This past Sunday I had a to-do list the length of my arm. Over at SoapPrizes, we are gearing up for our holiday season by rolling out new soaps, prepping for upcoming shows, and announcing a new line of home fragrances. I know I am not unlike a lot of small business owners this time of year. It is actually that thought of solidarity that kept me motivated throughout the day. Well that, a lot of coffee and some of my daughter’s Halloween candy.

All this activity meant creating a ton of content including:

  • Product descriptions for the website
  • Photos of all the new products for the website, newsletter and social media
  • A video by my daughter introducing our new soaps
  • Blog posts introducing our new line
  • Email newsletter to provide an update to our mailing list

When you are a one- or few-person-show, all this content creation can be totally overwhelming to tackle on top of the production of your product or service, and the general operations needed to keep the business running. It is hard and takes a lot of time, but it is very important for the promotion your great products.

Here are a few tips that I put into use over the weekend:

1. Create content that can be reused across your different tools. Product descriptions can be used as a script for a video. Blog posts can be reused in an email newsletter by providing a exert in the newsletter and link to the post.

2. Plan your photo shoot. Setting up my make-shift photo studio to take product pictures takes a bit of time, so I don’t like to set it up very often. For this reason, I try to think of all the scenarios I may need images for and write them down. This allows me to take and edit all my pictures at one time. This saves me down the road because I now have my own library of product shots to use on the website, social media, wholesale catalog, etc.

3. Create a promotional or editorial calendar to help you plan out your content over time. This will allow you to set some time aside to create the content needed rather than going into panic mode because you forgot to get an email out about an upcoming promotion. Not that I have ever done this ;-)

So yes, creating all this content can be hard and overwhelming, but with some planning you can do it effectively. It is my goal to share with you the strategies and tools that I find effective for myself and my clients. I have some pretty big plans for 2014 to accomplish this goal, so I hope you stick around.