Tuesday’s to-do list:

• 20-minute power workout
• Email this week’s client birthdays
• Reschedule strategy meeting with nonprofit
• Generate monthly finance report
• Lunch with friend
• Finalize & submit RFP
• Build prospect list for new product line
• Pick up kids from school
• Networking dinner
• Panic because you forgot to write another blog article
• Collapse on bed
• Wake up & repeat

Life is crazy, but you’re on fire and in love with what you do.In fact, you’re so in love with what you do and want to share your passion with the world……but there just aren’t enough hours in the day to write more blog posts, share more on social media, AND keep working in your area of expertise.Let’s face it. Content and social media marketing don’t scale well. Until now.With a little planning, you can leverage your very own team to help generate a steady stream of online content — for both your personal brand and your business’s.No need to clog-up your to-do list or break the bank.

Try these 3 “ah-ha” methods and finally get your team to create more content.

Insource Your Inbound

You can forget about having 1 dedicated person (like yourself) working on every piece of content.Everybody has valuable insight to share and can contribute. You’ll find that some of the best content comes from people across departments. Just make sure you have the right systems in place to allow for it.

Here are 3 rules you should implement immediately to insource your inbound with success:

Rule #1: You must follow a content calendar.Your content calendar is your roadmap. Without it you’re lost. Keep it as simple as a Google Sheet or get fancy with collaboration software. It’s your choice, but at a minimum your calendar needs 3 columns: one for the publish date, author, and headline.Consider organizing your calendar around quarterly or monthly promos. Are you launching a new service, hosting an event, or running a campaign? Those are stellar topics you’ll want to remember as you’re creating content.Try to categorize your content into buckets or pillars. An example might be an education law firm that decides to focus content efforts on 3 pillars: state education laws, advice for academics, and persuasion strategies. Or you might choose to categorize your content by type: inspirational quotes, how-to’s, videos, infographics, in-depth blog posts, etc.Pick a distribution channel(s): Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, your website, Medium, etc.Determine the frequency of your publications. (More is better, but if it jeopardizes quality than scale back).

Rule #2: One person needs to be in charge of content oversight.This person is the content catalyst, making sure your team follows the content calendar and holds employees accountable for their content.This person sets standards for tone, voice, and style of writing.They determine what is and is NOT appropriate for employee-contributed content: swearing, slang, humor, memes, gifs.They edit every piece of content before publishing to ensure it follows brand guidelines and to ensure accuracy. (No fake news).Rule #3: Focus on marketing your team’s strengths by letting employees create content in their preferred method.Content comes in many forms — social media statuses, infographics, videos, articles — so allow your team to decide what they want to do based on their individual strengths.Sally from sales loves to talk and film live video for social media, but Paul the product engineer might prefer writing in-depth articles.That’s ok. Embrace the diversity and use it to your advantage.Understand that employees’ writing skills will be all over the spectrum. Some people are stronger writers than others. Your weaker writers are great sources of ideas and inspiration, but leave the actual plucking on the keyboard to one of your stronger writers.

Interview Like A Champ

This method switches the content creation strategy and works wonders to produce written content at scale. You ready for it?While the first method assigns team members to create content *more or less* independently based on a predetermined schedule, the interview method assigns team members to a specific role along the content creation ‘journey.’Think of the interview method as your classic Henry Ford Assembly Line.

Here’s how it works in 6 steps:

Step 1: Define Roles

• Speaker: you are the person being interviewed. You have the knowledge, expertise, and insight.
• Interviewer: you give the interview. You prepare questions and record the interview.
• Editor: you transcribe the audio interview and edit it into a well-crafted article.
• Graphic Designer: you make images to help market and enhance the article.
• Publisher: you distribute the article across media channels.

Step 2: Create A Content CalendarBrainstorming time!This step requires you to outline your schedule and strategy. Your content calendar is your roadmap. (Refer to Insourcing Your Inbound: Rule #1).Start outlining your strategy by brainstorming answers to the following questions with your team:

• What are my goals? What do I hope to achieve by producing more content?
• What’s my message? What unique wisdom do I have to share?
• Who’s my audience? Who wants to hear what I have to say?
• How do I categorize my knowledge? Can I identify any themes in my message?

Flesh out all your ideas, organize them, then use them to generate a list of article headlines. Plot the headlines on your content calendar using the same guidelines from Insourcing Your Inbound: Rule #1.Step 3: InterviewShowtime!This is when the interviewer captures the speaker’s wisdom and expertise on an audio or video recording.Step 4: Transcribe & EditMagic time!The editor transforms the audio or video recording into text and makes edits where appropriate.The golden rule of editing: aim for clarity but maintain the speaker’s style, voice, tone, and humor.Step 5: Design GraphicsTime to get fancy!Attention is a fleeting commodity. You need flashy images in order to get your audience’s attention. It helps market your content, so have somebody with a good eye for aesthetics design header and in-body images for the article.Pro-tip: empathy is great and it’s wonderful to support a diverse range of stylistic preferences, but do yourself a favor and give the graphic designer a set of brand guidelines so they don’t drive the brand off a cliff.Step 6: DistributeIf you’ve got it, flaunt it!The publisher takes the edited article and supporting graphics and distributes them across your digital channels. Be strategic by aligning the content with the context of the channel. Nobody on LinkedIn wants to hear about:#FlashbackFriday to when I struggled to pay $200/month student loans ? but using #financialtips @Chase I’m debt free. ??

Scale Content The Smart Way

RELATED: The Ultimate Playbook To Scale YourselfThink of a pyramid.Top = your interviews or video recordingsThis is your prime time. It’s scarce. You can only afford 30 minutes once a week.Middle = your articlesCreate 2-3 articles, blog posts, or infographics from a single 30-minute interview. If you’re not doing the interview method, you can transcribe videos or repurpose those as podcasts.Create a series of articles that you can compile into a lead magnet or resource sheet.Bottom = your social media statusesTurn any articles, podcasts, or transcriptions into at least 10 social media status updates. Include links and images in your statuses whenever possible.