I have always loved writing content, whether it is articles or eBooks, or even blogging about my personal life. Whatever it might be, I have always really enjoyed sitting down, authoring some content and publishing it.

Over the past few years, I have found it nearly impossible to be able to achieve this. My primary role in my business now is communication. Communicating with my team, with clients and ensuring that this occurs means that I am constantly receiving emails, phone calls, and instant chat messages from all these sources. Therefore, being able to block out time, free of distraction to write content has been an incredible challenge for me.

So whenever I am now faced with the challenge of time, the question I ask myself is “how can I outsource this?”
When it comes to writing content and articles, you can of course outsource it to a ghostwriter. How this works actually ranges from being able to simply provide a topic or keyword to the ghost writer, right through to producing a framework for them to follow and convert your thoughts into the content that you require.

There are aspects of my business where ghostwriters are useful and in those cases I have other people create content. However, when it comes to creating my own personal content that I want to put my name too, I felt that I needed to do that myself. But as we have established, I had neglected to do it for many years now because of the time commitment. So I put my outsourcing thinking cap on and I came up with a solution that works very effectively.

I’m going to outline it to you step-by-step of how I create content for a minimal time investment.

 

Step 1: Saving my thoughts

Ideas for articles can come to me at some of the strangest times. Watching movies, exercising, working, talking with friends, whatever it might be, ideas can suddenly pop-up in my head for an article that I want to write. So I use an iPhone application for creating a list to record those thoughts down quickly.

The greatest advantage of this is that my iPhone is with me 99% of the day. It’s always within reach and it is also small and discrete enough to be able to quickly type in a thought no matter what environment I am in.

In the application, I have a list created for every topic or area that I create content for. Whenever an idea arises, I create a new item in that list, give it a title and add a few thoughts to it quickly. I often just record the title and come back to it at a later time and add a few key points ready for the next step of creating my content.

 

Step 2: Audio record

Using my iPhone, I plugin my hands-free system, open my list application, pick the next topic and record the article into my voice memo application. I speak word-for-word about how I want the article to be written. Even for this very article I am recording the content directly into my iPhone as I am driving.

This was the key step for me to be able to achieve the goal of writing a large amount of content each day. I am now utilizing what normally would be wasted time for me (i.e. driving) to create the content that I want for all my websites and publishing platforms.

It is simple and easy to do and because you are not presenting the audio, it can be rough, full of mistakes, pauses, coughs and it does not have an effect on the end product.

 

Step 3: Transcription

At the end of each day, I upload all these recorded files to a shared folder that some of my team have access to. This process takes me about three minutes to complete, from importing the files to dropping them on the server.

One of my team members’ regularly checks this shared folder to look for any new audio content. Once it finishes uploading, she will transcribe this audio recording into a written article, formatted with paragraphs, headings and anything else that I have outlined in the audio recording. The file is then saved, left in another folder on the server that I can access.

 

Step 4: Fine-tuning

Once the article has been transcribed, I only need to spend about ten minutes reading through the article, making small formatting changes, and varying a few words. Mostly this is due to the fact that I repeat a lot of words when I talk and I like to correct those in the written content.

 

Making use of the time that I have:

Now, I have a completed article that is ready to be published. Considering that when I am driving somewhere I am already investing my time, an article takes about ten minutes on average to author. That is the total time investment that I need to do to produce content everyday. So now for about half an hour per day, I can produce around 3000 words of content that can be published across my different channels.

It is a simple process but an effective method for outsourcing something that many people have said to me cannot be outsourced. In the past, I have tried using ghostwriters by giving them topics and an outline of points but the content I get back just did not feel right. It might be acceptable to use them on other areas, but when I’m publishing content attached to my name, I feel that it has to come from me. That is why for many years I didn’t create any fresh content until I came up with a method for being able to write a thousand word article, in around ten minutes.

Everything you do can be outsourced. Whether it be to a remote team, or somebody else working for you in a bricks and mortar office. It is just a matter of thinking creatively on how you can channel correctly the time that you spend working in your business.