Image: Danielle MacInnes.
Hannah just emailed me with a question. She wants to know what’s the secret to publishing content marketing more frequently. Here’s my reply.
There are lots of reasons for not publishing more of our ideas, to more people, more often.
- I just can’t think of anything useful to say right now.
- Maybe no one will bother reading it.
- I know what I want to say, but I can’t figure out how I want to say it.
- This needs to be really, really good and I’m not sure I can write something of that quality today.
- I don’t have enough time.
Those are totally valid reasons. I know because I’ve experienced all of them more than once over the years. However, I don’t think they address the primary reason why so few people, regularly create and publish their own content marketing.
In my experience, as someone who has mentored hundreds of people on content creation and delivery, the main barrier is pressing the publish button. Moreover, their concern regarding the response they might face, after publication. The fallout, criticism and possible confrontation.
It’s certainly true that if we choose to publish nothing, we don’t need to worry about unleashing a wall of potentially hostile responses.
It’s also true that we miss out on all the opportunities that could come our way, if we were to press publish and share our ideas or observations.
But tragically, by failing to press the publish button regularly, we never learn how other people manage to publish regularly.
Here’s the thing. By repeatedly pressing the publish button, we become perfectly, totally comfortable, publishing our original content whenever we have something useful to share.
Here’s an example of what I mean.
- My first blog post took several days to write, edit, re-edit, format, re-edit… then publish.
- This post was written on my phone and published on WordPress in around 15-20 minutes.
What was the difference between the two posts?
The experience I gained, from pressing the publish button several thousand times.