7 Strategies to Ease Anxiety During Content Production
Putting your name out there can be scary.
Whenever you publish content, you’re putting your name on the line. And there’s no guarantee that your audience will love it.
For your business to thrive, you must improve your visibility and audience engagement through content creation and publication. Digital marketing is more effective now than ever, and there are many, many types of content you can create and use.
But how can you ease your anxiety during content production so you’ll be excited to create more?
Let’s start by facing the fears head-on.
Why Content Production Can Increase Anxiety
Has this ever happened to you? You’re talking with a business associate or friend, on your morning jog, or in the shower, when suddenly inspiration strikes. You arrive at the perfect idea for a new piece of content. You’re excited! You keep the idea swirling in your thoughts, but soon… weeks pass, and you still haven’t published yet.
If this sounds familiar, you might be grappling with content production anxiety.
Producing content is really exciting. But on the other hand, it can also be anxiety-inducing (maybe even a little frightening) – making it difficult to hit “publish”.
When producing content, anxiety can increase for any of the following reasons:
- Getting started. For some, there is nothing more intimidating than staring at a blank page. When our content ideas are big, just getting started can be daunting.
- Finding the time. If you’re like most business leaders and entrepreneurs, your schedule is packed to the brim with meetings and urgent tasks. It can feel overwhelming to have another huge item added onto your list.
- Making mistakes. What if you say something in your content by mistake? It can be scary to make a mistake that will be online for everyone to see.
- Judgement or criticism. After you put all the work into finally putting your content out there, what if nobody likes it?
If you’ve had any of these anxious feelings around content production, you’re not alone. So many content creators struggle with these things all the time.
7 Ways to Ease Anxiety During Content Production
The good news is, there are ways you can ease anxiety during content production. Here are 7 different strategies to try out:
- Exercise your content production muscle
- Voice record your stream of thoughts
- Break up your content production in smaller subtasks
- Hire an editor
- Schedule the content to auto-publish
- Focus on the end goal
- Celebrate your wins
1. Exercise Your Content Production Muscle
Getting started on something new can feel daunting. When you start a hard workout or a new sport, your body needs to get used to that exercise. Writing is the same. You need to train your brain to produce content every single day.
Here are some training exercises that you can implement in your daily routine:
- Write for 30 minutes a day – everyday
- Read blogs (or whatever type of content you are producing) for 20 minutes a day
- Carry a notebook with you to jot down any ideas, sentences, or phrases that come to you spontaneously
If you feel like you’re running into writer’s block, try one of these 11 tips to break through.
2. If You Can’t Type It, Talk It
Most people can talk faster than they can type. If you want to make even more use of your 30 minutes of content creation a day, speak your ideas instead of typing them. You can record your thoughts on a voice memo or brainstorm about them with someone on your team.
In an hour, I can crank out content for about five full blogs when I’m talking about my ideas instead of typing them. And then, it’s time to finally put thoughts on paper, you’ll be able to listen back on every detail.
3. Break Up Your Content Into Subtasks
If you’re anxious about finding time to create content, you don’t have to stress any further. It can be easy for an entrepreneur, business owner, or marketer to keep up with a weekly content creation schedule!
Break up the content production into subtasks. For example, here are subtasks we use to create our blogs:
- Outline blog
- Draft blog
- Edit blog
- Check SEO
- Finalize blog
- Schedule blog
These 6 simple subtasks can even be done on different days. This allows the content production process to happen in bite-sized pieces, not overwhelming the writer at any point in time.
(We’ve created this process to catch all the potential risks, ranging from not sounding professional to releasing something that isn’t valuable. When approaching your subtasks, make sure you avoid these 8 major oversights too.)
4. Hire an Editor
The next way to ease your anxiety during content production is to hire an editor – whether that’s someone on your team or someone like us that you outsource.
An editor can take on 3 of the 6 subtasks listed in the previous strategy. That way you can create your content quicker with less stress.
If you can, have not just one, but two other people review your content before publishing. They can check for the overall quality and value of your content. You’ll be able to avoid anxiety around errors or audience scrutiny when your content has already faced constructive feedback from an editorial team.
5. Schedule The Content to Auto-Publish
Once you have the content written and edited, it’s time to press “publish”. This is where we commonly see authority leaders pause. They begin to question if it’s valuable enough, clear enough, fill in the blank enough. That’s why we schedule our content and our client’s content out. It takes the anxiety out of seeing it go live immediately. If you use WordPress, learn how to schedule a post on WordPress here.
6. Focus On The End Goal
If you don’t know where you’re going to end up, it’s difficult to know when you’ve got there and how to tie a bow on the content. You need to define an end goal before you start to write the content.
For this blog in particular, we know that our clients experience anxiety when producing content. Some of our clients have told us that they spend over 8 hours on a single blog (and are still not pleased with the content). So, it never gets published.
We help our clients skip through that by ensuring that every piece of content we write for our clients is valuable, and we both know the end goal before we start writing.
7. Celebrate Your Wins
Finally, you need to celebrate your wins! A mentor told me when I started FocusCopy that I needed to celebrate every win – somehow. The first dollar, the first hundred dollars, and so on. We even celebrated the first blog, the first comment, and the traffic that we’ve gotten from our most popular blogs. You, too, need to celebrate your wins – including publishing content. Instead of it being a fearful task, it becomes an exciting task that you want to complete.
Ease Your Content Production Anxiety About Outsourcing
Like we previewed in strategy #6, we encounter a lot of stress when we talk with prospective clients. Producing content can be scary, but it doesn’t have to be. FocusCopy partners with entrepreneurial companies, just like yours, to produce your content and save your time. This allows you to stay on top of your content schedule while managing a more-balanced workload. Learn more about our copywriting services here.
If you have any questions, drop them in the comments section. We are here to make content production a more joyful and beneficial process.
