Back in episode 12, I spoke about how your message transcends any one medium or format.
And I still think this is true. I don’t want you silo yourself away in one medium or channel when your audience could be larger.
But there’s another truth I think we need to unpack here too: People experience your expertise through your content, and content has specific formats.
To create content consistently, you really need to think about a workflow that will support you.
Hi, I’m John Lacey and this is Build A Presentation Muscle.
Constraints can be helpful
If you intend to create content on an ongoing basis, it’s important that you set up some constraints and practices so you don’t have to re-invent the medium each time.
In a lot of ways it doesn’t matter what your workflow looks like, as long as it works for you.
We all exist in different contexts and different things will make sense for some individuals and not others.
I think it’s useful to think about constraints. Sometimes people worry that constraints restrict their creativity. But the truth is once you know where the boundaries are, you can be more creative within those boundaries.
Constraints are ‘givens’ in your content creation. They are choices that you don’t need to expend extra energy on because you have already decided previously.
Some constraints will actually be made for you depending on where your content actually lives.
For example, if your content is going to be a TikTok video, you know it’ll need to be in a vertical format and somewhere on the shorter side in terms of actual length.
If it’s a YouTube Short, it will need to be vertical and less than 59 seconds. Ideally much shorter than that.
Different social media platforms have different character limits for text posts. Some will support hashtags, some won’t.
Having a workflow will help you set some expectations about what you need to produce and what the deliverables are.
Again, in terms of produced video, I know I need to produce a video file, a thumbnail image, a title and description and some captioning resources.
Master your tools
It’s important to know and master your tools. Again, it doesn’t matter what you use, what matters is that you know how to use it and can do so efficiently.
The last thing you want to do when you know you’ve got a content deadline is to sit down and learn a new piece of software.
This is not to say that you can’t change your processes over time, but understand that new things take time to learn properly. You really need a compelling reason to change a workflow that works well, and you don’t want to do that when a deadline is looming.
Tell me about your workflows
I’m really interested in hearing more about your workflows. If you’d like to tell me about it, head over to JohnLacey.com and follow the social links or send me a voice message via SpeakPipe.
