The entrepreneurial journey, support for solopreneurs and small business owners, and an easier way to create content for social media …
In this interview with entrepreneur and content creation expert, Kate Gilbert, we discuss our own personal entrepreneurial journeys and tips we’ve learned along the way.
If you are new to Kate… After founding and running an online magazine for ten years, she transitioned to providing solopreneurs and small businesses the support she wished she had had.
She brings her to-the-point perspective, background in visual communication, and entrepreneurial spirit to helping her clients get more done in less time, and with less stress.
In our interview Kate Gilbert shares insights and tools on easier methods for content creation, discusses the challenges small business often face with social media, and getting off the content creation hamster wheel with more sustainable approaches.
If you are a small business owner or solopreneur, there’s much here to glean from Kate Gilbert
Prefer to Read? You’ll find the Transcript Below
– Resources –
🛠️ Video Repurposing Tool Discussed https://shannonsuggests.com/Opus
📕 Download Kate’s free Content Creation Roadmap (PDF) https://shannonsuggests.com/KateCreates
▶️ Watch the replay of Kate’s Master Your Messaging Workshop for Entrepreneurs https://shannonsuggests.com/Messaging
🧑🏽🤝🧑🏻Check out Kate’s Action Lab Workshop to Create an
Optimized 12 Week Plan https://shannonsuggests.com/actionlab
🧑🏽🤝🧑🏻 Check out Kate’s Sprint and Social Media Group Therapy to see if it’s a fit for you: https://shannonsuggests.com/Sprint
– Visit – Kate Gilbert’s Website: https://kategilbert.com/ Shannon’s Website: https://shannonstoltz.com/
Timestamps:
00:00 Kate Gilbert, support for solopreneurs and small businesses
06:33 Action-oriented business “therapy”
17:10 Overcoming perfectionism by embracing iteration and experimentation
27:05 Social Media Group Therapy for business owners who hate social media
35:03 Easier social media content with a Content Loop
42:38 Content Creation Roadmap – Repurpose Long Form Content
51:09 Content Creation Roadmap – Insights into batching video and photography and using a Shot List
54:27 How to Batch Reels or Short Form Content
57:43 Repurposing content and content ideas, so you aren’t always having to create new content
1:00:37 Kate’s last content creation tip for busy solopreneurs and business owners
Transcript – Interview with Kate Gilbert
Business Coach and Support for Action- Oriented Solopreneurs and Small Businesses
Meet Kate Gilbert
Shannon: I have Kate Gilbert here with me today and we are going to talk about entrepreneurship, being an entrepreneur, a solopreneur, and a small business owner.
Kate has a lovely background in a variety of different things, including 10 years of running an online digital magazine in the crafting niche. Now she helps entrepreneurs, solopreneurs, small business owners in the food and crafting niches specifically, but also for those of us who just love her, do more stuff in less time with less stress. She has a nifty system for those of us who are highly introverted and don’t like social media who get all wrapped up in what to post and those types of things.
We’re going to cover a gamut. Kate kind of saved me today with this little tidbit, so we’ll talk about that a little bit, too.
Kate, thank you for joining me. I’m so glad you’re here.
Kate: Thank you for having me.
Shannon: Let’s talk a little bit about your background. We met in Tracy Phillips’ Live Video Launchpad. I don’t even know if she still runs that, but it was a 10-day thing where we could get comfortable doing live video, and we met there a couple of years ago. You were doing baking videos at the time.
Kate: Yes. At the time, I was running online baking classes. I did them live. I also did recorded classes. I still have one recorded class that I can sell, if anybody wants to learn how to make a Buche de Noel.
Shannon: I’d have to know what that is first.
Kate: It’s a cake that is served at Christmas in France, it looks like a log. I make a good one.
Shannon: I bet.
Kate: So, I was doing live classes on Zoom. It was during the pandemic, so people would have me come in online and bring together their family who were all over the place, or their coworkers, or I did a kid’s birthday party. I was doing that mostly.
Shannon: Cool. So, you have this background in food and baking, but you also do other food related things. I know you create content for food related business owners and small businesses.
Kate: Yes. I work for a spice mill company, and I sometimes make recipes for them. Then I make the videos that go with those recipes. I’m really a self-taught food person. I just love food and I’ve always loved baking, so I just kind of ended up in that world.
Before that, I was in the knitting world. I was running a knitting magazine.
Shannon: Designing knitting patterns.
Kate: Yes. I founded the knitting magazine because I wanted a place where pattern designers could publish and be paid fairly because that was a big problem in the industry. So, I launched my magazine in 2008. It kind of turned the industry on its head a little bit and all the other magazines had to start being more generous with designers because I was really giving people the best deal. That was good.
Shannon: So, you ran the online knitting magazine for 10 years. I didn’t even realize it was 2008, which is the same year that I started my first monetized blog. I had blogged since 2004, but I had multiple sites in 2008, so that was kind of a year to start things. That was a heyday of season to start things.
You could really do something online for the first time, anybody could if they could figure out the tech and produce content, to share a message and make a difference in their world in a way that couldn’t be done without a massive investment or skills or technology previously.
But as anybody who runs an online presence knows, there are a significant amount of skills that go into running or having an online business, or even doing online marketing for your brick-and-mortar. There’s just a lot. Small business owners and solopreneurs, we’re doing a lot. There’s a lot of balls.
Kate: There’s a lot of balls and a lot of plates spinning, and a lot of jumping through flaming hoops while you’re spinning plates and juggling balls.
Shannon: Exactly. I literally have a mark on my calendar for certain days that says spin plates. That’s actually a calendar entry on my calendar, spin plates, and that’s for the nonprofit I work with. It’s like make sure things are moving and happening.
There’s just all these things, so it gets overwhelming when you want to then have to go learn how to market your business online, or how to do social media when you don’t have any time, how to figure out branding for online and all the assets, how to communicate a message visually when you just want to talk to people. There’s all this stuff. That’s something that you have transitioned to helping entrepreneurs with.
Kate: Yes. Sometimes I say that I now provide the services that I wish I had when I was running the magazine. I did have people who helped me out, and I don’t want to make it sound like I was the only person there. I had a very good friend of mine who would meet me once a week just to talk things out a bit because I needed that, I needed to do that verbal processing.
Now that’s what I do for a lot of people. Somebody says to me, “I think I need a whole new website,” and I’m like, “Why do you think that?” I’m not disagreeing, necessarily, I’m just asking questions. They’re like, “Because I’m not selling enough stuff.” I’m actually thinking about a person in particular who said this to me. We went and looked at the site, and I said, “What are you actually selling?”
Shannon: It’s not a new website, it’s a messaging and visibility thing.
Kate: It was a question of putting out an offer and it was a question of communicating clearly. It wasn’t actually a question of overhauling an entire website. In that case, redoing the whole website was sort of a distraction, it was a way to stay away from other stuff that was more scary.
Shannon: There’s plenty of scary stuff. We all have things that scare us.
Kate: So, I did a lot of hand-holding. Sometimes I like to say that I do action-oriented business therapy.
Shannon: Not a therapist, but…
Kate: I’m not a therapist. I just play one on the internet. People come to me and they have a lot of feelings, like we all do. Our businesses are our babies, even if we have other babies. Sometimes you need a place to process some things, think about things, and decide what parts are precious or not precious and where you’re holding yourself back.
Shannon: I was in one of your programs, and I’ve been in your Sprint program a couple different times, and a whole part of your Sprint is about an easier way to do social media. You go through this whole process of helping people with their messaging. You were like, “Shannon, why are you in here? You’re all about messaging.”
My answer was, one, because I love Kate. The other reason was that you got it, I didn’t have to explain anything to you, I just could talk, and you would know exactly how to process what I was thinking about and talking about. You understood where I was coming from – from a branding standpoint, from a messaging standpoint, from an entrepreneurial standpoint. That’s gold.
Kate: Thanks.
Shannon: Just being able to bounce it off of somebody who gets it.
Kate: It’s absolutely very difficult to be your own coach. I’ve heard somebody use the phrase you can’t read your label from inside the jar.
Shannon: I like that.
Kate: It’s not my phrase, I’m not taking credit there. It’s really hard sometimes to evaluate your own stuff. Sometimes you need somebody else to be like, “Okay, Shannon, cut the crap here,” which I think I do for people a lot of times, and that’s why people come to me because they know I’m not going to waste time. I’m never mean, but I’m also going to ask them hard questions and be like, “Really now, let’s get real here. What’s happening?”
Shannon: Yes. You’re able to listen with a discerning ear and translate what we are rattling off into something concrete.
We had a conversation, and in half an hour you did something just by listening to me talk that would have taken me hours of both thinking time and actual work. That is huge. We hopped on a Zoom call and it was just done. Now I don’t have to think about that piece, I can think about the next piece. That’s a big deal.
Kate: I don’t know what to say.
Shannon: I think there’s a lot of value in that as an entrepreneur to have somebody to bounce things off of.
Kate: For sure.
Shannon: When I’m working with somebody, I’m doing a lot of asking questions and listening and helping them get information out of their head. How do we get content out of your head in the way that it works best for you? You’re doing the same thing for the areas that you specialize in. I really appreciate having that available.
Kate: I do have clients in food and I do have some clients in crafts, but I’m not really niched down to that. I have a lot of people who come to me who are in coaching of various sorts, or health stuff, fitness. I’ve worked with people kind of all over the place, different sorts of people teaching programs and things like that. I have someone who is teaching English as a second language.
Shannon: You’ve had a few realtors in your groups. You had Dottie who does holistic pet food supplements. Yoga might have been in the group at one point.
Kate: Some yoga and meditation and Jin Shin Jyutsu. Also, Meryl who is a personal trainer and runs an online fitness program that’s made for entrepreneurs, it’s pretty cool.
Shannon: I’ll have to get that link later to look at that. We have different needs sometimes. There’s a lot of plate spinning and scatteredness. I know for me I can be really focused or I can get kind of scattered, or a lot of scattered.
Kate: I like looking at other people’s mess and taking it and giving it order and making it make sense. That’s really fun for me. It’s hard to do for yourself, but I really like doing that for other people. Figuring out how somebody’s brain works, because we all work a little differently. I have to figure out what does Shannon actually need, how does Shannon think about things, and what’s going to help her get a thing done. I like that aspect of it, understanding how somebody processes.
Shannon: That’s something that was interesting for me, because I do a lot in the brain space, how do we think and how do we learn, and how do we package information in a way that best works for the audience, and how do we get it out of your head in the best way that works for you.
One of the things that I really loved, I have multiple brands, multiple projects, so you took me into a worksheet to talk about branding because I couldn’t nail it down. You popped me into a worksheet that you had for branding, and you just took me through the questions and helped narrow me down. What vibe was I looking for? What feel was I looking for? You had that all structured out. That goes to that visual communication background that you have.
Kate: Yes. My university degree was called communication design, it was actually an arts degree.
I really think people know more than they think they know. It’s just they know it on a subconscious level. If you look at a company with a particular font and a particular color scheme, you get a feeling from that. Even if you’re not a graphic designer, it still communicates something to you.
People are constantly reading signs like that all day long from different brands, from different ways of communicating, but they’re not necessarily thinking about it. It’s making the stuff that you know be more visible so you can make choices for your own brand that make sense.
It Doesn’t Have to Be Perfect – Changes Are Doable
Shannon: Sometimes when we’re trying to do it on our own, when we’re managing all of these other things in our worlds… I have a significant background in that, but if my head is over here, I can’t make the leap, or I can’t get myself there without having that focus time, which I can’t always carve out.
I know I’m not alone in that. That whole balls in air, spinning plates, lots of stuff to focus on. To have somebody to be able to sit down with for half an hour to ask the pointed questions, it’s almost like a body doubling coworking situation. It just gets you through the decisions rather than the churn. You can get out of that churn.
Do you run into the same thing on your side? You’re really great at helping people narrow it down, but do you get caught in your own churn?
Kate: I’m pretty good at pushing through it. Don’t get me wrong, I am a perfectionist, but it’s something I’ve learned to deal with a certain amount. The great thing about working online is I’m not building a storefront that has to look a certain way or spending tens of thousands of dollars on a sign. I’m not even printing business cards. If I want to change what my website looks like tomorrow, I can do that. I can change a couple of colors and it’s going to look different right away.
A lot of times, people who get caught in perfectionism and stuck in decision making, I’m like just make a decision, go, just do it. There are big decisions that are harder to walk back. If I choose to have my website on this thing or that thing, that’s a lot more complicated if I decide I want to redo it over here. That’s a lot more work. But once you choose where your website is going to be, for example, or you choose what platform you’re going to use, I can say that font is not working for me, and I can change it.
I’ve actually been going through a process of experimenting with fonts on my social media account and I’m playing with the typography. I’ll be like, “I think I’m sick of this one,” and then I change it. As I was laying out my website last week, I was like, “I think that one I was using before still has a place here,” so I brought it back in.
I like metaphors, so please forgive me.
Shannon: I love metaphors. Go for it.
Kate: I was working with a woman who had a background in ballet. She said to me that with her background you do it perfectly or you don’t do it, you do it perfectly or you’re not even on stage. So, she was having a lot of trouble just doing a thing.
What I had to say at one point was you’re not building a $10,000,000 mansion, you’re building a house of Lego. You can take pieces off of it, you can add new pieces, we can rearrange the pieces. This is not a decision you have to live with for the rest of your life. I had to really de-dramatize it for her, and then she was able to be like, “Okay, fine,” and start to move forward from there.
Shannon: Some of us come from backgrounds where the messaging was you have to make it right or it has to be perfect. Just an element of scale, even if you put your website on a platform and it turns out not to be the right platform, or your email list is on a platform that isn’t right for you, yes, it’s a bigger task to move it to another platform than changing the font on your website, but in the scale of business, it’s way easier than moving it from this physical location to that physical location.
Kate: Exactly.
Shannon: The scale business-wise is completely different. It’s very doable with the right help. With online business, we can make those shifts and pivots. Some are easy. Some are a little bit harder, but it’s still all doable.
I know I have had to work through the whole idea of it’s okay to iterate, it’s okay to make a decision and it be not the right decision, test and try and experiment, tweak and change. It’s okay to have something out there versus nothing out there.
Kate: Exactly. Like I said, I am a perfectionist, and I was that straight A student and that kid who either did it well or didn’t bother. This has been the work I’ve had to do as an adult business owner to change how I thought about that.
When I ran my magazine, actually, this woman who had been the editor in chief of a different magazine, we were having a conversation. She said to me, “The good thing about magazines is you always get another issue.” Well, you almost always get another issue. If you had a concept and it didn’t quite come out how you want, you can always try it again in a few months, you can always redo it, and it will come out differently every time, you have another shot.
I think that I’ve carried that. I had to, just for practical purposes, while I was running my magazine. I had very limited staff, I had very limited money, I was the only person working full-time on it. I couldn’t obsess over everything. I had to get things done, I had to get things out. Sometimes it was, “This is great, wow, I really knocked it out of the park,” and sometimes it was like, “This is fine, it will do, this is how it came out and I’m going to make the closest to a silk purse I can out of this. I’ll do better next time.”
I think that I’ve been able to carry that attitude forward into what I’m doing now and allow myself a certain amount of experimentation and flexibility to figure out what I want to do. After I left the magazine and it closed down, I tried doing websites, and I was like, “I hate this. I hate building websites for other people. I don’t want to do this.”
Shannon: That’s good data.
Kate: Yes. I was just like this is not for me. It allowed me to play around and I feel like I’m getting to a place where I love what I do, I love the people I’m working with, and I’m feeling a lot clearer in what my goals are and which direction I want to go. I wouldn’t have gotten there by digging in my heels and saying I’m doing websites, I said I’m doing websites, I have to keep doing websites. I would just be miserable.
Shannon: Right. That’s a thing that sometimes when we are multi-passionate or have a huge skill set, it’s like which thing to do, which way to go, which thing to focus on. Sometimes we just have to try something and see how it feels and whether it fits. Maybe it doesn’t fit for the season of life we’re in, so then what does fit for the season of life we’re in?
Some of my own entrepreneurial journey has been shifting because of seasons, raising kids, raising special needs kids. You’ve been a single mom. Now you’re in a new season with a new college student, which is different than when you’re in the bulk of the high school years and you’re taxi-mom, which is different than when you have little ones. That’s part of our journey, I think.
This new season that you’re in and what you’re doing now to help other entrepreneurs, you’re able to draw from all of those experiences that you’ve already had and continue to go from there. You also know those feelings that come up, why we get stuck.
Kate: Oh, absolutely. I’ve been processing some of those lately. It’s a good reality check when I have to process my own feelings around my business that I know other people come to me with, and I have to try to listen to my own advice. It’s tough.
Shannon: To turn it around on yourself periodically. What would you tell a client if they came to you with that kind of thing? It’s like, ugh, okay.
Kate: Yes. I think, fortunately, I’ve had enough clients and dealt with enough situations at this point that I can think about what I did say to somebody, because I’m much kinder to other people than I am to myself.
Shannon: I think that’s true for a lot of people, most of us. That self-talk comes up.
Kate: Exactly.
Shannon: That’s my fidget toy. My daughter bought this huge box of fidget toys, and then I came into my office one day and there were fidget toys all over my desk.
Kate: Nice.
Shannon: Apparently, I pick them up without even noticing it sometimes.
Social Media Group Therapy
One of the things that you do is this program that right now is embedded in your Sprint program is what you call Social Media Group Therapy.
Kate: Yes.
Shannon: Can you explain what Social Media Group Therapy is from your side so that I get it right?
Kate: Okay. First, I’ll say I run a program called 30-Day Sprint, which Shannon has been through.
As I was building it and I was setting up structures for how people could deal with social media and content creation on a practical level, I was going backward breaking down the steps, and then I got to a point where I was like, “You know what’s not really addressed here is all the bad feelings people have about social media.”
I get texts all the time from friends who are like, “Why do I even bother? Oh my god, this is such a waste of time. I hate this. Somebody is being mean to me right now,” or whatever, “I worked so hard on this post and nobody even liked it,” that kind of thing.
So, I started to think about I think I have to do a workshop about how we think and feel about social media. I was like it needs to be like group therapy, we need to do therapy. Then I thought, “Oh gosh, is everybody going to think what the heck is she talking about? Are people going to think this is really weird?”
The first time I ran it was November 2022. I had really debated if it was going to be a live session or if it was going to be a recorded video. I did it live the first time, and I asked everybody who was in the group, there were eight people there, “Was this worth doing live or would you rather have had a recording of it?” They were like live, absolutely.
So, we come together and we talk about some practical stuff, like how to keep yourself from falling down the rabbit hole because I have some ADHD tendencies. Even though I’m not formally diagnosed, I probably have ADHD. It’s like what are the things that I’ve put in place to not fall down that rabbit hole, but also what are the things that I’ve put in place to not fall down the emotional rabbit hole.
When I ran my magazine, I was a pretty visible person in the knitting world. I would launch an issue and then people would be mean, honestly. People would say nice things, of course, but…
Shannon: Trolls exist, and people say things on social that they would never say in real life.
Kate: Of course. Then also which voices stick in your head where you can’t sleep at night and you wake up thinking about it, who are you thinking about? Of course, you’re thinking about the jerk who said something nasty.
Shannon: Not the hundreds of good comments that you got as well.
Kate: Exactly. There are also people who think good things but don’t say anything necessarily. I started thinking about all of the things that I have done to really protect my time, my energy, my mental space, and I brought that all together to kick off our first session in my program.
I really think unless you can walk into the program having processed or at least thought about some of these actual bad feelings other than “I hate social media,” I hear that one a lot, but hate can mean a lot of things. I hate it because I feel jealous. I hate it because I feel like I’m not good enough. I hate it because I don’t get the response I want. I hate it because I think it’s a time waster. That kind of thing, there are so many different ways people mean that.
I thought we need to come together, process that stuff, think about it, try to come up with some solutions, hopefully change how we think about it a little bit so we can approach it differently and approach it with some curiosity and just enough distance where you can care about what you’re doing, but you’re not going to let it determine your mood for the day and you can get on with your life.
Shannon: I have a love/hate relationship with social media. As someone who has worked from home for 20+ years, it’s a lifeline for me to stay in contact with people and to meet new people, and it’s just necessary for me. I build relationships through it, and it’s just awesome. But I’m also a massive introvert. It takes energy and time to create content, put things out there, and then depending on what your mood is, it’s like people didn’t respond, or look at all of these responses and now I have to go respond back to everybody.
What I find interesting with your approach with the Social Media Group Therapy session is that it’s a group of people, it’s generally recorded, though sometimes it is, so we can kind of be real about it and we’re not the only ones that feel this way. We can shine a light on this is a real thing that we are feeling, that other people are feeling, we get to recognize that it’s there and then decide what we’re going to do with it ourselves and learn some strategies on how to reframe it.
Kate: Yes.
Shannon: Sometimes we spend all this time thinking about what we’re going to put on our social and forget that it has a lifespan of a blink.
Kate: Depending on the platform, for sure.
Shannon: Sometimes there are certain things that you say in there that helps reframe, and it’s helpful to have that reframing. Am I really going to let this trigger me or not? Am I going to let this overwhelm me? That’s all useful, I think. Or getting caught up in that I hate this, I don’t want to have to do this, but I have to do it, it’s a necessary evil, and just changing that because that energy is going to come through.
Kate: Yes. When you don’t show up or you show up in kind of a negative way, people can feel it.
Shannon: It comes through in how we’re phrasing things. I caught something last week and I was like I need to change my headspace, that’s not the way I want that worded, why is it worded like that, that’s not me. It just happened to be how I was feeling in that moment when I created it. Thankfully, there is a delete button, or an edit button.
Kate: Totally.
Create a Content Loop for Easier Social Media
Shannon: In your 30-Day Sprint program, the other thing that’s gold in there is you bring your massively impressive Excel and organization skills to this tool that you call a content loop. That’s actually why I first started looking at your programs was because I saw a video of you doing the content loop as an illustration versus on the spreadsheet and I was like she understands what’s in my head and what I’m trying to accomplish.
Kate: Oh, cool.
Shannon: I know you’ve gotten some feedback about that video and some harassment about how unprofessional the video looked, but for me, it sold me. Sometimes it doesn’t have to be perfect to get the message across.
Kate: Honestly, the first time I ran the course, I was like this might be the only time I run it, I don’t know. So, my goal was to show up and to make the video, not so much to make it perfect. I think overall my stuff looked pretty nice. I live in an apartment, the only white wall I had to work on is in my kitchen and is not very big, so it’s at a funny angle. I did what I could. I had to do it and move on.
Shannon: It worked. Here’s the problem that I see and hear, and what I think the content loop solves, and I’d like you to talk to what a content loop is. The problem that I hear people say, things that I’ve heard, “What do I post? I sit down to write a post and I don’t know what to say. I get ideas, but then when I sit down to do it, it’s like gone, it evaporates.”
There’s the feeling that you’re always on this social media hamster wheel and it’s eating up time and energy always having to come up with new stuff. When you’re an entrepreneur and a small business owner, and you have kids or a family or whatever else you’re doing, running nonprofits, administrating, everybody I know does it all.
Kate: I think a lot of us do.
Shannon: We have our causes, we have our businesses, we have our families, and we’re all very passionate about all of it. There’s the overwhelm of how do we get past that what do I write about, what do I post, how do I talk about my product, what do you do with it, how do you talk about it a zillion times.
In your process with the content loop, it puts a stop to that, it brings clarity to that. Let’s talk about what, in your mind, a content loop is.
Kate: In my program, it’s 70 posts that you can use again and again. That does not mean the exact same wording, the exact same tags, the exact same image, and everything is exactly the same. It doesn’t have to mean that. It can, but it doesn’t have to.
It means we start with the messages that we want to share. You’ve done this with me, and we get very clear on why we’re doing what we’re doing, who we’re talking to, what the language is they’re using. Then from there we start to think about what we need to tell people and how.
We break that down. I have questions I ask you, you answer those questions, and then it takes those it arranges them in a certain order to make 70 posts. Then we start building our posts.
The idea is you go through the 70 posts one time, and when you get back to 12:00, so to speak, then you’re going to have to go through them again, and this time you get to change how it’s presented, changing the aspect you’re talking about, change the wording you use, it was a video before, now I’m going to do a still image, or I’m going to do a Live, or I talked about this aspect of why I do what I do and now I want to talk about this aspect.
I’m actually in the process of updating my toolkit, my spreadsheet that I call a toolkit, that I make for each person because as people are creating content, they start to say, “Next time I’m going to do this,” so they’re already building their content for the next time through the loop. I think once you start going, once the juices start flowing, then it’s so much easier. You just have to get into that space.
That’s what the content loop for, so that you don’t have to work so hard each time you post, that you have a backlog of posts that you can refer to and you can reuse. Also, part of my program is all about systems, it’s about batching, it’s about processes.
Shannon: Automating.
Kate: Yes, automating things, doing things is a certain order, doing things all at once. I’m going to give you another metaphor, forgive me. If I told you that when I do my laundry, I put one shirt in the washer, I wash it, I take it out, I dry it, I fold it, I put it away, and then I do the same thing with my jeans, you would tell me that I was out of my mind. Right?
Shannon: Yes.
Kate: You would say, “Kate, put it all in the washer, put it all in the dryer, fold it all, put it all away.”
Shannon: Or at least break it into doable chunks that will fit your timeframe and your machine. Yes.
Kate: So, we do ‘the laundry method’ for creating social media posts. We’re not coming up with an idea, writing a post, making an image, posting it, over and over again.
Shannon: You can, but…
Kate: You can, sure. The funny thing is that for one of my clients I caught myself doing that a couple months ago. I was a little behind where I wanted to be and I needed to get some stuff up, so I was like, “I’ll do this,” then I made it and I posted it, and then I did another. Oh my god, this is taking me so long. Oh, I’m not listening to myself.
So, we talk a lot about monotasking and processes.
Shannon: Speaking of processes, this is your free downloadable. Each page of this is like its own little mini class, it’s amazing, and it’s a few pages. At the end of it, you have this process, which is your Content Creation Roadmap. That process, I’ve paid money to learn a version of that process, and you’re giving it away for free, which is cool.
But this process is how to take a long form piece of content and break it down into smaller pieces. How many do you say in here? I don’t know if you do. How do you take a long form piece of content and break it down into 10 pieces, or 20 pieces, or 30 or 40, or more.
I’ve seen you do this with a book. I’ve seen a spreadsheet where you’ve taken somebody’s book and broken it down into multiple pieces of content, a lot of content. This process is one that we use at Little Bits Media to take a long form piece of content and repurpose it so we’re not having to start from scratch every single time. I love this.
On this page, there is this little thing. When I downloaded this, you had this little tool tip there, and I clicked on it because I hadn’t heard of the tool before. I was like I love you, Kate, you just saved me thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours, that little tool is gold. I spent time today figuring out how to use it, and I’ve already used it on three different pieces of long form content in an hour.
Kate: That’s awesome.
Shannon: It was awesome. I was so excited. It was very cool.
You have in here processes. This is a little sheet on process smart, repurpose smart, this is gold, how to shoot smart, your shot list if you’re doing photography at all, and what to do and how to do smarter on your images, your photography or your videos, which is all in this little free Content Creation Roadmap, which is amazing.
That process, just being able to break it out visually helps people with brains like mine, even the way you visually have laid this out where there’s lots of whitespace and bold headings. Even if we’ve seen some of this information before but couldn’t process it, the way that you’ve delivered it works for my brain, which really likes pictures. I draw myself things, I scribble things in corners, speaking of a little ADHD, it’s just how my brain works.
Kate: I think it’s in my recycling bin right here. I had to sit and draw it out for myself. This is an older version of it, but I had to sit and make a sort of map. What ended up being the roadmap on the last page, I have the sheet someplace, I drew it, then I had to turn it all around, and then I turned it around again. I was trying to figure out how does this make sense.
Shannon: That’s what I do. I can’t start with a spreadsheet like you have for your social media stuff. I start with your process, and I draw it and then go through it. I did this email opportunity drawing for a client the other week, but it started all on paper with drawings, mapping things out.
Kate: I’m a big believer in Sharpies. I have this from our meeting the other day. I’m always holding up a notebook to the screen with a Sharpie. I’m constantly scribbling things like that. I love my Sharpies.
Shannon: For some people, they just need to talk it out, because their brain works that way. Sometimes I just need to talk it out with somebody who gets it, because if they don’t get it, then I don’t have enough oral power to explain it without my visuals. I need visuals to explain it. Some people are visual, like me, and they need that. Some people need to do and feel and touch, and so forth. Some people just need to read it. That’s just how their brains work.
Kate: I try to give a lot of options in my program. We have videos, we have stuff that’s written out in the workbook, we have live sessions where we’re talking, so I try to give people a lot of options. If you’re a person who learns by doing, you just kind of have to do what I say and just do it.
Shannon: I was in the middle of first sprint, because I did your 30-Day Sprint and then I did your Slow-mo Sprint, which we’re just finishing this week. I took a concept that you had shown in your 30-Day Sprint, I glommed onto it, and I went this will work for this other brand that I have. I took it to my VA and said, “This is what I want. This is what I’m thinking. Can we make that happen,” and we adapted it.
I do a lot of quotes, I like to share quotes, so we went through all of my blog posts and pulled out quotes, little snippets, and then we turned that into a loop.
Kate: I’m actually doing that for myself right now. I went through some of the classes that I taught live, the workshops that I taught live, I watched them and I listened, and then I was like, “Oh, I said something smart. I’m going to do a post about that.” So, I have a document going that on each page is just black text on a white background for now, just saying what I want to say. I’ll go through them at some point and pick out the order.
Shannon: We put it on a spreadsheet and uploaded them to Canva, did a thing in Canva, then downloaded them and put them into Metricool on an auto list. That’s not all of our content, it’s just twice a week those go out, but then I don’t have to think about it anymore and my VA is freed up to do other things.
It’s powerful to be able to just repurpose. Not everybody that’s on your list sees your content the first time through, it just doesn’t happen that way. It’s just like now I can do that and I can produce more content, I can help more people, and I can serve more people under different brands. And that came from an idea from your Sprint.
Kate: I’ve had to put my own tools into practice in different ways.
I have a client for whom I take a lot of pictures and a lot of video, so I have to really think in advance about what might I ever want, because it’s food content and it’s not just a question of throw a cookie on a plate and take a picture of it. I’d have to make the whole cookie all over again, so that’s hours of work. I live in a relatively small apartment, my kitchen isn’t nice for shooting, so I have to set up a fake kitchen to work in. It’s a whole thing, so I really have to think ahead for them.
Then I have a different client for whom they do all of the photography, I don’t touch it, I have to deal with what they give me. I have to work a different way with them, but I’m able to sit down and create their content kind of all at once, and then put it up. Then I work on other parts of the project for them, I don’t have to think about Instagram every day.
Shannon: Right. I’m assuming that this shot list checklist that is included in your freebie is from that experience of having to set up shots.
Kate: It’s actually from running my magazine. We would be shooting 36 hand-knit sweaters, hats, mittens, whatever, and you had to get the shot. We would have to get shots of all the details, we’d have to get everything you needed, because you’re not going to call the photographer and the model to go do it again, it’s too expensive.
The very first time I ran a shoot like that, I had an actual spreadsheet with the name of the item, exactly what was being worn with it, the jewelry, everything. The jewelry was in little sandwich bags hung on the hanger that had the dress, everything was super organized. Then eventually I got to the place where I was like this is what we need, and I could do it without having to write that all out ahead of time.
I tried to create a framework for that shot list for people to be able to come up with their own checklist according to whatever it is that they’re shooting, to help them make sure they get everything they need that’s going to work for them.
Shannon: When you have a physical product, like these are my cube timers, I took that approach whenever I get something new that I’m going to share about. I just take pictures from different angles, then video, and then choose from there because I also don’t have a really nice setup that can stay up permanently. I learned that from a food photography class that I took because I like food and we do taste tests.
We were talking the other day about the idea of if you are not working with a physical product, and you’re talking about messages and sharing your messages, how you can batch Reels or short form content, or even video content, so that it’s not something that you have to do every week, or even regularly. You can just batch it in whatever you have energy for, and just change your shirt or change your hair, pull your hair up, whatever it is that you do.
Kate: I’ve done sessions like that. I’ve done half-day VIP days with people where we come up with all of the messages, and then we go through and I say, “Talk about this thing,” and they talk and I take the video. Then I skip down the list and say, “Talk about this thing,” and they’re like, “No, I don’t feel like it,” so we’ll go to the next one. Then they change their shirt or their hair, or whatever.
That way you end up with a lot of video and you can create it all at once without everything looking exactly the same. The problem actually is, depending on how often you’re putting up videos, if they all look exactly the same, if I always see you look exactly like this, and I scroll past, I might think it’s the same video that I’ve already seen. So, you have to at least give some kind of cue that something else is going on, whether that be graphically or with your clothes or your hair, stick your glasses on your head, change where you’re standing, etcetera.
Shannon: Yes. That tool that you shared in your handout, that’s one thing that saved me a zillion times because I have a lot of long form content and I do interviews with private clients, my ghostwriting clients. It’s just a faster way to easily repurpose those into shorts. It’s easy for relatively low cost. That’s one of the reasons why I was so excited because that’s just another way you can get on an interview with somebody, have a conversation or a training, and repurpose some of that very quickly with the right tool.
That’s crazy exciting. Just crazy exciting, particularly for an entrepreneur who doesn’t have a big budget and is bootstrapping it, or a small business owner that doesn’t have a lot of time to sit there and figure out video editing. Something that frees up our time so we can spend more time doing the things we love. It makes a big difference to me.
Kate: Yes. Totally. When you have the right tools, or you can figure out ways to make things go faster or make them go further by repurposing them, that definitely makes a huge difference.
Shannon: Right. You don’t have to always be creating new content.
Kate: You don’t have to reinvent the wheel over and over again. If I’m talking to people who might be interested in me, they’re entrepreneurs, they have too much to do, I’m going to tell them something helpful, I’m going to tell them what I’m up to. It’s pretty clear what I need to tell them.
Sometimes that’s going to repeat because not everybody is going to see every single post that I make. Or you take the same idea and you present it a different way because, like we were talking about, people process different ways, people learn in different ways. Then, on top of that, what is it, you have to hear something seven times or something.
Shannon: It’s even more now.
Kate: Like 12 or something? I don’t remember.
Shannon: I geek out on this stuff, but that’s a whole other thing. But yes, you have to hear a message repeatedly and often in different ways. There’s lots of science there. It is not the same stats and data as it was pre-short-form content.
Kate: Don’t we have an attention span shorter than goldfish now?
Shannon: I don’t know.
Kate: That’s what I heard.
Shannon: I don’t know what the attention span of goldfish is. We are inundated with messages and we have internally learned to block them out. It’s just blinders, we don’t see things that are right in front of us because we’re constantly being bombarded with information. How do we as small business owners show up for people who are literally needing, wanting, and praying for what we have that solves their problem in a way that works for us and our bandwidth and for them?
Kate: That’s part of why in my messaging workshop I’m always like say less, make it really simple. What’s the one thing you have to tell them? Tell them that.
Shannon: Some of us need to hear that a lot.
Kate: I’m not the person who generally needs to hear that. I’m usually like I probably say a little more, but some of us write entire dissertations in our Instagram posts until we run out of characters.
Shannon: Yes. We should probably wrap it up here. Kate can be found at KateGilbert.com.
Kate, do you have one more tip that you want to give or a piece of advice?
Kate: I sort of said this before, but I’m going to say it again. My biggest tip that I think helps in so many different ways is to approach your work and social media like a scientist. This is a lab, you show up, you do an experiment. When the experiment doesn’t go how you want, you don’t take it personally, you look at the results and say it seems like this, so this is my new hypothesis, I’m going to test this. Then you move forward with that hypothesis, and you go from there.
I think if you can approach your work, especially social media work, in that kind of way with some curiosity and without your results necessarily meaning something about yourself as a person.
Shannon: It’s not a reflection on you.
Kate: Nope. The algorithm is going to algorithm, and it’s not personal. If you can approach it scientifically and approach it with curiosity, then I think you can make more progress and also feel better about what you’re doing.
Shannon: I have your voice in my head on ‘the algorithm is going to algorithm.’ I love that. Thank you so much, Kate. I really appreciate you joining us. So many gold nuggets.