Latest / Travel Agency in a Year / Day 210: Batch it or Burn Out
Transcript
- Rachel: Welcome to the Travel Agency New Year podcast. I'm your host, Rachel K, travel agency owner, helping other travel advisors become the CEO of their business through this three free podcast, by the way. And also, you can head over to elevate with Rachel K.com because I do also offer some courses and we have just launched some customized mentoring services for y'all. Okay. Sorry, my chair is gonna squeak. I like to swivel. Ignore the squeaks. Alright, it is day 210 of the podcast. If you've ever sat down to make a post for socials and ended up spending like 45 minutes bouncing between coming up with an idea, trying to film it or write it, second guessing your captions, and then never actually posting it because you're like, this is never gonna be good enough. Today's episode is going to save you hours every single week with this super secret sauce method. I don't think it's very secret. But it's convenient. there's a huge problem with creating content one piece at a time from start to finish, and it is a lack of efficiency for a number of reasons. And I'm going to talk about doing it task by task. We'll get into it. Most advisors treat content creation as one long unbroken task per post. You gotta think of the idea, then you film or write it, then you post it or edit it, sorry, find the pictures, whatever, and then you post it or schedule it and repeat. The problem is that each one of those steps uses completely different parts of your brain. Idea generation is like the creative loosey side of you. Loosey goosey. Filming is performative and energetic. Editing is detail-oriented and picky. I'm the worst at editing because I'm just like good enough post. And posting is administrative. Switching between all four over and over and over for every single piece of content becomes so mentally exhausting in a way that has nothing to do with how much content you're actually making. This is how I've done everything in any business before I even realized social media was a thing. Like way back. Back in my day, before social media was like a very much a necessity for most small business owners, I had a cleaning business. And people were flabbergasted about how quickly and thorough and efficient we were, commercial and residential clients, and that kept our rates low because I did everything based on an estimated hourly rate to get the job done. And everyone was like, how did you get this done so fast? And there's nothing to complain about. I taught my maids to do everything on a task-by-task basis. So they were only focusing on cobwebbing and like dusting off the blinds. That's all they did when they first w came into a property. And then it would be like straightening everything up, making the beds, changing the linens. That's all they focused on. Then they would disinfect like bathrooms or like we did one floor at a time. They would disinfect bathrooms because you need that disinfectant to sit for several minutes to actually Kill stuff. Fun fact. and while that was all being disinfected, then they could go through dust, do any deep cleaning of deep cleaning of any rooms, then all of that was done and ready for vacuuming. Then they would go to the bathrooms or the kitchen, and then all of the floor, vacuuming, mopping, whatever, wood polishing. You can do the same thing with your content creation. You can do the same thing. We're going to talk about this in the next few episodes. In every aspect of your business so that you can become more efficient as a travel advisor. Okay. That is the fix. Instead of doing all four steps of content creation for one piece of content at a time, do one step for your content all at once. And I've mentioned this in previous episodes, but we're gonna go like deep framework and like thorough understanding of this process so that you can apply this to your travel business today. So I brought this up in time blocking way back at the beginning of this podcast. If you are new to this podcast, and It is tied to a subscription program that I have at elevatewithrachelk.com called the Success Circle. And week two of the Success Circle, I talk about time blocking because it is the easiest way to get things done without distractions if you can stick to it. And I go in at length about how I do content creation pretty much every single day of the week, but I'm doing different tasks of the content creation process each day of the week. So, this is gonna be like a more detailed version of that. So, in your first batch, I just said so in the exact same tone and note, like a robot repeating myself. We're going to do this in three batches. Sorry, four batches with regards to content creation. Batch number one, so four days a week essentially. You can do this every day for like 30 to 60 minutes. And on the last day, the fifth day of your work week, you can do your analytics, okay? So batch number one is ideas set aside 30 minutes once a week, once a month, however you want to do it, however often you are creating content to post. purely to brainstorm content ideas. There's no filming, there is no writing captions. Just just a list of ideas. Because you're not switching into performance mode. This step alone often takes a fraction of the time it takes when it's mixed in with everything else. And if you're like, well Rachel, I'm not a very creative person. I can't brainstorm ideas. What I will do all of the content that I consume when I'm like perusing the socials. I'm looking for Content ideas for my own business. Like I and it doesn't have to be tied, it doesn't it's not like I'm going to look at like other travel agencies or anything. And it's not or whatever it is that I want to post, but it I look at other people's content and I think how can this apply to what I want to offer? Will this ever apply to anything that I'm doing in my business? And then I save that video. And then when I'm in brainstorm idea time, and if I'm at like out of ideas or I want inspiration, I just pop open that app and I re-watch those videos because they're like 30 to 60 seconds, right? And I'll be like, okay, do I like this idea? Do I like the sound? Do I like the angles? Do I like how they have this content set up for like the the aesthetics part of it? Like I just kind of like look at it and then I'm like, how do I apply this to my travel agency and what I want to promote? So that is a very easy way if you are like, I suck at brainstorming, I don't know how to come up with content ideas. And while there are many companies that offer you ready-made content for your travel business, we are all different. We all have slightly different messages. You can use that as like a temporary buffer. Eventually you do need to have your own brand voice though. So that is an easy way to help you get the creative juices flowing. And eventually after a few months, you get so used to it, you're like, I could talk about this, I could talk about this, da da da da. And then you don't need that inspiration so much. I do still sometimes like, I'm like, I really like the sound. So I'll save a video specific because I do a lot of short form video stuff. That's my preferred marketing. So I'll save a video just to be able to reuse that sound. Anyway, so that's batch number one. Don't do anything else with regards to content creation in this session. You can break it up and do like ideas in the morning and then the next step in the afternoon if you want a full day dedicated to marketing, but take a break in between each one of these. You can also do it one day each week. It's however you have your schedule and what works for you. Alright, batch number two is filming or writing the drafts. Maybe it's a little bit of both. If you're doing both written and video content, which we'll talk about that, once you have your list of ideas already decided, sit down and film or write five, eight, ten pieces of content in one sitting. Back to back. If it's written content, draft all of it in one sitting. Back to back. If you're doing both, do all the filming at once. Take a five-minute little break. Then all the writing. So you're already kind of like warmed up. You're not restarting from scratch. You've already got your ideas, so now it's like go time. Let's create this content. And it's just the first version, okay? Doesn't have to be perfect. The third batch session is editing. So then you can switch entirely into editing mode. And that's like trimming any video clips, adding all the captions, cleaning up written drafts. This is the detail work and it goes much faster when it's the only thing you're doing rather than something you're squeezing in between your ideas and filming. I do know some travel travel advisors who hire like on Upwork or Fiverr someone to just go vid video. Go video their edit content. Go edit their video content because they're just like, I don't even think I'm good at this. That is an option as well. It's a low cost option. and you always have to weigh your time or your money. So if you think that you can generate more leads or focus more on bookings to bring that revenue in and it costs you less to pay someone to edit the videos versus your hourly wage when you're booking stuff, that's a great option as well. Okay. The last batching is the posting and or scheduling. So you want to sit down once and schedule everything out. the captions and I don't even know if hashtags are a thing anymore. Posting times for the whole batch at once. And this really depends on how often you want to post your content. Some people just do all of the ideas once a month and then on a weekly basis they're filming, editing, scheduling. Some people, if it's written stuff, they can do all the written stuff for once a month and then they schedule it all out for the entire month, but the video is like a weekly thing. if you are trying to get a lot of business, obviously you want to post more often, right? If you're like newer and you want to get the word out there, you wanna be able to post more often. If you are not quite comfortable already yet, but you still want to get the message out there, you don't have to post as often. There's a ratio of how often you post versus how much you're gonna get attention for potential leads. Okay, if each one of these four steps, let's do some mathy poos, took you 15 minutes per piece of content separating it out, 15 minutes coming up with the idea, 15 minutes filming or drafting the written content, 15 minutes to edit, 15 minutes to get it all together and post or schedule. One piece of content will take you an hour. If you're doing five pieces of content, that's five hours. That's an entire workday, and you're gonna be like, ugh, how does anyone keep up with posting content regularly and showing up like that? Because there's so much mental switching baked in. When it's batched, those same five pieces might take 45 minutes for all of the ideas. You probably get ten, honestly. if it's short form video content. might maybe twenty minutes to film it all because you're just gonna be in set. And I'm gonna tie this into like wedding photography. The bride and many wedding with many wedding photographers post ceremony often is just kind of standing there. The photographer makes the dress look a certain way and then people come in because they can get more photos in once everything's set up. The way the photographer wants things to look, that is aligned with what the bride and groom want. And the bride's usually got the more intricate or like, you know, she's got a br she's got a wedding gown on. She can't just be running around. The groom is usually in a tuxedo or suit. That's a little more flexibility, right? Same thing with your content. if you have everything set up you can just go go go go go with your content and filming it. So you can end up doing all of this for the entire week instead of five hours. You can knock it down, get double the content, and it'll take you about three or four hours. Total. You've saved roughly one or two hours, possibly produced twice as much content, just purely grouping everything by task instead of context switching four different times per post. All right. That is day 210 of the Travel Agency in a Year podcast. Tomorrow we make we take the same batching principle and apply it to something just as draining if it's handled piecemeal. The operational sides of running your agency. Payments, client emails, trip audits. Boring. Don't switch from one thing to another because this is also why I like to have my notifications completely on silence so I can focus on the task that I'm doing for my business. We'll get into it tomorrow. That was day 210 of the Travel Agency in a Year podcast. You have a wonderful day.