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Work Less, Earn More is the podcast that explores how to get the most out of every hour you work. Gillian Perkins brings more than a decade of experience as an entrepreneur and educator to help you design a business that's not only flexible and fulfilling, but highly profitable. She shares strategies that are working in her own business to save time and maximize profits. She also features interviews with successful business owners on how they’re achieving big things in their businesses with crazy-little time investment. Share Work Less, Earn More with an overworked entrepreneur you know who could use a change of pace!
[0:00][intro bumper]
We became entrepreneurs because more than anything, we want freedom. We want to be in control of our own schedule, income, and life. But unfortunately, that isn't always the reality of being a business owner. I'm Gillian Perkins, and I'm on a mission to take back entrepreneurship for what it's supposed to be.
In every episode, I'll share with you how to get the most out of every hour you work so that you can work less and earn more. Let's get to it.
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[0:36] I'm pretty sure you guys know that I am all about efficiency. And I think sometimes efficiency gets a bad rap because sometimes people assume that when you talk about being efficient, that you mean that you get a lot of busy work done. That's not what I mean. And that's not why I care about efficiency at all. When I talk about efficiency, I am talking about getting meaningful work done, getting actually productive work done, producing things in less time and producing high quality work. And the reason I care about efficiency is because, because as you probably know, I've got five kids and I want to spend as much time with them as possible. So I run my businesses, all four of them, in just 20 hours a week. And the only way that that's possible is by being pretty efficient with how I run these businesses. And one way that we can be more efficient with how we run our businesses is by doing things in batches, by batching related work. Because as you've probably heard, we waste a lot of time when we switch between different tasks. So for example, if I film one YouTube video each week, then each video takes me, I would say, two to three hours, if not more, to film.
[1:48] But if I film, let's say, four videos all on one day, I can get all four videos done in just four to five hours, making it only a little bit more than one hour per video. And that's because there's a lot of time that goes into setting up to record a video and getting mentally prepared to record a video and all sorts of things like that. And it's not just big production things. The little tasks can really add up and they can overwhelm your entire day if you're doing a million little tasks.
[2:14] But if you group those tasks together, then you can save a lot of time. Okay, I'm not being very efficient about this. Today, we're going to talk about how to plan out your content for the entire year. And you can do this in just about 14 or 15 minutes. The method that I like to use to do this is the building block method.
[2:32] And I find that not only does this save a lot of time just because you are batching the work, but it also means that you have a plan for the year, which can help you to be a lot more strategic with your content marketing, which is huge. Now, one little concern you might have with planning out your content, something that might stop you from wanting to plan it for the entire year, you don't want to be locked in. You know, what if you change your mind? I just want to let you know that that's totally okay. You can have a plan and you can choose at any time to go a slightly different direction. You can take a different route. You can choose to make a different piece of content than you initially planned. But most of the time, you can just go with what you plan and not have to worry about it. And it'll save you a lot of time and a bit of a headache. And like I said, help you be more strategic. Okay, so let's talk about what the building block method actually is.
[3:21] So the very first step is to choose your platform, okay? So visual here, we're choosing a platform. This could be YouTube. This could be a podcast. This could be your blog, okay? But where are we building this content, okay? For my little example here, let's just say this platform is YouTube. And the reason I'm using that as my example is because YouTube is my main platform. Now, you might post on other platforms too, but the point here is what's your main platform? where are you going to create your core content? And generally you want your main platform to be whatever platform you post kind of the biggest, most substantial content on. So I also have a podcast. In fact, I've got two podcasts and I have a blog and maybe I post on social media. We'll talk more about that a little bit later. But where I post the biggest, most substantial content is on YouTube. So that's my main platform. Now you probably already know the answer to that question. So that shouldn't really take you any time at all. The next part of this process is identifying what formats you like to create content in. So in my building block framework here, we're thinking about building a structure. And when you actually build a structure, you basically just use rectangles of different sorts. But the visual will be better if we use different shapes. So maybe we have triangles, maybe we have circles, maybe we have squares. And like I said, these are the different formats. So maybe these are vlogs.
[4:45] How-to videos or tutorials. videos, maybe they are storytime videos. What are the different formats of content that you make? This is going to be easier if you have been making content for years, you know, and you know what those formats are already. And in that case, this won't take hardly any time at all. But If that's not the case, if you are starting from scratch, that's okay. You'll just need to spend a few minutes here thinking about what the different formats of content you would like to create are. So just figure out what those are, make a short list. And I would recommend that you keep it simple. Three is plenty of different formats for your content. And again, we're only talking about formats for this one platform. So I'm not even talking about long-form YouTube videos and YouTube shorts. I'm talking about if long-form YouTube videos are your main platform, then, you know, are you posting vlogs? Are you posting how-tos? Are you posting storytime videos?
[5:40] Are you posting listicle videos? What are the different formats that are your go-to? I'd recommend you have at least two different formats, but three is plenty and four or five. Don't go more than four or five. Okay, so you've got your formats chosen. Now, we are going to think about the actual content of the content. What is this content about?
[6:00] Basically, we're going to look at like topics that you cover. And sometimes people call these content buckets, because I like things to be visual, I'm going to instead talk about colors. So you might have some different colors that you talk about. Again, these are the topics of your content. They might talk about red things and blue things and green things. And so these, for example, might be if you have a brand that is about digital marketing, well, maybe you talk about email marketing, maybe you talk about social media marketing. And maybe specifically you talk about content marketing, for example. If you have a fitness brand, maybe you talk about weightlifting, maybe specifically you talk about supplements or macros or diet. Okay, so what are these kind of like main categories that you talk about? So I'm going to use kind of my business as an example. One thing that I like to talk about is startups. Okay, so how do you start an online business? Another thing that I talk about is sales strategies. I'm just going to put sales strategies.
[7:04] And then a third thing that I often talk about is visibility and particularly YouTube. And YouTube probably should have been the red one, but oh, well, I didn't plan that out. So those are three things that I talk about. And I know YouTube seems a little unrelated to the others, but it ties in because it's a big part of my business strategy. Anyway, so you've got your three to five, that's how many I would recommend three to five different main content topics, which you can think of as the different colors that you talk about. And this, again, should take you very little time because you probably already know what these big buckets or these major topics are.
[7:42] So maybe spend a minute just thinking about them and listing them out. Now, this next part could take you a fair amount of time, but it also, I think, is the place where ChatGPT or some other AI tool could be the most useful. What you're going to do is for each of these topics, you are going to list five to ten, 10, preferably closer to 10, but 5 to 10 subtopics, okay? And so these are going to be things that fall within this category, but are much more specific. And of course, if you have more main topics, then you can get away with fewer subtopics within them.
[8:16] I would say ideally, really, you have fewer main topics, only about three, and slightly more, somewhere in the range of like six to 10 or so of these sub topics. So for example, in my category of starting a business, one subtopic I cover is how to decide what business to start. Another topic I cover is business ideas. Another topic I cover is the legal side of how to start a business. Another topic would be how to get customers.
[8:49] Another topic is marketing basics. And then another topic would be like, what software to use when you first get started? Okay, so I think you get the idea here. For each of these, you're going to list out five to 10 sub topics. Now, like I said, these should be more specific, but they don't need to be actual content ideas, okay? You might make a video about how to decide what business to start, but there's a bunch of other related videos or podcast episodes or blogs that you could make that relate to that specific topic. Now, like I said, this could take a moderate amount of time. It doesn't necessarily need to take more than a few minutes, but you can save the time by asking ChatGPT to do this part for you.
[9:31][mid-roll]
Okay, let me take just a minute to tell you about something that has changed my life. YouTube. Seriously. Now, I'm sure you're probably aware that YouTubers can earn money, but you might not realize just how much. It is not just pocket change. You can make a full-time living as a video creator. Make good money making fun videos? I know, it sounds too good to be true. But seven years ago, I started my own channel, and in less than six months, my husband and I were able to quit our day jobs, We sold our house.
[10:02] Traveled to Europe for two months, and then came back and bought a new house. And that was all financed by, yes, my YouTube channel. I know this sounds crazy, but I also know that I'm not the only one who has experienced this. There are literally millions of people supporting themselves with YouTube, and they're making videos about every topic you can think of. Cooking, cleaning, art, makeup, career advice, real estate, cats, books, even just reacting to other YouTube videos. If you want to learn more about how this works and how you can get a piece of the action, then check out my free on-demand workshop called Three Secrets to Reach 1,000 Subscribers and Get Your Channel Monetized in Just Three Months. Because that's the truth. If you understand how the platform works, you don't have to wait years for your channel to grow. You can start getting views from day one be making money in as little as three months and be on your way to earning a living as a creator before you know it sign up now for this free on-demand youtube training by heading to creatorfasttrack.com you'll find that link in the show notes below but again the url is just creatorfasttrack.com i can't wait to teach you how to start your own successful youtube channel and start earning a living as a creator.
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[11:20] Okay, now we come to the real meat of this, okay? All that pre-work was very important, but now you're going to come up with a few different specific content ideas for each of these subtopics. And if you want to plan your content for the entire year, then what you need to do is consider how many different subtopics you have. So for example, maybe you have 25 total. Divide 52 for 52 weeks in the year by 25. So you see how many different pieces of content you need to create about each of these subtopics. And 52 divided by 25 is obviously just a little bit more than two. So what that means is you just need to come up with two specific content ideas for each of these subtopics.
[12:01] And if we go back to the pre-work we did before this, we identified those different content formats of which you have at least two, up to about five. And so what you're going to be doing basically is figuring out some different pieces of content you could create in these different formats. So for example, if I am going to make a video about, let's say, the legal side of starting a business, I might decide that I want to interview a lawyer as one of my pieces of content. And for another one, I might want to make a listicle, maybe that's my circle piece of content, about different important legal things that you need to make sure that you do when you start a business. So those are just two little examples there. Marketing basics. Maybe I decide that I want to make a how-to for planning my marketing basics. And I also want to make a listicle of different marketing basics to check off when you are first starting your business. Or maybe I want to do a story time video about the biggest marketing mistakes that I made when I started my business.
[13:06] And so those different content formats, they can immediately kind of spark some ideas for some different like ways you can approach these topics. Of course, you definitely can use ChatGPT for this step too. You could tell it. I want to make several videos about different business ideas that people could easily start give me 10 specific video ideas that I could make around this topic.
[13:32] And the reason I say 10, because remember, you only need about two, is because CHIGPD is going to suggest just, you know, pretty much random ideas to you, right? They're not necessarily good. So ask it for more ideas than you need so that you can choose two that are actually
[13:47] good, that you know your audience would actually really like. And also if you're not sure which ones to choose you can always go over to youtube and you can search for the main keywords from each of those and see how other videos about those topics have performed on other channels okay now obviously what you're going to do here is just repeat these steps for each of your main topic categories and by doing that you will come up with 52 or a whole lot more of your main content ideas and the next step will be to put them on the calendar And so obviously I've been mentioning 52 because I'm assuming you're going to make 52 pieces of main content or core content per year on pretty much every platform that is a good amount because remember we're talking about substantial content here.
[14:35] Now, beyond that substantial content, beyond those core pieces of content where you're posting maybe one video a week or one blog post a week, you might want to, you probably want to be on some other platforms. And it is very efficient to repurpose your content for other platforms. Now, I used to not be much of an advocate for repurposing because while it sounds efficient, remember that you are only being efficient if the things you are producing are actually useful, right? Doing busy work is not efficient. And I found repurposing to largely be busy work because I would make, for example, a YouTube video. It would do really well on YouTube. But then if you do what a lot of people say and you publish the transcript of the YouTube video on your website as a blog post, it doesn't perform well at all because we talk a lot differently than we write. And so it doesn't read well. So it's not content that people want to consume. Or if you rip the audio from the YouTube video and you publish it as a podcast, a lot of the time that doesn't work very well either. Sometimes it does. It kind of depends on the video and the format of the video and whatnot. But a lot of the time it just doesn't carry over or the audio quality isn't good enough or something like that. So I found that I didn't get very good results when I repurposed content.
[15:51] These days, things are a bit different. Because of all the AI tools we have, we can actually repurpose content really effectively, turning a video or any sort of audio content into really well-written, well-organized written content that people will enjoy reading. And also very effectively pulling out short sections to publish on short form platforms like Instagram or Facebook, if you still use that, or LinkedIn or Twitter or whatever platform you like to use. Because we're not now just choosing some random sentence from the article or from the transcript and copying and pasting it. Now the AI can actually rewrite and kind of reconceive some of the thoughts or ideas that were shared in the main piece of content and summarize them into something that is bite size, but really communicates the whole value and is useful in and of itself. So these final couple of steps that we've got here.
[16:49] One is putting everything on the calendar. So you're going to look at your calendar. Maybe you're using Google Calendar. Maybe you are using Asana. Whatever it is, you should have some sort of visual layout, I would say, or at least a list with dates of when you're publishing these different pieces of content. So you're going to put them all on your content calendar. So they're all scheduled out one per week for the entire year. And then the very last step is your repurposing strategy. So which platforms do you want to repurpose on? And I would say really less is more here. You probably will get bigger, better results if you focus on just a couple or three, even of these sub platforms. And you don't try to be everywhere because your resources are limited, I'm sure. And by that, I mostly mean your time or your team's time. And so you can only create the best quality if you limit the quantity to some degree. So which platforms are you going to repurpose on? And then for each of those, what is your repurposing strategy? So just a little example from my business, my main platform is YouTube. I make these YouTube videos. Obviously, they include the audio and the visual aspect.
[18:04] We take the transcripts from the YouTube videos, and then I programmed a custom GPT that we can literally copy and paste the transcript into. And then because of the careful programming that I put into this custom GPT, it will turn that transcript into a well-written, well-organized blog post. It actually reorganizes the ideas, rewrites everything kind of from scratch while still communicating my ideas, telling my stories, etc., And I've given it content I've written in the past so that it has examples of how to write like me. So it's not just well-written, well-organized, but it also sounds like me. So it ends up being, I would say, higher quality content than I probably could make on my own because the AI honestly can write better than most of us can. The problem, of course, is that it generally sounds too generic.
[18:54] But if you give it your ideas and you give it your writing style, you end up with something that's not generic at all. And if you want to learn exactly how to do that for yourself, how to program a custom GPT like that, it's actually really easy. And I made a video about it earlier this year. So we will include a link to
[19:11] that down below for you to watch. Anyway, so these are the basic steps. Let's go over them just really quickly here. So you're starting by choosing your main platform and identifying your main content formats. Then you're going to identify your main topics you're covering and then choose specific subtopics within each of those and then come up with the specific content ideas.
[19:35] From there, you are going to then schedule those on your calendar, right? You're going to put one per week for your main platform and then you're going to create your repurposing strategy, decide what platforms you are going to repurpose for and what's the strategy for each of those platforms. And I would highly recommend that once you nail those two things down, that you are consistent and you just do it for every single piece of content you create and use the same process over and over again, you might decide to skip some pieces of content. But whenever you are repurposing that you have a process you follow, because that will make things a lot more efficient as well. Now, to wrap this all up, content marketing, as you probably know, can be really powerful at generating a whole lot of leads. But leads do not make a business. You can have thousands of leads pouring into your business. But if you don't do anything with them, then your business won't make any money.
[20:31] So I don't just want to show you how to get visibility here. I would love to show you more about how to turn this visibility into leads and then turn those leads into paying customers.
[20:42] Obviously, we don't have time today. But what I did is I recorded a limited podcast series. It's a podcast that just has 10 episodes that walks you step by step through my entire sales strategy that I use in my business from getting that visibility to turning it into leads to turning those leads into paying customers. The podcast is called The 100K Method. And I will definitely put a link to that down below as well. Like I said, it's just 10 episodes. And I did that on purpose because I often struggle when I start listening to a new podcast.
[21:14] I'm not sure whether I should listen to the most recent episode or the first episode or start somewhere in the middle. Let me know in the comments if you can relate to this struggle. And so I thought, you know, what would be really nice since this is a business podcast is let's make it more strategic, more intentional than just new content every single week. Instead, let's make something that has a distinct start and a distinct finish so that you can obviously start on episode one and then just listen all the way through to understand what all the ideas in a logical order. I tend to be kind of a logical thinker, as you've probably noticed.
[21:48] Anyway, so the 100k method, link down below. If you want to learn how to turn your visibility that you'll get from your content marketing into sales for your business, then definitely check that out. All right, well, that's all for this video. Thank you so much for watching. If you're new here, make sure you subscribe before you go so you can catch my new videos that I make about business strategy and digital marketing every single month to help you grow your online business. And right now, after you click subscribe, you can watch this video right here about how to create a custom GPT to turn your videos into well-written blog posts that sound like you, or to do almost anything else you want it to do for you in a really intelligent way.
[22:29][outro bumper]
All right, that is it for this episode. Thank you so much for listening. Before we wrap this up, I just want to remind you that if you haven't already looked up the $100K Method podcast series, you're definitely going to want to do that and give it a listen very soon. The $100K Method podcast is a 10-episode podcast series that's going to teach everything you need to know to get an automated sales system for your product set up and running online so that you can start seeing consistent sales month after month.
All right, that is it for this episode. Thank you so much for listening. I'll be back again next week with another one, and until then, stay focused, and keep taking action.
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