Hey there, my fabulous listener, welcome to episode 251 of the Small Business Made Simple Podcast.

Thanks for lending me your ears today – I know you have lots of choices, so I sincerely appreciate me being one of them!

If you’re enjoying this podcast – I’d love you to take a screen shot and share it on your socials and tag me in it.  How cool would that be!

Don’t forget you can get the show notes for this podcast at www.socialmediaandmarketing.com.au/251

Did you have a listen into last week’s episode? Last week I spoke to Erin Huckle from Chuckle Communications about building your profile – such a great chat.  Erin is so amazing at her job. If you didn’t get a chance to listen to that episode, go back after this one and listen to episode 250.  www.socialmediaandmarketing.com.au/250

But before I get started, I wanted to give a shout out to this week’s podcast sponsor – [INSERT KATE TOON PITCH]

As a marketing consultant, you can only imagine how many conversations I have about content! Creating content is one of the biggest challenges small business owners have. In fact in the 2022 Big Small Business Survey that I did, over 53% of people said that coming up with engaging content was one of their biggest challenges.

So today I thought I’d give 3 pretty simple ways of coming up with more content, when you feel the content well is dry!

1. Remember that everything is content. I know, it’s a bit of a copout of a tip – but it’s true. Everything is content.  Your morning routine is content, your evening routine is content, the way you produce tiles in Canva is content, that question you answered in a Facebook group is content, the fact that you are struggling to produce content is content too! If you are feeling it, doing it, thinking about it – then there’s every chance your community wants to know about it. So start taking notice of things that happen during the day, questions you are answering, things to you each day to make your life simpler or easy (or even the things you do that make your life harder – share that and someone might have a solution for you!). If you start to look at your world through a “everything is content” lens, you will keep coming up with content.
2. Repurpose, Repurpose, Repurpose. If you are running out of content, then look back over the content you have already produced and repurpose it! You might need to change a few things about it, and update the content a little, depending on the subject, but really you already have SO much content available, you just need to think about how you can spin it again.  Repurposing content is my jam – I am always repurposing content. I have virtual assistants and that’s their entire job to repurpose my content. I repurpose content around my speaking pillars, my book-a-call pillar and I am always repurposing a good testimonial! Make it your content life purpose to produce content that you can repurpose down the track and go looking, today, for content you did 6 months ago, 12 months ago or even longer that you can now bring back to life.
3. This one comes from my book coach. Running out of content (or from a book point of view, need more words) then tell more stories. Stories are how we get to be memorable, how we get to be relatable and how we get to have our message remembered. Stories are one of the most powerful marketing strategies you can employ in your business. We all have stories, we have loads of stories, we just sometimes fail to see how they can be “business” related. But believe in me, they can be. The art of segue is what you need to learn.  A super simple story segue could be (and forgive my bad summarising of this story), “I climbed Mt Everest, bad things happened, I never gave up, so moral is when bad things happen in business, never give up”. Horrible quick story, I know, but you get the gist. Not a business story but segued into a business lesson for us all.  Once you grasp segue story telling you can do it all the time and if you look or listen carefully at my marketing, you’ll begin to see it everywhere!  Story telling I love.

So there are 3 ideas or tips to help you when you are running out of content. And we all get to the stage of thinking, I have nothing – nothing left in the tank. After 251 episodes of this podcast, I think every week, that’s it – what could I possibly talk about – who do I possibly know that would be a great guest and yet here I am – with podcasts planned until the end of September.

When I am empty of content, I sit down and give myself some space to come up with ideas.  I also keep a story and ideas diary – which I get to look at when I have the content blues.  PS – my content idea is really just two things – my notes in my phone with jumbled words that only make sense to me or my whiteboard of ideas that sits in my office. Calling it a content diary sounds much more sophisticated than it is!

I hope this episode has helped.  Content is really everywhere and if you learn to repurpose and tell more stories, content should never be too far away.

If you have some tips around how you create content for your business, come and hang out in my Like Minded Business Owners group – I’d love you to start a thread in there and share your wisdom with everyone.

If you want to chat to me about content creation, content pillars and strategy, there’s a link in the show notes for make an appointment with me or go to https://calendly.com/jenn-smm/discovery

So, that’s it for episode 251. If you loved this episode and found it valuable, please take 30 seconds out of your day to leave me a rating and review if you want where you are listening.  One more goal of mine is to reach more people with this podcast, and you can help me achieve that, by leaving me a review!  Thanks in advance.

See you next week on the podcast for episode 252.

Thanks again to Kate Toon and her new book Six Figures in School Hours – you can find out more and get the book here: https://www.katetoon.com/writing/books/six-figures-in-school-hours/

But in the meantime, let’s hang out on social and get social on social – you’ll find me on Instagram, Facebook and my fav LinkedIn.

But whatever you do,

……..remember small business peep, as my opening song says, there’s no point in dreaming small!