Knowing what you need to post and when or what you need to create and
when, you're so much more likely to stick with it than if you just
share content when you feel like it, or when you have time or when
you feel inspired. Because unless it's a priority, you're probably not going to
do that, and you're not going to feel consistently inspired, you're not going
to consistently have time, you're not going to consistently feel like doing it.
So then the only way to be consistent with it is to make it a
priority. Welcome to Imperfect Action. I'm Steph Taylor. For years, I
read all the books, downloaded all the freebees, and did all the courses,
but it wasn't until I started taking imperfect action that my business had its
first million dollar year. Imperfect action is about doing things before you're ready,
prioritizing consistent action over perfect action, and moving forward even when you're not sure
you're doing it right. On this show, you can expect mindset advice,
actionable marketing tips and strategies to build a business that brings you more profit,
more freedom, and even more joy. You on the list to get my
daily businesses. Every day, I'll send you a bite sized prompt designed to
help you grow your business in a more intentional way. Sign up at Steph
Taylor dot co, forward slash DBB, or at the link in the short
notes. Hey, welcome back to Imperfect Action. This is episode seven hundred
and eleven. Today I'm sharing five tools that have helped me and my team
as well now to be a bit more consistent with content and with marketing,
because, honestly, I can't say this enough. Consistency is one of the
biggest factors in growing your audience, in nurturing them, in growing your business,
and if you can't be consistent, then you're really going to struggle with
all three of those. But the good news is that there are a lot
of tools out there that you can implement to make the whole process a lot
smoother. Regardless of whether you are podcasting, or whether you're on YouTube,
or whatever kind of content you are creating. There are tools that you can
apply and systems you can apply to make it a lot smoother. Now,
when I talk about consistency, this is going to vary from person to person.
For me, consistency is three podcast episodes every single week. I have
done that for five and a half years and there have only been a handful
of weeks where I haven't put out all three podcast episodes. But for you,
that consistency might be one piece of longer form content, whether that's a
blog post or a YouTube video or even a long email to your list.
Whatever you can stick to consistently is the goal. It's not about doing all
of the things. It's not about quantity. It's about showing up over and
over and over again. So this episode, I'm sharing a couple of the
tools that have been game changes for me in being consistent with my own content
and with my own marketing. Number one, and this one is the most
boring one on the list. The notes app on my phone, I know,
just the plain old notes app. And in the notes app, I
have a folder called content Ideas. I am constantly adding to this content ideas
folder from anything in my life that gives me a little spark of inspiration or
even just like the little stem of an idea where I'm like, cool,
I don't know what this is going to be, but they could potentially be
a little idea. Here, I write it down, I make a note
of it, because then when I go back and look at it months from
now, I might be able to turn that little stem of an idea into
a big, full podcast episode or a post for Instagram or wherever. So
for example, I recently was in Vanuatu, which is a beautiful island in
French Polynesia, surprisingly not that far from where I live in Brisbane, and
they have Evanuatu has one jet plane, one international plane that they fly between
Sydney and Vanua to Melbourne and Vanowatu, Brisbane and Vanuatu and Auckland and Vanuatu.
So one plane is servicing all four of those destinations. And while I
was over there, that one plane broke down. They had to ground it
and they were waiting for a new part for its engine. Now, that
for me was a content idea, even though it's not even related remotely to
what I do or what I talk about. That was a content idea because
I could instantly relate that relying on that one plane to relying on one income
stream in your business. It's really risky that one income stream, for whatever
reason, stops working, then you don't really have a business anymore. So
notice how I took something that happened in my everyday life and used that to
come up with an analogy for a piece of content, you know, and
another one like a friend and I went to speed dating ones and there we
met this guy who just talked about himself NonStop, and that gave me the
content idea of well, you can't just talk at your clients NonStop. You
can't just talk at your audience and expect them to be interested in your business.
You need to have a conversation with them. You need to listen to
their pain points, you need to listen to what they want. That was
a piece of content that came from a real life situation. So then whenever
my ideas, my inspiration runs a little bit dry, I can just hop
back into the notes app on my phone and I can see if there's anything
in there that I can use or anything that I can re use. Sometimes,
you know, I might have an idea two years ago, and then
two years later I can use it again, because I don't always have endless
ideas popping up all of the time. But I still need to be consistent
with this episode. So I need to be consistent with those ideas. Okay.
Tool number two is click up. Click up is a project management tool,
and in my business, it's like the command center for all of our
content right all of the content that is going out, We have it mapped
out in a calendar. We use it as a team so everyone knows what
they need to be working on, when they need to be working on,
what content is getting published on what day, and everything is just in that
one place. We don't have millions of spreadsheets for content calendars, we don't
have all of these different things floating around. We just have it in one
place. And even if it is just you in your team right now,
starting to use click up or some kind of similar project management tool means that
you can start to build out that content calendar. It means that you can
fill that content calendar with your pieces of content, your plan content, and
it means you can fill each piece of plan content with the processes and the
tasks required to make that piece of content happen. And then when you're ready,
you can start to easily delegate parts of that process to others because now
you've documented it within that task and now you can just add new people to
your click up workspace as you hire them, and you can delegate to them
without having to do a huge amount of training because it's already documented there.
Now, if you have an actual calendar as well in click up, you
can knowing what you need to post and when or what you need to create
and when, you're so much more likely to stick with it than if you
just share content when you feel like it, or when you have time,
or when you feel inspired, Because unless it's a priority, you're probably not
going to do that, and you're not going to feel consistently inspired, you're
not going to consistently have time, you're not going to consistently feel like doing
it. So then the only way to be consistent with it is to make
it a priority. May tell yourself it is a priority for me that my
content is consistent and stick to that. So if you want to try out
click up, head to Steph Taylor dot co slash click Up. I've popped
a link to it in the show notes as well. Number three Sun Sarma
So this one is also a like a task management tool, so it's a
different to click up click ups, more of like the Big Picture command center
for the business. Some Sarma is my own personal task management tool that I
use to plan out my day. I use it to plan out my week
and because you know, time management is essential in staying consistent with your content,
I need to make sure that I'm batching or blocking out time in my
calendar where I can outline two or three episodes at once record two or three
episodes at once. Now ssama integrates with click up. It also integrates with
Google Calendar, which is what I love about it. I use it to
map out my tasks for the day in my calendar so that I know exactly
what I need to be working on at any given point in the day,
but also so that I don't overload my to do list each day because I'm
blocking the tasks in my calendar, and I have to estimate how long each
task is going to take me, so I then can't put ten hours worth
of work into a five hour day. I have to be a little bit
more realistic about how much I am putting on my to do list. And
then each week, when I plan out my week, I can set my
objectives for the week, so I might have something like outline and record podcast
episodes to the end of next week, so then I know that's a priority
I need to be working towards that. During the week, I can align
my tasks with those objectives, and I know what I need to be focusing
on at any given point. I have used all of the planners, all
of the to do list apps, all of the different things. This is
the only one that I've stuck with consistently for nearly a year now, so
it really works. It's really simple, it's easy to use, and it's
friendly for other types of brains like mine, which it does not like.
Structure, it does not like the systems, does not like the plan right,
So you can grab a thirty day free trial for that one at Steph
Taylor dot Co. Slash sun Sama sunsam a. I'll pop a link for
that one in the show notes as well. Number four descript or descript if
you want to call it that. Descript is a piece of recording software for
audio for video content and I love it because it transcribes as you speak,
so you can edit it really easily, like as if you were editing a
Google doc. You can edit it as if it was text. And they
have some pretty great AI feature is that they're adding now like overdub where there's
an AI version of my voice. So if I mess up a word and
my team needs to go and edit the word so that it's correct. I
don't need to rerecord that word or that sentence. They can just type it
and it automatically fills in in my voice, which is pretty cool. Saves
a bit of time. There's also a feature called studio Sound where they use
like an AI tool to make your audio sound like it's been recorded in a
professional studio. That is awesome as well. It's where I record these podcast
episodes. It's where my team edits them. It's where my team turns them
into YouTube videos now, and where we extract snippets for short form video,
for reels and TikTok and YouTube shorts. It's a lot. I know,
we do a lot with it. I've been doing this show for five and
a half years now. If you are just starting out, I would usually
suggest that you start out with audio only, and then once you've got the
process for audio sorted, you're comfortable with that, you're being consistent with that,
then add video right because for me, the biggest barrier now we're having
video is, oh, my hair has to look nice, right. I
can't just hit record in my pajamas with my hair in a messy bun,
because now the camera is on as well, and just a reminder you don't
need to be showing up on all of the platforms. Choose what you can
for being consistent. I have a team who now helped me with all of
the production. Like when I first started podcasting, it was just me.
But now that my team are on board and we use descript, it's made
the whole process just so much more streamlined than it was in the past when
I was recording and editing in garage band on my computer. So if you
want to get a free trial of descript, head on over to stephtaylor dot
com slash descript d script. We'll put a link to that one in the
show notes as well. And then number five, the fifth and final one
is my webcam, which is called the Lumina four K webcam. Now I
have started recording video versions of this show and sharing them to YouTube, as
I know that that is where a lot of people consume their podcast content.
And I'm really serious now about taking this podcast to that next level of growth,
Like we've had awesome growth over the last five and a half years audio
only, but now it's how can we take it to that next level.
But I didn't really want to muck around, especially Now, at the start,
I didn't want to muck around with a full studio set up, fancy
camera, all of that. It just adds so many layers of complication into
something where I really just want it to be simple. So for now,
I'm using the Lumina webcam, which can record in four K quality, and
I like it. I'm really impressed with it. I use it from all
my Zoom calls and all of that as well now. And the only thing
that's really had to change when I'm recording podcast episodes now to turn them into
YouTube content is I just switched the webcam on when I'm recording an episode,
and then I get video for each one as well as audio, and we
use that video for YouTube. We use it for sure, we use it
for reels, we use it for TikTok. The only extra step involved is
making sure that my hair looks nice. So I'll pop a link to that
one as well. Steph Taylor dot Co slash Lumina l U M I n
A, and there'll be a link for that in the show notes too.
So there you have it. Five really simple tools. The notes app on
my phone, click up Sun Sama descript, and the Luminar webcam. The
all five of these play a really huge important role in how consistent I've been
with my content, not just recently, but over the last couple of years.
That is, if for today's episode, if you haven't already left a
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