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In today’s podcast we’re going to talk about how to batch content so you can save time and also eliminate a lot of stress from your life.
Toward the end of the show we’ll walk you through the exact system we use to not only create content but schedule our promotion and updates.
A quote from past guest John Lee Dumas really sums this episode up well “you have to spend time to make time”.
You will learn
- What batching content means for your online business.
- Advanced concepts on how to start batching content.
- What types of content should you be batching?
- How to set up a calendar for your content.
- The step by step system we use in our batching process.
Links and resources mentioned in today’s show
- The Flip Your Life Community
- Buffer
- Meet Edgar
- Interview with John Lee Dumas
- Pat Flynn’s Podcast
- Aweber
Enjoy the podcast; we hope it inspires you to explore what’s possible for your family!
Listen to what others are saying about Flipped Lifestyle
The passive income has started to come in and I quit my full-time job and ramped up my freelance clients. I am now fully booked with fantastic projects through November. My husband and I are also moving to Fernandina Beach, Florida, at the end of May. We are so excited to start the life we have always wanted. I appreciate the motivation that you guys give to everyone that is trying to change their lives. It is really, really important.
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Can’t Miss Moments
Each week Jocelyn and I share moments that we might have missed if we had not started our online business. We hope these moments inspire you to see the possibilities and freedom online business could provide for your family.
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If you have comments or questions, please be sure to leave them below in the comment section of this post. See y’all next week!
Can’t listen right now? Read the transcript below!
JOCELYN: Hey y’all! On today’s podcast we are going to show you how to save time strategies for batching contents.
SHANE: Welcome to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast where life always comes before work. We’re your hosts, Shane and Jocelyn Sams. Join us each week as we teach you how to flip your lifestyle upside-down by selling stuff online. Are you ready for something different? All right, let’s get started.
JOCELYN: Hey guys, welcome to the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast, today we are going to be talking about creating content in a very efficient way and if you are creating content in real-time that is not a very good idea. A lot of people start out this way and that they try to do everything as this go along and it just doesn’t work very well. It’s not very efficient, something will come up in inevitably. It’s just like real life. This always happens so today we are going to talk about how to batch content to get ahead in your online business in an efficient way. But before we move into that we are going to tell you about one of our most recent success stories.
SHANE: Alright guys today’s audience members success story comes from Andrea and Andrea is a member of our Flip Your Life Community. Andrea sent us an email the other day and said, “The passive income has started to come in and I quit my full-time job and ramped up my freelance clients. I am now fully booked with fantastic projects through November.” Way to go. That’s amazing Andrea. “My husband and I are also moving to”—what is that say?—Fernananda, Fernanina.
JOCELYN: Fernadina?
SHANE: Fernandina Beach, Florida, which sound like an amazing place. I just can’t pronounce it. “—at the end of May. We are so excited to start the life we have always wanted. I appreciate the motivation that you guys give to everyone that is trying to change their lives. It is really, really important.” That is an awesome success story I love hearing from people when they quit their jobs or they just take action and move forward and start really going after that life that they want to live just like Andrea was talking about. If you like to make some changes in your life we would love to help you do that. Come over to Fliplifestyle.com/flipyourlife and take a look at our program where we show you how to start an online business. We teach you how to create digital products, we show you to sell digital products online. We talk a lot about building your website now and all the strategies that you can use to start creating an extra side income and maybe move yourself closer to that quitting your job. Taking action and doing the things in your life that you really want to do instead of what you’re doing now. Once again at flippedlifestyle.com/flipyourlife. We would love to have you in our community. It’s such a supportive place. We love going in there every single day and talking to all of our participants and we would love to talk to you there too.
JOCELYN: Alright let’s jump into today’s topic which is batching content. And before we get into that. We are going to define what batching means because some of you guys might be new to this online business space. I mean batching is not exactly an online business idea but a lot of people talk about it in online business.
SHANE: Even those of you who have been with us for a while, you may still be kind of grinding this out. You hear a lot of people like hustle, work, keep creating content, create content every day but batching is going to take all of that to the next level because it’s going to free you up to do things that really matter in your online business.
JOCELYN: So basically batching means that you are doing a lot of content at one time and then scheduling it out. And the reason we do that is so that you can focus on other things in your life. It may be you know, other responsibilities that you have. It may be your family or another project that you need to do to make money. Because the reason we are in online business is to make money and if you’re constantly creating free content in real time chances are you are not going to have a lot of time to make that product that you might sell. So this is a huge, huge problem for a lot of people and they get overwhelmed by the big checklist of things that you have to do. You know you have to write content. You have to schedule it to be posted.
SHANE: You have to participate on social media every day. You have to talk to your people. You have to go comment on other people’s blogs. You have to do this, you have to do that. A lot of air quotes going on over here again; have, have, have—all of these have to do things.
JOCELYN: Yeah and if you don’t have an army of virtual assistants which most of us do not then all of this can seem very, very overwhelming. So batching it helps to take pressure off because you can get a lot of stuff done upfront and you don’t have to multitask as much on the backend.
SHANE: Right so what we are going to talk to you about today is how you can batch content in your online business, we are going to tell you how we batch content ion our own online business and hopefully you can take these strategies so you can batch content successfully. If you are batching the wrong things it still wasted time. If you are doing this the wrong way you can really mess this up and you can create a lot of useless work for yourself. So listen to these tips that we are going to give you today about batching content. Apply them to your online business and if you will do this for about a week, I would be willing to bet and a couple of weeks from now you are going to look back and go oh my gosh, why did I ever do this in a different way?
JOCELYN: Alright so the first strategy that we have is to batch your actual content. And these are things that you crate for your audience. So it might be blog post. If you are a blogger go ahead and write all of your blog post in a day or two.
SHANE: Like for the whole month. If you release twice a week and you got eight blog posts that you need to write, sit down, find a weekend and do every one of them at once so you have got all eight written in one day and you’re completely finished with the writing process.
JOCELYN: And you’re maybe thinking this sounds so hard. I write such crazy long blog posts, well here is the thing. Don’t write long blog posts. Keep them short. Split them into parts. Make a part one and a part two. We have been doing this with our podcast and these have been working really well for us. If you are a podcaster like us, record all of your podcast for a couple of months like on a weekend or over a couple of days.
SHANE: We are doing that right now. We have a lot of stuff going on May and June and July this year and we looked at out calendar and we are like oh my gosh we are going to be gone here, we are going to be gone there, we got a live event here, we got another live event there and at the same time, we have to release a bunch of projects. We were not going to have time to podcast. So we basically in march said we are taking the month of April and we are recording every single podcast we are going to do for at least May and June and hopefully May and June and July and that’s we are doing. We are recording three podcasts today. We are sitting down, we got the mics out and we are just going to roll out and do it that way we don’t have to worry about it later.
JOCELYN: And we set ourselves a deadline. Like today, you know Shane is out outliner of podcasts usually and so I was working on something else and I said look you have got 30 minutes to get this done and he did. He got it done. So give yourself a deadline. Say this is when I need it to have it done and I am going to have it done. Don’t give yourself an option. Another thing that you can do if you are a videoer you can record all of your videos in a day and here is a little pro tip for you: just change your shirt. If you are a girl–
SHANE: Just move the camera to another wall. So it looks like you are filming totally a different thing.
JOCELYN: If you’re a girl, change your earrings, change your hairstyle, pull it back for a couple of videos. We do this all the time. And the reason why for me because I don’t like to get ready multiple times. When you work from home, usually I end up wearing like workout clothes or pajamas, so if I actually get dressed and get ready that’s sort of a monumental occasion.
SHANE: That means we are recording videos that day is the only reason she actually get ready or we got to church. One of the two.
JOCELYN: Or I have to go to my kid’s school or something like that. So if I am going to get ready then I am going to really take advantage of it and record everything in one day. So those are just a couple of strategies that you can do to batch your actual content.
SHANE: And the side note on that, all the people that you see online do the same thing. Like when you see tons of pictures and they are awesome and they are so polished in all these things, I mean you know guru websites, well they had a photoshoot. And they brought ten outfits with them and they just walked around the different places of a hotel or something and took different pictures or their house or whatever. So everyone does this because it doesn’t make sense to get up every day and do something different when you can do this all at once and move forth with your life. So everyone else is doing this. This is how you do it online so make sure you are doing it too. There is another way which you can kind of double your content up while you’re batching it and that is to create a nice plan where different layers or different channels of content kind of flow together. For example, if you plan it correctly, you can totally record a how to video and how to do something with you on camera, or maybe on a screenshot or in front of a white board or something. And record a video showing people how to do things if you say it correctly and you plan it right you can also take that audio, strip it off the video and release that as a podcast. So now people who love podcast can listen to you explaining to do something while people that love to watch video on your website. Then, you can draw an image or create a picture or something that with that content then you just pay someone to transcribe that audio from the video you recorded and no you got words from a picture that you can boom, make a printed blogpost o people who love to read it can read the transcript, people who love to listen can download the podcast and people that love the videos can watch the videos. Everyone consumes content all in a different way so when you are batching this video content, you work 20 to 30 minutes to get this one recording session done for the video but you also created a blogpost. You also created a podcast and in one 30-minute session, you created four pieces of content. Everyone is going to look at it differently. You can even split that transcript into two or three different part sand make multiple blogposts. You can get five or six pieces of content out of one recording session if you plan it and batch it correctly. So why not work 30 minutes to create a video that you release one week, a blog post that you release one week, a blog post that you release over the next two weeks and a podcast. Thirty minutes for four pieces of content, you schedule it all, it’s all done and you don’t have to work in real time to get a month’s worth of content on over with. So if you don’t have a ton of time and you want to batch content, that’s another strategy that you can use to create enough content for an entire month, reach everyone in your audience and the way they like to consume to content and you are done in 30 minutes.
JOCELYN: Alright the second tip we have for you today, we talked about batching our actual for our website and for our brand, the next thing that you can do is to batch your social media. This is something that we hear all the time that people say–
SHANE: So overwhelmed.
JOCELYN: I can’t do social media, such a time suck, yes it is if you don’t have your content batched. So what you can do is schedule your post with like Buffer app, there is also Meet Edgar, you can type in all the things you want to put in there that links to your previous content and let those roll out on a schedule. Some people out there will say oh well that’s–
SHANE: Not authentic.
JOCELYN: That’s robotic, but you know what the truth is that everyone does it. And that is not to say that you don’t ever do any post in real time. We still do post in real time.
SHANE: Every day. I love Twitter. I post at least five times a day on Twitter and it’s really me but I also got 20 other things that are scheduled just to make sure that everyone is getting content, every hour or so.
JOCELYN: But your schedule post are your back up. In the worst case if you don’t have time to log on to social media that day at least your scheduled post are going out and people have that opportunity to come and consume your content. So do not underestimate the power of these scheduled post. All you had to do is scheduled all of your post like one day a month and let them roll out each and every day. That way you know for sure that you are going to communicate with your audience every day no matter what happens.
SHANE: This is going to do two things for you really right away. Umber one it’s going to take the stress off because we know that a lot of people get really stressed out about this because it’s like I have got to post on Facebook, now I am going to post on Twitter and then I am going to pin on something and I got to do this, I got to do that, well if you can automate a lot of that process at the beginning, you’re at least going to share everything once and it’s done so you’re not stressed out every single day worrying about that post that you scheduled if it’s going to get shared on social media, you have already taken care of it. Number two, it’s going to keep you off of social media as much. That is a huge problem with online business is that we are constantly in our computer and we are sitting here and I am doing this and I am doing that and well I open Facebook to share a post, well then I got sucked down the vortex that is Facebook and I sit there and look at what is going on with everybody for 30 minutes. Or I pin a post and I look at it and I am sucked in the Pinterest vortex and before I know it I am looking at what kind of birthday cake I am going to make for my daughter next year.
JOCELYN: In January.
SHANE: In January, exactly. So it really served two purposes. Number one, it make sure like Jocelyn said you are communicating with people you got that out of the way, you are not stressed about it anymore and it’s also going to keep you out of social media which is going to save you an hour of your life, a day that you can work on other content. Now here is a little tip for batching social media content. You are going to have to create an editorial calendar which is basically all the things you are going to work on this month or all the things that you’ve already got created for this month. Because you need to plan out what’s going to be scheduled win. That way you are not scheduling things twice. You are not scheduling things that don’t exist. I have done that before where I said okay I know this is going flippedlifestyle.com/podcast24 so I’ll go ahead and put it on social media but then maybe we forget you know we are not quite to that podcast yet. It’s going to come out like two weeks. So I went ahead and shared it and then go on the link and people are like there is no podcast there. And I was I thought it was already done so I went ahead and schedule it. So you need to have a good calendar written down to show when blogposts are going to come out when videos are going to come out, so you can align your social media sharing around the actual schedule of the content being released.
JOCELYN: And this isn’t have to be anything fancy. I mean we keep ours in an excel spreadsheet on Google Drive. So don’t get stressed out about what it needs to look like or if it is good enough. I mean we just start putting ideas down and put a date down beside them. It sometimes changes but for the most part we just have an idea so we just schedule it in our podcast.
SHANE: And you can even schedule things in advance. I do his all the time. This podcast will be—what is this one 47? Yeah. This is podcast 47. I have a naming system for our website that I know what the podcast is going to be named. It’s going to be flippedlifestyle.com/podcast47. That is going to be the URL, to this podcast period. I know that this podcast is going to be released on and I am going to check the date right now for both calendar. I know for sure that this podcast is going to come out on June 9th. O there is no reason that I can’t go in to my social media scheduling right now and I know it’s going to come out at 9 am on June 9th, I can go schedule a post right now that says hey check out our latest tips on batching content and podcast 47 and I can go ahead and put flippedlifestyle.com/podcast47 but I will schedule that on 10 o’clock on June 9th. So that way I know because of my calendar that the post for release at 9 am on June 9th and this tweet will go out at June 9th at 10 am so it’s going to come out an hour later and if you want and if you want to check in on that, go check it. I’m going to schedule that right now and you can see that there will be a tweet coming out today at 10 am about this post. So as long as you create an organizational calendar you can go ahead and schedule all of this stuff the same day that you do it and then you’re basically done for the rest of the month.
JOCELYN: It does take a little bit of preparation and a little bit of planning. But I think that you’ll find that just about like everything else in life if you do a little bit of harder work upfront it’s going to make your life a lot easier down the road.
SHANE: John Lee Dumas has a great quote that I heard him say one time and he said you have to spend time to save time and that I think it’s what a lot of my marketers don’t do. They just want to hustle. They just want to work. They are going to put the time in. Well if you’ll work smarter, instead of harder, you’re probably always going to be better off in the long run, especially online business. We have so many powerful tools. It’s crazy not to do all these stuff instead of being stressed out all the time. We are in online business to make our lives easier not harder so go ahead and attack the plan. Schedule, schedule, schedule; get it all done like we are doing right now in April and then we are going to turn our attention for three straight months on nothing but products, sales finals and trying to make more money for our online business. You have t do it this way if you want to be successful in the long-term. You can hustle upfront but eventually you are going to have to plan, you’re going to have to stop you’re going to have to get ahead and then you’re going to get ahead and then you are going to start working with your online business. Every podcast you’re listen to from Pat Flynn, to us, to anybody else is usually recorded about 11 or 12 episodes ahead. I bet that is a fact. I have never met anyone that makes it to the next level that’s like I’m recording one a week. John Lee Dumas records, what was it, like eight a day or something like that.
JOCELYN: Yeah he records an insane amount in one day.
SHANE: He’s insane. He is so far ahead. He is absolutely ridiculous. Like we’ve actually seen—he told us what he does and like he has eight or nine that he record on Monday. Maybe another day he’ll record a bunch of them and he is done for two or three weeks at a time. You have to schedule this stuff if you are going to get ahead in your online business.
JOCELYN: Alright. So we talked about scheduling our content, like blog post, podcast. We’ve talked about batching our social media to schedule it out ahead of time and that leaves us to our third thing that we are going to batch and that is emails. So using a Weber that’s what we recommend if you are starting out. You can write your emails ahead of time and you just go in and schedule them to come out in real time. So instead of like every Monday, say a few podcast on Monday, you get up and you think, my podcast comes out today. I have got to send an email out to my subscribers and before you know it, it’s noon and you haven’t done anything except write this email.
SHANE: And nobody is going to check their email at noon because they are going to lunch and checking Facebook. And they have already checked their email at 9 am. So you missed your window to actually communicate with them.
JOCELYN: So instead of doing that, you’re just going to schedule an email on your batching day. So like for us, today is your podcast recording day and tomorrow is going to be our day where we work on all of these automation type stuff. So you can schedule yours that way as well. You know go ahead and get your content done and then maybe say the very next day or the next opportunity that you have you work on all of these automation. So it’s just a process that you have to get into the habit of doing.
SHANE: So what you do is that there is a system here that you can kind of follow with all of these that we talked about like batching emails and the great thing about scheduling the emails out to is you can re-purpose that content just like we did earlier with the video and the podcast and the content. You can write a broadcast email. You can schedule it two Mondays from now so that announces your new podcast but then you can copy that same email and just stick it on your follow-up sequence, your auto responder the one that you generate way ahead of time. You got like 30 emails that come out every Tuesday. So everyone in your email list gets these emails. You can keep bulking that up with your broadcast. Because that same email might come out later but that person is not going to see it for 30 or 40 emails. So basically you make sure that everyone always gets your broadcast emails. You can reuse those. Don’t just throw them away and send them once, stick those your auto responder in your long-term sequence that way someone is getting content here for a long, long time with your stuff. But if you want to look at everything we talked about today. We want to talk about batching the content, batching your social media, batching your email, it will look maybe a little something like this. In the first week of the month, alright this is a good way you can try this out, you’ll create all your content. So maybe on days one through four of that week on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday, you are going to come home every night after work you’re going to get the kids to bed, you’re going to have dinner, do all those things hang out with your spouse, your significant other and maybe 8 or 9 o’clock instead of going to bed you’re going to say okay I’m going to work from 9 to 12 I’ll sacrifice a little bit and I’m going to get as much content as I can do in three hours. So maybe over the first four, three days of the month, you’re going to get an hour of post Jocelyn, something like that. You can probably get 12 posts done, maybe, just blog post.;
JOCELYN: I mean that’s just overestimate a little bit.
SHANE: So I am going to get 12 blog posts done or let’s say eight. Let’s make it even easy on ourselves. So I’ve got four days, three hours a day I’m going to get eight blog posts done in those first four days of the month, period. So that’s two posts a week now. So as soon as that content is done I’m going to go in and schedule those. The next four weeks after that every Monday and Thursday I’m releasing a blogpost, done, scheduled. The next month of your life the content is over. So basically, the first four days you created the content. Day five, on that Friday night, you went ahead and you scheduled out all of those posts. Then on Saturday you get up now I’m going to write all the emails to announce all these content and I’m going to schedule them to a line when those posts are going to be released. And on day seven on Sunday you get up, you go to church whatever you come home, you sit during your lunch, you schedule a social media posts an hour after each one of those content pieces releases to let everyone know. So now in one week, you really put the time in, you sacrificed you worked into your schedule, whether you’ve got a 9 to 5 or not and you got all these done. The next four weeks, you’re on cruise control. If you ever already got a product you can focus on ads and working on your sales funnel; and get that product to people to sell it. Or if you don’t have anything to sell, you’ve got one month to create a product. You definitely should be able to create a product for your online business in a month. If you’re taking more than a month to create a product you are waiting too long to launch. It should be for sale way before that. So by taking a week and spending some time and getting it done and scheduled you’ve now gained four weeks of your life back. You have traded one week for four weeks. That’s like trading $10 in ads for $100 in ads. What an amazing return in your investment of time to be able to now focus on the things you need to focus on over the next month to take your online business to the next level.
JOCELYN: And this is the problem that a lot of people have you know they wait and do things in real time and then they just worn out and exhausted all the time because they are like oh I have worked so hard.
SHANE: This isn’t worth it. It’s not working. I quit.
JOCELYN: This is a difference between doing this as a business and doing this as a hobby. If you want to do this as a hobby just something to take up your time, then–
SHANE: You will do a little every day in real time.
JOCELYN: Yeah. You know that’s fine but if you want to make this a business and really make this work, you have to start batching your content. So we talked about so far, batching our content, batching our social media and batching our email. The last thing that you can batch is communication and what we mean by that is like any type of interviews that you do, maybe in person meetings or coaching if that’s something that’s part of your business and also emails, like responding to like customer emails or listener emails or blogpost comments, things like that. So these are the things you can do a couple of days a week. We like to try to dedicate days to things like this. It’s not always perfect but it does help to help you do this.
SHANE: Eighty-percent of communications can like happen on Thursday. Maybe you got to take a call here and there but you can get most of them to one place that’s going to be more organized and help you free up time in other places.
JOCELYN: Our day that we actually talk to people is on Thursday. So we do any kind of coaching on Thursday. We try to record Flipped podcast on Thursdays so maybe Thursday is your call people/ skype day. Maybe Mondays and Fridays are your email days so you try to get to in bog zero where you have no emails remaining that you need to respond to on Mondays and Fridays.
SHANE: The huge mistake that we made early on is you keno Jocelyn and I get hundreds of emails from Flipped Lifestyle so we were trying to like reply to these people as fast as possible. We want to help you guys so much that we are just like we have got to email them back. This guy has a questions right now, this girl needs help right now and it was overwhelming and it wasn’t working and it was actually inefficient because we were starting to be really short with answers we weren’t being thorough. We didn’t have our mind right because we were trying to answer them at 9 o’clock at night when we are tired and it wasn’t working and we said you know what people are just going to have to wait. It’s okay. We are going to get back to them within a few days and we just said you know like Monday and Friday we are going to tick the inbox zero. Jocelyn actually got us to inbox zero today almost while I was outlining the podcast. So we kind have a divide and conquer moment there. Email is so tempting to put it out. We don’t have notifications on our phones for email because it sucks you into your phone too much. We don’t have any notifications like that for any messaging because it can be a time suck. So we have to schedule times I have one hour. There is that deadline again Jocelyn was talking about. I have to make it to inbox zero, I’ve got to sort of do this in one hour and it’s all the time I’m putting toward this today. In reality, that has allowed us to get back to more people, faster with better answers because we put it in one place.
JOCELYN: And it seems like these things it will just take a couple of minutes to get this done. But those couple of minutes, even seconds, they add up. Like responding to emails they take me 30, 45 seconds maybe a minute a piece. It doesn’t sound a lot of time but if you start doing four, five, six, seven and ascending, you’ll be there 15 to 20 minutes before you know it.
SHANE: Humans are terrible at estimating time. If you think something is going to take five minutes I almost times everything by three. If I think I can drive down to the gym and be there in ten minutes and then I’ll workout for 40 minutes then I’ll leave in 10 minutes. So see it only take me an hour, no that’s not true you might as well multiply that by two or three because something is going to happen there is going to be a wreck. You’re going to slow down, you’re going to get thirsty, stop go and get a drink. You’re going to get to the white room and somebody—every machine you are trying to get you have to wait for and all of the sudden that one hour turns into two-hour trip. Especially online, emails if you think it sounds like 20 minutes to answer all your emails, I bet it takes you an hour. So go ahead and put the multiplier in and say it’s going to take twice as long.
JOCELYN: And I have a good man example for any of you guys who lived with men. They think it takes them like 20 minutes to get ready when in reality it takes them probably about 40 minutes to get ready.
SHANE: I’m ready at 10 minutes. You’re crazy. Yeah you’re right see the reason that is though is because I only count the times it take me to actually put my clothes on. And I don’t count the time it takes me to like shave and shower and all that stuff. So I am like yeah it takes me 10 minutes, I’ll just throw some clothes on and whatever and you are really just taking by all of that.
JOCELYN: Yeah it takes a lot longer.
SHANE: I like to look nice and handsome for you baby. Do you know what I am saying?
JOCELYN: Right. Yeah but if you start doing all those little things and they do start adding up, this is going to lead to further procrastination.so somebody ask a question, you go out to Google to look up an answer then you are going to see an ad or maybe you hear a Facebook notification and before you know it, you forget you’re even answering emails because this is what we do as human beings. We just don’t estimate times properly.so when you do these tasks like email or whatever you’re doing that day, turn everything else off and focus on that one task. It’s so hard to do but if you can do you’ll be much further ahead in the long run.
SHANE: So that is the kind of the last point that we want to make here for the whole podcast is that you can’t switch from task to task. You have to focus on the one thing that you’re batching at that time. I can’t check email and record podcast. I can’t sit here and record while I’m looking at social media. The only that is open in front of me right now. I’ll have two computer screens sitting on my desk. On the left one, I’ve got the Garage Band because we are recording the podcast with Garage band so I am watching the sound levels and monitoring that and then I have our outline. We actually have a quick outline that we make because that helps us get to our podcast faster. We plan it first and just outline, kind of what we are going to talk about, not exactly word per word what we are going to say but it keeps us flowing and it keeps everything under 30 minutes. Those are the only two things I can see right now on my computer screen. That way I am not like, I don’t have a Facebook notification popping up. I don’t have a tweet that says three new tweets, I got to open that and see what happens. I even turn my email program completely off that way. I don’t see the little thing pop on my right-hand corner of my screen that says you got email. I don’t have to look at that anymore because it’s all off. I turn everything off and just focus AAA get this done then the next thing we’ll do, BBB and then CCC. So when you are doing this batching of content, totally focus on the thing that you are working on. Don’t look at anything else, shut it all down, turn off your phone, everything else and then move forward and get that done and then over on to the next thing.
JOCELYN: Alright y’all that is all that we have on that for today. But before we go we want to get into our can’t miss moments and these are the things that we might not have the opportunity to do if we had not started our online business. And mine today was actually the Cinderella spa day. The little kid’s spa, I’ve actually talked about this before in another podcast. They had what they called a Cinderella Camp and Cinderella actually came to the little kid’s spa and she got pictures with the little kids and they made a craft and they got their nails painted and we went with two of our friends and then their little girls came and it was a lot of fun. It actually happened on a Saturday. So you know it’s not technically something that I couldn’t have done while I was working on a 9 to 5 job but the difference is that I didn’t have any stress because–
SHANE: Yeah you weren’t tired.
JOCELYN: I wasn’t thinking about you know need to get home and get my house clean and get my laundry done and all this stuff before I have to go back to work on Monday. I was just thinking about being there with my daughter and having a good time and get our picture moment with Cinderella and just having fun. That’s just the difference in the way that my life is now compared to the way it was before we started online business.
SHANE: We have a lot of moments like that where we are like this is totally different than how it would be or our mindset is totally different and we look back at all the hard work and sacrifice that we put in those first year and a half to get to this point where you can actually enjoy things in life and every bit of that was so worth it. It was so hard. I think people think that you’re just an overnight success and they don’t realize that it took two to three years to become an overnight success. Because when we look back we are like how did our marriage serviced working full time jobs, raising kids and?
JOCELYN: Good question.
SHANE: Yeah right. Our online business. But we gotten to the point where we quite it was like man all of that was worth it. That’s how we share can’t miss moments with you so you can see what’s on the other side of all the work and the effort of putting into your dreams right and to tell you keep going because it is worth it. My can’t miss moment this week was something that happens to us quite a bit. We were all by ourselves. We picked up our kids after school like 3:30 or something and we are like let us just go to the playground, it’s a beautiful day. So we went to the playground and we had this huge playground, pretty much all to ourselves. There is like one other dad there with his little girl. I was talking to him. I just went over and I just talk to random people wherever I am.
JOCELYN: And you can’t imagine that right?
SHANE: Yeah right and I just walk up to people and I am just hey what’s your name and he worked third shift. He was kind of crazy. Oh I am tired man but this is the only time I have to play with my little girl so I brought her out here. So we were in the playground and we looked around and the kid just a run of the place. As a kid she went crazy. Anything she wanted to do she could do with no waiting and it happens to us all the time because out schedule is flipped from everyone else so we can go to like an indoor water park on Tuesday to Thursday instead of a weekend. Instead of ten billion people there, there is only like five people and we have got this whole wave pool to ourselves and that was a just cool moment last week just be on the playground and just hanging out and just being able to do anything we wanted and play with our kids and we really enjoyed.
JOCELYN: Alright that is all the time that we have for today, we hope that this help you to batch your content so that you can be your own your way to your can’t miss moments of your own.
SHANE: Get out there, create an editorial calendar, that’s an action step that you can take as soon as you turn this podcast off. Write a calendar out and say in week I’m going to have a month of content out and that is it. And you will find on the back side of that so much freedom you will be able to take your online business to the next level.
JOCELYN: Try it out. Get on our podcast, this is Flippedlifestyle.com/podcast47 and let us know how batching go on. We want to know if this makes a difference for you.
SHANE: Until next time guys we’ll catch y’all on the flip side.
JOCELYN: Bye.
Rene says
Thanks Shane, Thanks Jocelyn. This is a great idea. I will definitely be doing this for my blog content. Take one or two days to do the content for the whole month. Very smart. I will let you know how this works for me in the next few weeks. Thank you so much. This is one podcast I will listen to again. Now to take action and follow through.
Maria says
Goodness, this podcast could not have come at a better time for me! I must say that I felt identified with a lot of the topics you discussed. We do have an editorial calendar, but batching content is something that we struggle with constantly. One month it’s great. Then, we get complacent and don’t batch as much the following month. By the third month, we’re so exhausted that we give up and go back to real-time content creating, posting and communication.
We do create quite a bit of unique content, but I think your suggestion of making it flow from one platform to the other can help us a lot. I jotted down some key points and will discuss them with my partner to implement them as soon as possible. Thank you so much for sharing.
Michelle Pippin says
One of my favorite posts of yours. GREAT WORK, so practical! Thank you!