Episode Summary 

I know what you’re thinking; “Never finish your To-Do list is bad advice.”  But hear us out!  You always need to have something on your list to keep you moving forward. If you have completed everything on your list and have nothing left to do, this means you aren’t working towards anything.

In order to be successful in your business, it’s extremely important to eliminate stress, be efficient, and make sure you are always moving towards your goals. We’ve noticed that things that generate a lot of stress for self-employed business owners are often related to their To-Do lists.  

Three common To DO list stressors business owners struggle with are:

1. Unrealistic To-Do lists
2. Not knowing what to do next
3. The “Getting Ahead” Myth

How to Overcome Stress from Unrealistic To-Do Lists

We’ve all been guilty of creating To-Do lists that go on forever and are impossible to complete. We think that writing everything down on an epic list is the perfect way to relieve the stress we have of keeping everything in our heads.  The reality is, these impossible To-Do lists end up adding to our stress because they are impossible to complete!  This means we end every day with a never-ending list of things we didn’t get done and it’s deflating.

The way to fix this problem is to focus on making different To-Do lists.  Your Daily To-Do list should only include tasks that you can actually complete that day.  Force yourself to really consider how long something will take you to complete and make sure you are breaking down your tasks into their smallest form so you can easily check things off as you go.  It’s not helpful to have giant tasks on your To-Do list that require multiple steps.  This means that as you complete each step you have nothing to check off so it never feels like you are making progress.  This can lead to stress!  After focusing on your daily To-Do lists, think about breaking things down into different categories and making different lists to work off of.

Tips on Making Different To-Do Lists:

• Weekly Tasks

These are things that have to be done no matter what, like housekeeping.  It’s not exciting but it’s got to be done.

• Client Tasks

These will constantly change as weeks go by, but if you’ve got a good client workflow process and a project management system in place, it should be simple to manage.

• Internal Business Tasks

Any time an idea pops into your head of something that you want to do or SHOULD do for your business, you need to write it down.  Not on a sticky note, but in an organized place for your business tasks.

How to Overcome Stress from Not Knowing What to Do Next

When you don’t know what you should be doing for your business or your current clients/projects this can be really stressful.  We use WRIKE to manage our projects and when we come up with things that need to be done, we create the task and keep it in a folder that we can pull from when we begin to make our next week’s agenda.  Think of this as your “Backlog” that you can pull from whenever you aren’t sure what to do next or you have extra time.  Believe me, when you properly plan a daily To-Do list, you’ll sometimes have “extra time” and this Backlog will come in really handy to keep things moving forward and avoid time-wasting.

If you have nothing on your list to do, it’s impossible to keep moving forward. For example, I like to always be reading a book so I keep a list of potential books that I can always pull from.  A few months ago, I finished the book I was reading and realized that I didn’t have any more books on my Reading Wish List, and before I knew it an entire week had gone by without me reading!

How to Overcome Stress from The “Getting Ahead” Myth

I used to work tirelessly in my business to try and get EVERYTHING done so I could get ahead and relax.  The reality is, it is impossible to “Get Ahead.”  Think about it,  if I ever actually finished EVERYTHING that needed to be done for our business, it would be the day we were no longer in business.  Finishing your To-Do list means you are out of business. 

There is always client work to do, bookkeeping, business development, organization, etc.  If you actually finished everything, it would be because you had no work and no money coming in and effectively, NO BUSINESS.

Quick-Wins:

1. Organize your To-Do lists into different categories
2. Make realistic daily To-Do lists
3. Create a “Backlog” list with tasks you can pull from when needed
4. Forget about trying to get ahead and focus on always moving forward

Host Bio –  Rhi and Pete [Rhi-Pete – now you’ll remember] are a wife and husband team who have been in business together for over a decade.  They run a creative media agency [Do Something Different Media] that provides strategy and consulting, video production, website development, photography, graphic design, and content writing for small businesses. 

Recommended Resources 

Wrike Project Management

The post Quick-Win Episode 7: Never Finish Your To-Do List appeared first on Learn It - Do It.

Organization is Key — Introducing Content Campaigns

We organize everything we create into content campaigns.

What are content campaigns?

Content campaigns are topically-focused streams of content that are distributed throughout your proper marketing channels. In other words, we like to categorize what we can talk about, write the content, make the designs, and then distribute it based on our overall marketing plan.

Sharing is Caring

Once you have your content campaigns, you need to let the world know about them.

Where do I share my content campaigns?

When creating a content campaign you should look to use this content across the following channels:

• All social media accounts [Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Linked In, SnapChat]
• Email Newsletters
• Your Blog

What Should I Say?

Believe it or not, this is where it gets fun provided you have a plan to generate good content.

We suggest that you have yourself an old fashion brainstorm session geared around the following pain points and questions:

• List your services, products, skills.
• What are some questions your clients or potential clients may have about you?
• Describe the process of becoming your client.  Break this down and use it to educate your audience.
• List the industries that your clients or customers interact with regularly.
• List any industries that may be related to your company.
• What are some things that you could take pictures of that you do?
• What are some trivia questions your company could use to encourage interaction?
• What are some other things your clients could be interested in besides your product/service?
• Are there any contests or giveaways you could plan?
• What’s happening in the news or pop culture that relates to you and your industry?
• What’s happening seasonally that you could post about?

Take these lists and use them as inspiration to begin writing some posts. ALWAYS keep your audience in mind.

Remember: This content is NOT for you, it only exists to help your potential clients solve a problem, or maybe to engage them with laughter, knowledge, information or a fresh perspective.

Group Topics into Categories

Each category will then become a campaign. Each campaign should stand on its own, and you should try to run 3-5 different campaigns at any given time. These campaigns should be outlined and written with your specific audience demographics in mind.  

If you need help discovering your audience, download our Audience Profile Worksheet and get started now!

Examples of Campaign Categories

• Company Brand & Mission – Here you’d write all of your posts to highlight specific details about who you are and what you stand for while keeping your audience in mind.
• Product/service – You would highlight all unique selling points of what you’re offering while keeping in mind that the purpose of your product or service is to solve a problem.  Make sure that you aren’t just shouting about your product. Cater your posts to help your audience solve their pain points.
• Testimonials – Leverage the positive feedback that you’ve received by breaking it down into bite-sized chunks and share it!
• Event or Contest Promotion – If you have a time-specific launch for a promotion or event coming up, make sure that you create a content stream that reaches your audience on all platforms and engages with them about the event or contest.
• Blog or Newsletter – If you write a blog or newsletter for your business, you re-use the content that you’ve already prepared by breaking it down to targeted bite-sized posts.

These are just a few ideas to get your brain juices flowing. Once you get started, you’ll find that you may write down too many ideas or have too many categories. It’s never a bad thing to come up with too many ideas. If this happens, welcome all of the ideas and write them down. Once you’ve got them down you can refocus and start working on the most pertinent 3-5 campaigns that are the closest aligned to your current goals.

Make sure to keep the rest of your ideas handy because before you know it, it’ll be time to write some more content.

Broadcast Your Content in Your Brand “Voice”

In order to understand what your brand voice needs to be, you need to understand your customers and clients. You need to know who they are, what they are looking for, what obstacles they face and what would help them. Once you know these things about who you’re trying to market to, you need to write simple messaging directly to them.

Remember, messaging is not about what you want to say or want to hear, it’s about what your ideal customer needs to hear. You want to think about your voice as if you were having a conversation with your audience. Don’t shout your message on the screen, think about how you would say it in person and create a brand voice that really speaks to your audience. Consider the words you use, whether you are formal or casual, and what would your audience really want to engage with.

Again, it’s not about you. It’s about your audience. Write directly to your audience. And no, your audience cannot be everyone. Ever.  

If you need help discovering your audience download our Audience Profile Worksheet and get started now!

Pro Tip

I always write out what I think each post should say in an outline or spreadsheet before I work on any design. Sometimes if you start with design, you will realize that as you were focused on making things look cool, your message may have been ignored. Messaging is always 100% more important than fancy design.

Create Designs & Media

Video and images get far more traction than text posts, so it is silly to just post a plain text post. Go ahead and scroll any social feed right now and you’ll quickly notice that it’s an extremely visual place. This ultimately means that you, too, need to have visuals to coincide with your posts to encourage engagement. We are a visual society, and if you are going to go through all the energy of creating content, you should definitely try and make it as effective as possible by adding some sort of visual.

Pro Tip

We use Canva for all of our social campaign designs. It’s a brilliant, easy-to-use, web application that allows you to create custom or templated designs and resize them for multiple social media formats with just a click of a button. If you’re not using it, start!

Total lifesaver.

Create a Schedule

What do you do now that you’ve created the content for five social campaigns?

Schedule them, of course!

You should not be manually posting to social accounts daily unless you are posting about something that is happening relevant to a live event. There are so many online services, websites, and WordPress plugins that allow you to schedule posts for all of your social accounts from one dashboard. There are almost too many to name, so I’ll let you find the one that best suits you.

How to know what to schedule and when?  

You can Google search your demographic in terms of when they use the internet, social accounts, and email so that you can determine the best time for you to post your content.  

Remember that each post will natively receive less than 4% organic reach [without paying for ads], so never assume that “everyone saw the post and it’s all washed up now.”

You can (and should) certainly recycle posts, especially across different social platforms.  Just make sure when reposting content that you change the publish time and day of the week so that you can potentially reach a whole new audience.  

I know it can seem like a lot at first, but after you’ve done it once, you can set up an organization system that works for you and start churning out content!  

Pro Tip

We like to sit down a few times a year and organize our campaigns from our master ideas list, which makes posting consistent content a little less daunting and A LOT more effective than randomly posting when we remember to do so. Ultimately, the campaigns keep your messaging focused and working towards your marketing goals, rather than sporadic and inconsistent.

It’s time to get a coherent message for your marketing with social media campaigns that are easy to create and fun to implement.

Now, let’s get social!

The post Best Practices for Creating Social Media Campaigns appeared first on Learn It - Do It.