I want you to imagine that you are making yourself a bowl of cereal. And instead of pulling a bowl out of your cupboard, you go to your backyard, where you have a pottery wheel. You make a brand new bowl from scratch, and while it's drying, you go to the store, you look through all the cereal, and you buy a new box of cereal, bring it home, pour it in the newly dried bowl, and eat your cereal.
The next morning, you do the same thing over again. You go to your backyard, make a new bowl while it's driving, go to the store, find the cereal you want, buy the box, and do the same thing over and over and over again.
Now, while this example sounds ridiculous, right? Of course, you would just pull the bowl that you already have out of your cupboard and look at the boxes of cereal you already have in your house. Unless you're really craving something. We are doing that equivalent with content when we create brand new content from scratch without any ideas beforehand.
So, today I am going to tell you how you can stop being the bottleneck in your content creation process. And if you want a full system that you can easily implement today, for your content creation process, you should head over to streamlined.fm/kit, where you can get my completely free resource, the Solopreneur System Starter Kit. It will give you the four systems every Solopreneur needs, including content creation, as well as the simplest implementation of that system, a tools index so you don't have to go looking for the right tools, and automation and AI prompt swipe files. So, you can find that over at streamlined.fm/kit.
Hey everybody, and welcome to another episode of the Streamlined Solopreneur, the show that helps you automate your business so you can take time off worry-free. I'm your host, Joe Casabona. And here's the problem.
As solopreneurs and small business owners, we know that creating content helps us establish trust among our potential customers. We need to create content somewhere so that people can believe that we can do what we claim we do. But producing content is hard, especially when you don't have good ideas or when you're trying to invent the wheel or reinvent the wheel.
So what can we do to stop being the bottleneck? Or really, the first question that we should ask ourselves is creating content worth it? And I obviously think it is worth it. I create this podcast, which has two episodes per week. I do at least one YouTube video per week. I write a newsletter that gets repurposed as a blog post, and I post on LinkedIn three times a week. So how am I able to do all of those things? And why do I think it's worth spending my time on?
Well, like I said earlier, it's important to help people know, like, and trust us. This isn't even an age of AI thing. When online courses exploded pre-pandemic, and then especially during the pandemic, it was super easy for some huckster to make a course to tell you that you can make a million dollars on LinkedIn, just do exactly what I tell you to do.
And what they leave out is that what they did doesn't work anymore. Or what they did only works because they already have a big following. And so you need to bring your receipts, and creating content to show your expertise is the way that you bring the receipts. And yes, I am on a bunch of platforms, but LinkedIn is the only social platform I'm on.
But still, how do we stop being overwhelmed by the content creation process? How do we stop being the bottleneck for our content creation process? That's what I'm going to talk about today.
The fix is three methods or three ways to make producing content faster without sacrificing quality. Have a way to log ideas as quickly as possible. Use tools like ECAMM to make recording and post-production easier and repurpose.
So let's walk through all of these things. Number one, have a way to log ideas as quickly as possible. This is my recording day. I am recording several episodes in a row, and I'm able to do that because I went into my Notion planner, and I looked at all of my ideas and I picked the five that align with the thing I am putting out into the world right now, which is my system starter kit for solopreneurs. So a lot of my content is going to focus around that, which I don't want to spoil.
Number three, but these all kind of connect. So how can you log ideas as quickly as possible? It could be as easy as like shouting into your phone or your watch. Having a notebook with you to write ideas down as they come to you. Having a button on your lock screen to quickly create a new note.
The idea here for capturing ideas is that you want to make it easy in any context. For me, I might be driving or with my children or walking my dog, and I have my hands full. So I need an easy way to activate a voice notes app. But then I want those voice notes to go to Obsidian, which is where I keep all of my notes.
So I use the app Whisper Memos. It's amazing. I have a button on my watch, but it's also attached to a shortcut, so I can just shout into the void and then talk for a while about this idea that I have. And I know that it's going to get sent to Obsidian. And then once a week I look through all of my ideas in Obsidian, and I throw out what needs to get thrown out, and I put the good ones where they need to go.
Now, the other side of this for my system is I have a button on my home screen, on my phone, that does let me do a little bit more targeted idea generation. So if I, if it's definitely a podcast episode and I definitely want to do it, I can put it directly into my podcast planner. But the idea here is that you should never be starting with a blank slate on the day you're going to create the content, because that is going to take you longer.
I also think that you should batch content, and it's a lot harder to batch content when you have to come up with a bunch of ideas from scratch. Like I said, I'm looking at the five episodes I need to record today in my notebook or in Notion, and I am going to record all of them and then edit all of them after I go for a walk or something like that.And editing is really easy for me. I use an app called Gling, which brings me to number two: use tools like ECAMM to make recording and post-production easy.
When I first started podcasting, I knew the first thing I had to do was hire an editor. I hated editing. I was very bad at it. And I have been with my editor for a very long time, basically since this podcast started nine years ago. But with these solo episodes, I don't need my editor. And there's a few reasons for that.
First, I'm recording everything in eCamm, so I'm releasing the video for these episodes too. My editor does not do video. He tried it for a while. Shout out, Joel. By the way, big fan of Joel. If you need a good audio engineer, definitely check out Joel. I'll put his website in the description.
But with these solo episodes, I'm doing the video, and I'm using a really good setup. And I have a bunch of things in ECAMM to make the production side of it easier. So I don't need to do a lot of things on the back end. It's really if and only if I mess up during the recording that I need to edit. And so that's when I'll put it into Gling and tighten up some things because it's a transcript-based editor.
And then I can release those episodes when I have interviews or when I did interviews, I always sent the files to Joel because I knew Joel would do a much better job than me of combining and cleaning up and leveling everything. But since my recording process has gotten simpler, and for these solo episodes, that part is not really necessary. So use tools that will make your life easier.
And then number three is repurpose. And yes, okay, this could be with AI. Maybe. I've experimented with having AI take my newsletters and turn them into LinkedIn posts with varying levels of success. I will use a very specific Claude project to create the show notes for these episodes. And it's really specific because it basically says make the description the cold open and gather the show notes. And then I heavily edit that. But it is only using my words. So sure, use AI for repurposing.
I think post-production is a very good place to use AI. Gling is an AI tool, but I also mean reframe ideas. You can take a message and repurpose it for the platform and reframe ideas. I've mentioned this before, but you know, when people say, " Oh, I use AI because it makes me faster”. I always respond, faster isn't better; it's just faster.
And I've repurposed that idea with other stories. I've said things like Jazz Chisholm Jr., for the New York Yankees, has used a heavier bat so that he's not swinging as fast. So it's a more controlled swing, and it has helped him get more hits. Would you rather have seafood from a fast food joint or an actual seafood restaurant? Faster is not better. I'm not buying gas station sushi. I don't care how fast it is because I'm going to be sick all night. And my favorite example is with skydiving, right? If you wanted to skydive as fast as possible, you could jump out of the plane without a parachute. That guarantees that you will hit the ground as fast as possible, and you don't want to do that.
So you can take an idea and reframe it for a different audience, reframe it for a different platform. You know, for me, I write my newsletters, and then I take those newsletters and I repurpose them into these episodes.
And I like writing the newsletter first because it helps me clarify my thinking around a topic. And then I look at those newsletters, and I think, is there anything that's worth showing? Right. Show, don't tell. Is there anything I can demo for the YouTube channel, and I'll use it there.
And then like I said earlier, I'll take the text of the newsletter and I will pull out shorter ideas or ideas reframed to be shorter that I can post on LinkedIn. So for this episode it's probably the three fixes, but then each of the fixes could probably be their own LinkedIn post as well.
For YouTube, I could show my idea capture process. I can show how I'm using eCamm, I can show the Claude skills for repurposing. So, that's really what I mean by repurposing. I don't mean like, oh yeah, talk for a while on a podcast and then have Claude write an article. What I mean is like take the content yourself and reshape it for the platform. You can use AI to help there. But I think starting, I personally think starting with the written is going to get you the most bang for your buck. Because it is. It should fully be your idea that you're repurposing to other platforms and you're still showing up every step of the way. And I think that's the important part. So, there you go.
Three ways to stop being the bottleneck for your content.
1. Have a way to log ideas quickly.
2. Use tools like ECAMM and Gling or whatever you want to use to make post-production as easy as possible, and’
3. Repurpose in a meaningful way.
Again, if you want to get my entire content creation system, if you want the other three systems that every Solopreneur should have, as well as exactly the simplest way to start with all of those, a tools index, and an AI and automation swipe file, you can head over to streamlined.fm/kit. It is my most valuable resource ever. But that's it for this episode of the Streamlined Solopreneur. I hope you enjoyed it.
Thank you so much for listening, and until next time. I hope you find some space in your week.