you posted the tweet about it? Or on Instagram at the right moment to see your story or your post, or did it get lost in the feed because the algorithm didn’t show it to them? Your content won’t be seen by 100% of your audience. Sometimes we make things harder for ourselves, but it’s only the rules we make up in our head that holds us to them. Here is your permission slip to post things twice, or three times, or however many you want!
I’ve started sharing photos on my instagram that I posted six months ago, and re-sharing it to my feed. Heck, the image I made that went viral in September? I posted it again last month and even the ‘second’ version is in my top 5 performing posts on instagram. Even if your audience remember seeing it before, they’ll still connect with it again.
I also know that when photographing a new product or having that photoshoot at your desk, we take hundreds of photos. You might narrow it down to two or three great ones, and then post one. What happens to the others? I’m certainly guilty of sharing only one image from the photoshoot because I know the others ones are similar. But do my audience? Nope!
So not only are there easy ways to get content from stuff you’ve shared in the past, you can even share the exact same things twice for things like photos or graphics. When it comes to longer form content like emails or blogposts, this content is usually best to be reworked or updated. This is not only for SEO sake but also to keep your words current and up to date. Wrote a blogpost about the best shops to find excellent childrens clothing last year? Up date that post, keep a few of them if they’re still relevant and add some extra new ones in too! Talked about your favourite apps in an email to your subscribes back in June? Update it to your faves right now and send it out again! People won’t care if you still have a couple of them that’s the same. Update your wording, make it current to the date you’re writing it now and hit send. The wheel doesn’t have to be completely re-invented each and every time! When we’re tight on time, we can reuse those gems of an idea we’ve shared before and mix it in with our fresher, out of the box work.
For things like blogposts, I recommend rewording things so that google knows it’s new content. Don’t just hit copy and paste on your old post to your new. Update some of the wording and rejig it for the current day so you’re not penalised in your SEO ranking. You’ll still save a huge amount of time by not coming up with new ideas and re-penning your own older content instead!
CONTENT HACK NUMBER THREE
Outsourcing
I know, especially in the beginning, that we want to save as much money as possible. I’ve always been hands on when it comes to learning and wanting to do as much of everything as I can. But sometimes, it’s just not worth our time. It’s important to weigh up your time and energy vs how much it would cost to outsource a task. Some things may just be totally out of our league and not even worth trying to do ourselves because we haven’t spent years perfecting the craft or learning the ins and outs like the professionals in that field. We may be able to get by on some things, and I’m all for learning and broadening our knowledge, but there’s only so much we can learn and do for ourselves before we physically won't have the time or the mental bandwidth for.
If you want to do your product photos yourself but need to work out how to use a DSLR, learn how to use Photoshop to edit the photos, and google the difference between aperture and exposure in between all that? Not only is your energy taken up trying to get your head around something new, but you’re also taking all that time trying to do something that may not work as well as you picture it in your head anyway because you’ve not honed that skill and had many years of practise.
Obviously I’m not saying you can’t do things yourself. I’m self taught with photography and love taking Etsy listing photos but I know that I don’t know anything about finance and taxes so have to outsource. Sure I could take a course to understand the language and then allow extra time in my schedule to do that task now as well, with an extra job title to balance under the small business owner umbrella, But I know that for me personally the accounting side of my business is way out of my remit and best tasked to an actual professional. It’s not worth my mental sanity to get my head around the numbers and I’d rather spend money to get it sorted with peace of mind that it’s out of my hands and I can sleep easy and not worry.
I mentioned earlier about content calendars and planning in advance. As an extra bonus hack I can’t recommend content calendars enough for saving time in my own business. It makes such a difference knowing I have ideas spaced out in the month to keep my content consistent and having it spread between each and every content channel for my business. I’ll be sharing more about how to use and create a content calendar soon, so be on the look out for that! I’ll also have a free downloadable template when that’s live exclusively for mailing list subscribers so be sure to sign up so you don’t miss out.
Need a hand with outsourcing some of that content creation? Head to the work with me page to see if I can help some of your pressure off.