When we first made a commitment to ourselves to blog daily, we were honestly a little worried about how in the world we would keep up with that commitment. But we knew that the benefits to creating fresh, daily content would be beneficial, so we made a public commitment to it and the rest is history. One year later, we’ve been pretty spot on – not perfect – but definitely dedicated to the cause! Over time, we’ve had people notice and ask us how in the world we keep up with blogging every day. To be completely truthful, it can be a lot at times. But early on we picked up on a solid piece of advice that completely transformed the way we thought about creating content.
Coming up with daily social media posts can be a chore, let alone writing full blog posts, right? If you’re like we were, it was challenging to get creative for blogs beyond simply sharing our work. The problem for us was that we don’t have fresh work to post every day – and we don’t want to! Our goal is to create a sustainable photography business, and sustainability doesn’t mean shooting every single day.
As we wrestled with creating new and fresh blog topics every day, we discovered some sound advice from Gary Vaynerchuk, the owner of VaynerMedia, a digital marketing agency in New York. Gary creates fresh content on a daily basis, customizes it for each individual platform – Facebook, Instagram, SnapChat, Medium, his own blog, YouTube, etc.. – at a rate that seems completely irrational! It leaves you wondering how in the world there can be that much fresh content every day. The answer? His philosophy is, “Document, don’t create.”
Did you catch that?
Don’t focus on creating fresh content everyday. If you sit down at a computer and try to think of what you can create from scratch to share with your audience, you’ll not only run out of creative ideas quickly, but you’ll burn a ton of time in the process.
Instead, document what you are already doing. Show yourself working behind the scenes on a job. Talk about the real life wins and struggles of your business. Share educational information you’ve recently learned and implemented with your audience. Whatever you are currently doing – share it!
Document, don’t create.
If you’ve read our blog for any length of time, you can no doubt point to this now that we’ve clued you in on the secret. That’s why we have our Friday Top Five, sharing fun insights about the week we just lived. We’re not creating that information, we’re sharing what we documented all week. We share personal and business struggles and wins. We share educational topics just like this one!
Because at the end of the day, bringing value to your audience is all that matters. What you do in your profession is interesting to others. Document it and share it, and watch the creativity come to life!
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