I write a lot online. I one time tracked what I wrote over the course of a week and it was nearly 10,000 words. To offer some perspective, a Harry Potter novel is about 100,000 words. That means, in any given year I was writing the entire Harry Potter series except for Chamber of Secrets and Prisoner of Azkaban because those two book sucked anyway.
Or put another way, I write about 500,000 words a year and publish them online which is about 500,000 more than George R.R. Martin published in the Game of Thrones series in 2015.
Ok, enough nerdy book jokes.
Seriously though, that’s a ton of writing and like anything else in life, the more you do something, generally the easier it becomes.
When I started this project everyone asked how I’d turn out 500-750 words per day in an email and 4000-5000 words in a newsletter every month.
My answer was straightforward, “I’ll do that in less time than I currently spend writing in Facebook Groups and other people’s forums.”
Writing comes easy for me and it pretty much always has. I can sit down and crank out 750 words in 15 or 20 minutes off the top of my head.
With Casual Marketer, I’m having to be a little more structured, but it’s like exercise, the writing comes easy, I just have to work the “structure” part of my brain to improve its performance. Then it just becomes muscle memory.
Similarly, I’m looking at putting together a couple of podcasts in the next few months. People who know me personally, know that I can talk underwater, so podcasting comes naturally. However, I have a tendency to talk a lot. I’m going to need to learn to be more brief, but with practice, it will become more natural.
On the other hand, I don’t really like shooting direct to camera videos. I find it tedious. You need to get so many little variables right: lighting, framing, sound, focus, etc. and my brain just wants to get the information out. In the past I’ve been able to produce a fair amount of video when need be, but I just don’t like the entire process.
If you’re just starting out with a content marketing strategy, then start with what you may already be naturally good at, work on that skill and build up your marketing muscles. It’s much easier to have success and produce higher quality content if you’re comfortable and you’re willing to put the effort in.
From there, branch out. Once you build up your muscle memory and confidence in one modality, start introducing another. Keep working at it and apply yourself until you’ve mastered two, then keep going if you’re interested.
The challenge is sticking to it and putting the effort in on a regular basis. I have a long list of half baked ideas and projects I’ve started and got bored of over the years. To build up those marketing muscles, you need to have perseverance and commit yourself to sticking with your strategy.
In fact, the March issue of the Casual Marketer Monthly Newsletter is all perseverance and how underrated it is when looking at people’s success. To subscribe, simply click the button below and fill in the form!