There are two things I know a bit about because I do them over and over: messaging for businesses and being away from the office for extended periods. Sometimes it's because I've been traveling (like last month's travel to Australia.) Sometimes the reason is less exotic (like the past two weeks I spent attending to family issues.)
Yet, whatever is on my calendar, the blog deadline still comes up every two weeks.
Like today*.
I put an asterisks on "today" in the sentence above because it's a bit of a fib. You're reading this today, but I was writing this on an entirely different day. Before jet lag. Before family responsibilities.
Like discussed on a previous Well Said Wednesday, this is the beauty of content planning and batch creating. It helps us manage time and remain consistent with our messaging.
Yet, there are times when even the best laid plans get thrown off course. There are a number of tactics you can use when you hit a content creation time-crunch.
- Re-run popular posts.
It's nice to put a fresh opening on a old post and rerun it. You can see how I did that in this post. - Share your "greatest hits."
String together a few pieces of content that tell your core messages best. Sitcoms call this technique "clip shows" when the whole episode revolves around flashbacks to previous episodes. It works for content, too. Here's an example. - If all else fails...
You can always acknowledge that we are fallible humans swimming against the tides of an ever-changing world. Like this one.
There's a lot to be said for consistency when writing about your business. You want to be consistent in how you define and use your core messages, but you also want to maintain consistency of pace.
It puts you in a predictable rhythm with your audiences, no long curious gaps where they wonder if you're still in business. It also helps you become a better writer for your business because you're practicing at regular intervals, not stopping and starting and starting over all the time.
What stops you from consistently writing about your business?