When it comes to being a small business owner, especially a solopreneur, there’s a catch: you need content to market your business and lots of it. While sure, your mind might be thinking of enhancing your workspace, getting customers, maintaining relationships, and just leaving your competitors in the dirt, most of this can only happen when you have marketing and a solid customer base to grow on.
But when it comes to marketing, the solution is marketing. But when you’re new, you’re most likely going to be DIYing your content. It’s fine, but it’s hard. Actually, it’s really hard. Yes, by all means, it’s super rewarding, but it just doesn’t seem to get enough attention for how hard this actually is for businesses. So, with all of that said, let’s take a moment to chat about the rollercoaster ride, which is DIY content creation for small business owners.
The Great Time Sink
When you first start creating your own content, you might feel a rush of excitement. The idea of designing your own website, writing blog posts, and shooting photos for Instagram sounds fun and creative. But soon, reality hits. Crafting high-quality content is incredibly time-consuming. That blog post that you thought would take an hour has now eaten up your entire afternoon. Editing that seemingly simple video? Say goodbye to your weekend. The time you thought you’d spend growing your business is now consumed by learning and executing content creation.
The Learning Curve is a Total Nightmare
You’re a master of your craft, whether it’s baking, consulting, or crafting artisanal soaps. But suddenly, you also need to become a graphic designer, writer, photographer, and social media strategist overnight. Each of these skills has its own steep learning curve.
Sure, there are countless tutorials out there, but piecing together bits of knowledge from various YouTube videos and blogs can leave you more confused than when you started. Plus, oftentimes, a lot of these just contradict one another, and that only adds to the sheer confusion!
Quality vs Quantity Conundrum
This basically piggybacks on what was said above about the vast wave of information. But as a small business owner, you’re constantly bombarded with advice about the importance of content marketing. “Post consistently!” they say. Quality content is king!” they add. But here’s the thing: consistently churning out high-quality content while juggling other aspects of your business is a Herculean task.
If you’re literally the only person running your business, and you have a personal life, you can’t really do both! You either end up sacrificing quality to meet your self-imposed deadlines or you post sporadically and lose engagement with your audience.
It’s a lose-lose situation. Honestly, there are a handful of things you can do to counteract this. For example, you could hire a video production company to help you out, which would slash your time producing video content (and they do all the editing). You could also outsource certain aspects of your creation, such as blog writing, or even just hire some staff to help. But seriously, don’t try to juggle all of this.
The Expert Envy
You’re scrolling through your social media feed, and you see content from big brands or even other small businesses that look flawless. Their videos are polished, their photos are stunning, and their blog posts are impeccably written. It’s hard not to feel a twinge of envy and frustration. Why does their content look so professional, while yours feels… amateur? The answer is often simple: they have help. They have teams of professionals whose sole job is to create killer content. So, this circles back to directly above: you need help, and you can’t expect to do it all.
