Lessons

Lesson Info

The 90/10 Model for Efficient Content and Shortcuts

let's talk a little bit about content you address content as well different ways to systematize it for yourself and you you addressed the content calendar building yourself a calendar and I want to talk about that a little bit more and a little bit more in depth because when we started building a content calendar it really helped a sea our marketing strategy just like you were talking about earlier today um one of the biggest roadblocks for many of us with coming up with content right is when you sit down and say what am I going to write about I have no idea so I'm supposed to send an email newsletter when am I going to do this why am I going to do this what am I going to write about what does he need to look like and for us what got us past that hurdle was building a calendar for our content and I suggest starting out by mapping out the next month start with the year that jarod was talking about what you want your global strategy to look like and then for your the next month map out w...

hat block post you're going to post it what what big strategy's going to be in there if you're going to host a meeting with your past clients that month what date that's going to be on if you're going to send an email newsletter if you're going to do all that kind of stuff on the map that out on your calendar and then I build out our content calendar for the next quarter so over three months I know what's going to go on the block when it's going to go on the block I know what email newsletters are going to be sent and I know what's gonna happen over there's next three months so what's really nice about a calendar is that it tells you what content you need be developing you can move it around you can adjust to dates figure out what's gonna work better but you know what's going to happen and so it's not a surprise when you come up on a blood post and say oh I should have been developing that two weeks ago well now I need to go pull these images and I need to go start writing this and oh shoot I need to interview that person and you can build you could build a workflow around that and start working on things ahead of time think of yourself in a lot of ways as a magazine I like to think of ourselves as an odd line editorial magazine you know I always need to be working on some sort of content and I've continent different stages throughout the whole throughout the whole month as I'm going towards these different blawg posting these different deadlines and that helps me out tremendously so having a calendar is half the battle it really is and it also keeps you from going back to the consistency term I hadn't really brought it up until jason brought it up yesterday but they're realization that oh man I posted ten black and whites and a rose and yeah we shoot sun drenched brides in the mountains I mean I love black or white but is this consistent with our brand and stopping yourself from if you're just in the moment you often times can't see the big picture and when you're in the big picture when you have a content counter you can actually see everything from how many black and whites to color means you're posting from what content you're choosing to talk about are you balancing the stories you tell in your blawg with the you know with the just showcasing I would event you just shot versus some of the other things that you do I know you guys do recipe sundays and that doesn't have to do with the story that it has to do with your brand presence and something that your target market means into a cz well and these are things you can't see you will not goingto manage all of them unless you put on a calendar you know at the outset yes definitely and it helps me see I start with it all the shoots we have coming up that's the first thing you know and I know when they're going to be posted we post our wedding's ten days after they after we shoot them an engagement sessions a week after we shoot them that just works really well with our workflow it doesn't make it super stressful honest and so that's when we post our block post and so I have those on the calendar and that's what I start with yeah that's the framework and then I'm filling in around all that those chutes and I'm like okay well this siri's I do once a month so that's where this month is going to be in the next month is going to be and before I know it we only post two to three times a week I had those weeks filled with content that I congenital eight easily for myself so it's a lot less overwhelming when you have a calendar you can see it and see you know what how I actually don't have that much work to do this month like that's doable because I have all these chutes that I've planned out or I have all these products I need a block about our you know and how they're spaced out sometimes I look at three months and I'm like okay that's actually pretty simple I could do that that's you know that's not a problem right and I can have more time to do another email newsletter or start writing a guide and move on to other things so things like a calendar really do free up your time and help you figure out help you save time and figure out what's most important to prioritize those things so with content you need to build as much content as you can all at once so that you can space it out schedule it out over time and that's how that's why a siri's work so well a lot of times jeff and I weigh do recipe sunday that's our main siri's that we do on our block and recipe sunday began I mean it began years ago I was I was miserable at cooking I barely knew how to cook scrambled eggs and I really wanted to learn how to cook better so I just started finding interesting recipes and I thought you know what why don't I just photographed these and put him on the block it was a big hit with our audience are brides really really loved reading about the different recipes and all the stories about us in our kitchen and so I started posting these on a regular basis but the problem wass I was cooking these and photographing them once a week and then posting them on that sunday and pretty soon that doesn't scale it's pretty soon I'm sitting there on wednesday like oh shoot I need to do a rescue sunday this weekend and these next two nights are busy so I need teo I need a cookie recipe tonight I don't have a recipe yet okay I need to go google a recipe ok forget about all that other stuff I need to do all of a sudden like a recipe like marketing I'm not looking for a recipe oh shoot I need okay I need to get to the grocery store because the sun is going down at this time and I want that for my photos so I don't have to set up all the lighting so okay I need to run into that and all of a sudden it's just pandemonium right and jeff is stress because he's like what happened to like our nice date night and I'm like I know I need I need to photograph this dinner and make it look right and just reinvent the wheel with each and every block post so one time jeff was like why don't you make two recipes tonight and photograph them and space them out I was like oh my god the light bulb went off like why have I not thought of this before so I found a weekend found ten recipes and now we we photograph ten recipes of the course of two days and we do that every six months and I set everything up I turn our whole house into a giant photography studio get up everything get everything out all the lights all the state sets in staging and everything and photograph all these recipes and it's fun we have friends over to eat all the food the best tip of being creative live course might just be find yourself in san diego on a weekend when aaron is doing arresting recipes and yet find what he invited over I've managed to get invited for once or twice yeah there's just a lot of amazing oh it's just piles and piles of food and we're just we can't find enough people to come over and eat it all and so and this nice because they rate the food they're like okay know that recipe actually was very good at that one a little bit of a dead so because I do it all at once generate all the photos I take them back edit them all at once prep them for the block and then I spent another time riding them all out and I just scheduled them out over the next six months you're blogging platform probably has a schedule feature of some kind and it's surprising to me how many photographers I talked to that don't know that there's the schedule button and word press on its life changing you khun schedule post out too close whenever you like and do it ahead of time because I have six months worth of content that's posting on its own and the ten percent is me posting it to social media when it's ready and I try to schedule as much of the social media as I can some of it I can't but it's much less work then re inventing the wheel every single week for that siri's and then that also in another byproduct that we haven't brought up it all we keep finally by process but a byproduct brought up is the stress has gone down system reduces the stress and you know if you have enough friends if given a photographer friends and you get on social media any given night you can see the stress level high especially during busy season and these sorts of things bring the stress level down systems bring the stress level down and allows you to manage everything and not feel like all the wheels are falling off the bus yes definitely and I even listen when my good friends she wanted to learn how to photograph her kids better so I said okay in exchange for me teaching you how to use your camera will you find ten awesome recipes for me for recipe sunday and then come over and help me cook them and so I even like outsource a little bit of that to my friend in exchange for me teaching her how to use a camera so that was a way for me to make it even easier on myself because she also knows cooking really well and sounds awesome recipes for me so I was like great recipe sunday is becoming really think so easy this is great pretty soon I'm just gonna look down on all your recipes sunday minions right yeah just like look at all you guys uh with my recipe sunday which is so funny cause it's just a personal siri's on my block it doesn't bring any revenue except that it connects with my ideal clients and rings and more of my target audience exactly gives you the ability teo talk about things that your target market leans into and gets to self actualize and they get to say wait a second that's something that is so important to me as well you know it again your target market likes that they like to cook they like to be a part of that experience the date night aspect of that you have identified that so it's another thing that you guys are doing to let your target market lean in and let people who don't for example we talked about the balm of photographers professional doesn't cook oh yeah they're not into it and you talked about the differences in those two brands and and I think that's a wonderful example will see that this is another opportunity to create a marketing strategy out of something that you're doing and setting up a system for yes definitely so let's move on to some other ways that we can free up some time with content and the's air more like tips and tricks kind like the photography in ways we can free up time for ourselves you know kim I think on day one you talked about having questionnaires for your clients and being able to generate answers that then you could use to write about later on in your block close which is all we're talking about right now weighs teo make it easier on yourself later on when you have to sit down and write a blood post so figure out ways you can do that with questionnaires I know that we submit a lot of our work tio blog's two magazines if that's something that you like to dio figure out how to get all that information up front from your clients throughout the process with different questionnaires different questions so that afterwards I'm not tracking it down you know I'm not spending so much time trying to figure out what dresses the bridesmaid had you know the shoe designer where they got the jewelry all of the accessories because those are things that are specific to publishing on dh not necessarily necessary for me to know outside of I'm going to submit it somewhere they really want to know that information I've had a few magazines and logs that I like to submit teo and I know exactly what they want and I've learned how to gather that information and make it easy for myself to submit stuff to those publications so that's something you could do to free up time later on so that once you do get a list you can market it you khun right about it and you can focus on you know bring in more business through those avenues one thing that's helped me a lot I'm a writer and I know there's other people in the audience that are writers as well and one thing that helped me out was I read annie dillard she's one my favorite authors I love her and she wrote a book called bird by bird and it's herb brooke about the process of writing and it's a really really simple concept have a place where you just write down notes but up until then I was writing down notes on a sticky note it's I was writing about my phone and then you know doing voice memos and then you know I just kept losing all of my notes because I hadn't designated one spot to put them it's it's literally the note pad on my iphone it's that simple but a lot of photographers I know youse ever know evernote fan that plane's meeting here I know but it's better that you have something then not ideo yes ever know is what a lot of my friends use and they really love it but just having a designated place for those ideas because when I sit down and want to schedule out my block calendar and I say what am I going to do with these holes I need to fill with some of this personal stuff for other ideas I go to that place and I have some ideas that I just generated over time and it helps start the wheels turning so helping yourself out was writing down ideas having a place to put it very simple but it's something that a lot of writers definitely could benefit a lot from another thing we do to generate a lot of content is that we just photographed every product that we sell and so whatever product it is that you sell but there's portrait's if it's fine art prince of landscape photography you know when we sell those products we receive an album at the studio we unwrap but we photograph it and we put on our block we don't reinvent the wheel with that either we have the same table that we photograph them on used the same kind of props we mix it up a little bit but not much we photograph it the same way we the same different stuff and I don't mind that a lot of those block post may look similar because they're consistent and it makes my life a lot easier I'm not trying to find a different place to photograph this every single time I wanted to be easy I wanted to be fast and I want to know exactly what I need to be doing so with any product that you want to post about or anything like that don't try to reinvent the wheel with any of that kind of stuff so um that also helps me sell that helps in the sales person aspect of this too because I am setting expectations for my clients that when you hire us for your wedding you're going to buy an album it's gonna be beautiful it's going to be great because every single one of our clients bison album when they hire us for their wedding so you're also setting expectations up front which is a really really great way to do it so eliminating roadblocks have talked about this a little bit already figure out what those roadblocks are for you figure out what the hang ups are for you and overcome them and there's a couple stories I want to share about this the first is that when it came to newsletters email newsletters I wanted to do them and I wanted to make them happen but I just kept hitting a wall every time I went to go make one because I honestly just didn't have a design for it I didn't know what was supposed to go here I didn't know if I should have like you know five different things the bottom if I should do one little called action or what so when I finally sat down and said you know what we're going to do a block it dex here here's what that's going to be I'm gonna do the similar kind of theme or similar kind of riding with each one and there's gonna be two calls to action at the bottom one's going to be our recent work was gonna be about what we're up to you know all of that stuff so once I figured that out boom we started doing email newsletters and I knew exactly how to do them and why I wanted to do them um so just figure out what those roadblocks are and byron I was talking to you about this yesterday and I was going back and forth on whether I wanted to share this or not but I'm a writer and we were talking about writing and the challenges that come with writing and for me what I realized was that there I was so um I was wanting to do everything so well that it was preventing me from finishing anything that I've started and I'm guessing that a lot of you might be feeling that right now there's a lot we need to dio and we've been a resounding being the last day and a half way have been taught the best ways to do everything we've been taught the best practices because jared is the best city knows how to do it he has taught us all the best practices of how to do all of this really wonderful marketing for me I would get so overwhelmed by trying to make everything perfect that it just stopped me in my tracks I would write you know it right I would write and perfect and I perfected trying make perfect no no it's not good enough to put out there yet it's just not good enough and I was talking to one of my girlfriends about about this whole thing just saying how am I supposed to accomplish everything was accomplished like how am I supposed to you know come across the way I want to come across and do it well and make sure that I do this right and that right and she was like aaron like you're doing so good already she's like I but your you know your standards are so high they if you just lower them a little bit you would be fine and she said my mom her mom told her sometimes you just need to see it from the viewpoint of completion not perfection and when she told me that it was like this huge weight off my shoulders just came off when she said you know I my guess is that your completion is probably a lot of other people lt's perfection because you set your standards so high that you need to aim for completion now I'm not advocating that you should do you know a poor job I'm not advocating the yushin be excellent but for me my hang up was trying to be perfect and trying to do it so well that I just endured it all and I feel like when I approach it with okay you know what completion not perfection I have been so much more effective getting things done not so worried about every little thing and feeling like you know what I think this is good I think this is great I'm gonna put it out there and just let it let it be and I'm gonna do a good job and I'm gonna keep working at it but I know it's not perfect and that's okay way see that that you hit the nail on the head we see it all the time that she got at it where photographers are editing the work to be perfect in their eyes and taking it to a level that goes well past anything that their client is going to see and be able to actually enjoy on and when you sign up to be in business you sign up to build a business that is focused on profit along with delivering an excellent product and so you have to balance that you have to come up with a way to deliver products services marketing love you have to come all the way to deliver this service to your customer in a way that doesn't also doesn't make you bankrupt in a way that rob you of all your time and as artists we have a higher level of standard typically speaking a vision well past and so there's a balance but you have to recognize the balance and you have to come to terms with not delivering perfect every single time or else you'll put yourself out of business it's about delivered a product of the client loves and embraces and you have to find a way to artistically stimulate some of those things outside of the client process sometimes and you know you still need to produce great photography you know you still need to be you know what you d'oh um but it is it reminded me it's the benchmark yes it's just the stakes you get into when you play the game that's a given yes it's given by providing a service them you have to deliver them an excellent product but that's a given definitely and that reminds me of a quote by steve jobs jeff reminded me of it this morning he said but steve jobs said riel artists ship and that ends with a p not a tea just like I don't know if I could say but really artists ship that means that you can be an artist but until your work it's out there you know you're not going to be able to move forward with your art you're not gonna be able to bring in more business riel artist ship and we all know this steve jobs was pretty neurotic uncle steve uncle c was pretty neurotic you know and that's why he delivers such an amazing product that's why that company you know he was able to bring it to where he was able teo and but we just have to remember completion not perfection and I know that that's helped me a lot so I'm hoping that that'll help you guys too as you sit down and think about everything the long today you should be doing a hearing about that a lot lately definitely so the last thing I just wanted to address there's a couple more things that I wanted to talk about as faras hang ups go for me social media the biggest roadblock for me was not having images ready and available I'm not prevented me from really taking action on instagram from posting to facebook as much as I wanted to in the beginning and I just realized you know what I need to make sure that when I want to implement these new processes that I think about what roadblocks I might need personally I'm going to come across what my personality is goingto find it's going to stop me and what that wass is I'd be ready to go stram on my phone and be like I just I don't have an image um okay I need to go back and find that shoot and I need to pull it up I need exported correctly get it up on my phone and and then I'm gonna be able to instagram and just the thought of that would just be dead in the water I wasn't gonna instagram so I finally realized like aaron we could do this with everything else just make that folder in your light room catalog to export it when you're delivering the job as soon as I did that such an easy fix started exporting I have a whole catalogue of instagram images now built a process around it's everything that we've been talking about building that process in that system but it came out of me identifying okay what is my hang up what is goingto prevent me from doing this and how do I fix it make it easier on myself to do it later so so for me that was my big hang up social media and when he's able to fix it it could be much more effective all right so let's we're going around this out with a bunch of different tips and shortcuts that I want to share with you guys that help us save time when it comes to marketing and when it comes to social media blogging all that kind of stuff blawg song is a software that I love if you don't use blog's stump I think it's wonderful it's it took the ten step process of sizing your images for your blawg water marking them arranging them properly putting them side by side or making a collage of my image is getting him in the right order and getting him on blogged it took that whole process and put it into one piece of software that sizes watermarks format renames and puts him in his on your block for you it's wonderful I love it so block something something that you guys can use in order to do that it I made that process much faster much more efficient for us when we implemented that into our blogging workflow text expander this is my favorite I love tex expander you love texas tio tex expander is is one of the easiest ways to save yourself time when it comes to female templates and when it comes to typing so it's an app that you put on your computer and it runs in the background and you'll take a body of text type over and over and over and over again so the same kind of mindset as an email template and you assign an abbreviation of letters to it and when you type in those few letters it will on your computer and hit space bar it will expand into that body of text so the best example I have is directions to our studio which is not something I can necessarily embed into email template for weddings or anything like that I have it in there but I need to give directions to a lot of different people so I built a snippet is what it's called with the specific directions to our studio like we're above a starbucks but you have to go down the hallway and go to the door and call the call box and make sure you call the right person and you know here's where you can park and here's how you call me and all the information you need and we finally wrote it out in a way that made sense was clear nobody was getting lost anymore you know we were able to be really precise and we made a snippet I think it's called d I r and you hit space far wherever you type that it'll just expand into specific directions with our address and everything to our studio so I can send that to vendors I consented to friends I consented to clients anyone that's coming by the studio it works across all applications so facebook we use it for captions and our images on facebook we have a snippet that expands into our you know photography by the younger ends with our website fume or images that are blocked here with a link to our blogged why you do that with all images and facebook and I use a snippet and it saves me a ton a ton of time you can get really creative with these facebook mail online you can use them anywhere you can think of jeff uses it for when he's meeting people at his favorite starbucks and he's a snippet called close bucks and then it says here's the address it's the starbucks here's where you go here's how you get there he is another one that says like if he's doing a consulting session here's what you should bring here's what we'll talk about all that kind of stuff has a snippet for a signature so and like you know three different snippets he's built this long form email and then personal message send it off so it's a really really wonderful application and the best part is you can go in and you can see your statistics and it shows you how many characters you save and how much time you saved and the stats are addicting I think since what is that since two thousand twelve I've saved something like ninety hours of typing and it's like two million characters or something crazy like that and it just shows you how much time we spend typing just writing out emails so tex expander is really great you could use it for your email templates if you wanted we don't use it for that again we used ta be a house of our email templates but I know people that do use it for their email templates to for weddings and for their work clothes so it's really great and then asana you talked about asano earlier your thunder on that one I know but I love asana and I don't mind because we actually is a sauna for our block calendar huh so there is a calendar view in asana so if you start using it just look for the little button that says calendar view and it's hard to find but when you go to the calendar view you can see the full calendar of one task or do so every block post the task with a dude a and it lands on that day and I color coded and I have all these tags for it and I get really expensive with it but in there you can assign sub tasks for that block posts that are doing different days that signed it out to different people if you need teo you can write notes you know what you're going to do for that certain block post it's an easier way to do it than using like an actual calendar system because you can have tasked you consign things out you can have notes so it's a lot more efficient that having an actual calendar so I use a sauna for our content calendar and I think that it's a really great way to use it that song is a wonderful tool yes how you use it I love it I think I am it's free I e top in your house you know I just I don't want to argue it's I mean it's the backbone of our business we don't have internal email because we have a sauna it's amazing we love it even if it yet just with jeff tonight we would use this on so yeah so this is just some great ways to save yourself some time with all the content building portion of your business all right so in order for clients to say good things about you you know we talked about building advocates on day one you need to provide a good experience and in order to provide our create true evangelist of angeles evangelist and true believers who believe it well done you provide a remarkable experience so you can deliver the expected and then free yourself up to do the delightfully unexpected and that's how you're going to create those true believers and those evangelist that jarod was talking about on day one providing that remarkable experience two or three times that's pretty easy you know you contract that you continue you can remember the things you need to do and it's pretty easy to do that a handful of times when you start doing all of these wonderful things that jared has been talking about and you start bringing in all that business and clients are coming to you and they're really great clients you're going to need to be able to provide that remarkable experience over and over and over again and the systems are what are what are going to free you up to do that so start building the systems now seeing yourself as this chief operations officer the chief marketing officer getting yourself up to that thirty thousand you know level view and making sure that you are seeing everything in your business so the system and get freeing yourself up giving yourself time to then provide that remarkable experience for all of your clients if they start coming in so so yeah so that's about everything that I have for systems but I am so excited that I got to be here and I got to sharing this experience with you guys I love all the content that you have been talking about it's just been really really wonderful thank you I'm surprised you hung in there for all three days like some of the rest of us it's a long so long ago you weren't even get a nice comfortable chair your offset there but thank you for really bringing on a gain experience as faras this is a complicated topic yes it really is I mean we were talking about at the brakes about how important is that we really detail it's out with it's understandable it's digestible and you know you've done a great job really getting into the brass tacks without making it too confusing so I really appreciate that now you're welcome you're welcome it's it's a topic that I believe in so it's fun for me