How to Post Enough Stuff

Everyone tells you that all #ModernTherapists need to have a blog, a podcast, a newsletter, and tons of social media posts. That’s not totally true, but it certainly can be helpful to put some nice content out there to share with your audience. The focus of this blog post is not to debate whether you should post stuff or even what stuff to post for the biggest marketing impact. This is the post that is going to talk with you about how to make sure that you are consistent and you are posting the stuff you want to post when you want to post it.

So. Here are our best tips for making sure that you do just that.

Don’t do all of the things – even if people say you HAVE TO DO IT because you won’t get clients otherwise.

First off, make sure that you decide what you are going to do with at least some sense of what you have energy for and what else is on your calendar. Decide which medium or mediums you’re going to use and stick to those.

Decide what you’re going to do, answering the following questions:

1. What are you good at? For example, if you’re a horrible writer, don’t commit to writing a daily blog.
2. What do you enjoy doing? If you hate social media, don’t do as much of that – figure out other stuff to do to connect with your clients and referral sources.
3. What can you do OVER and OVER and OVER again? If you can do a live video on Facebook, but it took you a million hours and you haven’t been able to figure out how to do it again – not your medium. You want to be able to consistently produce content that is valuable to the people you serve.

Don’t get too fancy.

Good enough is good enough. You don’t have to have the biggest blog, podcast, video extravaganza before you can put something out. In fact, you want to make sure that you are lining up with how you present in the room. If you’re super casual, but you have a really strict and buttoned-up video or blog post that you’re putting out – not helpful to you.

Be really strategic on how you do it.

Make sure that you set yourself up for success, so you can work efficiently and effectively on what you’re putting out.

1. Identify the themes for the content you’re creating. Make sure you know why you’re putting the content out and then write down subjects, titles, or themes of what you will be writing, talking, or presenting about. Make sure you have enough ideas in the bank – conventional marketing wisdom and a number of marketing sources say that you want at least 30 or 40 of these.
2. Create a sustainable content calendar. Identify how often you are going to put the different types of media out. We decided on a twice monthly blog post as we know that we can each write one post. We also decided to move from twice weekly to once weekly podcast episodes, because that was the timing we knew that we could do. We will continue to play and tweak what we put out there (based on your responses and our ability to be consistent), but we have created the timeline for both creating and posting content.
3. Set aside content creation days. Just because you have once a month blog posts, doesn’t mean that you create one blog post a month. Batch content creation, so that you can schedule your posts and uploads in advance. Getting behind and missing a deadline feels bad AND when you batch your activities, you can get in a better rhythm to get the work done.
4. Reuse content whenever you can. When you have a podcast, a blog post, and a social media presence, for example, you can write on a topic that you’ve talked about on the podcast and then make social media posts that highlight quotables or actionable tips. Don’t recreate the wheel for every item of content that you’re creating.
5. Create templates whenever appropriate. When you can create a format or structure you can use for every blog post, for example, you can get things done more quickly. Blog posts can start with an outline with bullet points. You can then fill it in and allow yourself to get creative. Then you can edit the bejesus out of it and be done. For our podcasts, we have templates for each piece (the show notes for both types of episodes and for episode artwork within each of the different pixel size graphics needed to upload and promote the podcast episodes). Once we created these templates, we were able to get this stuff done much more quickly.
6. Have checklists and systems in place. When you know exactly what you need to do, with checklists and processes written down, you can accomplish a lot more quickly. This is to streamline your efforts and make sure you’re doing things in the most efficient way possible. When you create these repeatable processes, you can make sure that you’re not doing something twice when you could do it once. You can assess and refine.
7. Take time to be creative. The most important part in sustaining content creation is to give yourself space to be creative. If you’re constantly grinding away at work, you won’t have the capacity to think up the new insights you’d like to share or the clever way to connect with your audience. Give yourself space and time to be off work and free to let your mind roam. Have a notebook or other mechanism to write down the ideas as they come – it will allow you to have really poignant and meaningful content, that doesn’t just “get you clients,” it also allows you to help more people.

Content creation is one of the pieces that many therapists often hate, but also that many grow to love. It’s in fact our favorite parts of being entrepreneurs and helping professionals.

Make sure, if you’ve taken this on, that you think about how to make it sustainable. This shouldn’t be something that stresses you out.

Join us in The Modern Therapists Facebook group to talk about your ideas for sustainable content creation. We’d love to hear what resonated with you in this article and what you have found helpful in your practice.