6 Steps to Hacking Your Content Creation Process as an Extrovert
There’s so much amazing information out there for introvert business owners. I’ve seen, “I’m an introvert, so I get the struggle,” so many times that I’m starting to wonder if any business people I know are actually extroverts.
I’m a single point over the extrovert line. According to my therapist, that means that I process things by talking my way through them, but I still need alone time to refill my energy each day.
You’d think it would be a breeze to be an extrovert in the business world today, but any business owner in the online space will feel me when I say we struggle with content creation.
As extroverts, we often have our best content ideas in the middle of intense conversations with other people. We talk our way through things, and there’s nothing worse than having to cut off that conversation to write down the brilliant idea you just had.
“Excuse me, could you hold that thought so I can try and get it on paper and pray to the goddess of inspiration that I remember all the nuance I just came up with later?”
Yeah, that’s not happening. We both know that it will never be as good as the way you just said it in the moment.
When your brain likes to talk its way through ideas, you also have the unfortunate side effect of lots of ideas hitting you at once.
The extroverts I know actually struggle more with consistently putting out content, especially if it’s written content. Trying to get your brain to switch into creation mode with a blank page in front of you can be overwhelming for these types.
Content creation for extroverts is all about having a system in place that supports you rather than one that requires you to stop everything to create.
Here’s what my process looks like:
1. I record my client calls.
As a business coach, I always get deep insights into the struggles of the people I work with when I’m on call with them. With their permission, I often record calls so I can grab my exact wording later.
2. Voice messages are my friend.
Facebook messenger and WhatsApp are great for quickly communicating a thought vocally and storing it. I keep notes on which conversations will be worth my time to revisit and turn into content. Voice to text and audio memo software are also great. When you’re bubbling with ideas from a great conversation, leave yourself a quick voice message so you can remember what it was while your mouth still remembers.
3. Hire someone who can cut your content together for you.
Casey Neistat has a dedicated member of his staff that goes through all the interviews, talks, and on-the-fly conversations he has to pull out his content. It’s one of the reasons he is so prolific even outside of YouTube.
You don’t need to be the person writing every single thing you put out, and at the same time you don’t need to hire someone to create your content without your input. Having someone else spend the time needed to get your words from your mouth to paper can be incredibly freeing for anyone, especially extroverts.
4. Use your phone whenever possible.
Your phone is probably always with you. Why not make it a library of all your work? I’ve actually set up my entire business to work from my phone (traveling with a dying laptop made me get creative early on), but you don’t have to go that far. Make sure you have a good cloud system for storing your notes, and get a small bluetooth keyboard for when your thumbs get tired. That’s all you need at the basic level.
5. Find apps that support your process.
This one should be a no-brainer for everyone, extrovert or not. Some of the best apps I found for quickly scribbling down my content ideas are…
- Google Drive. I’ve got an android phone, so this is often the easiest way to get someone down quickly. It’s also how I share files with both my team and my clients, so it makes for easy access later. I also have everything backed up on OneDrive since I find their desktop file syncing less buggy than Google Drive’s.
- Speare. This is the best app I use in my business, hands down. Speare is a web app designed to make writing as easy as possible. They let me jot things down in short pieces as they come to me, and I can use voice-to-text liberally this way. They also have better organization options that Google Docs, so at the moment I’m jotting things down in Speare and exporting to Google Docs when I’m done with them. I’ve gotten my entire staff to convert and we’re loving being able to text ideas to the app on the go and really feeling like the content creation process is play rather than work.
- Reminders or Task Management Apps. I mostly use Google reminders for this (again, it’s built in to my phone and computer, and it gets the job done well), but I’m also experimenting with a new app called Habitica. Habitica is meant to gamify your goals and make them more rewarding in the same way a game rewards tasks. It doesn’t require you to set a time for each task, so I am trying this out as a way to remind myself to invest in content creation daily. I don’t want my little avatar to die because I didn’t take a moment to leave myself a voice memo.
6. Set a time to go back through all the content snippets you’ve generated through the week to make them shippable.
If you’ve followed my other tips, you’ve got a library of content snippets just waiting to be turned into an article, video, newsletter, whatever. Set time aside each week to compile those snippets into something sharable. The process will be ridiculously fast compared to those days you spent trying to come up with article ideas while staring at a blank word document.
As I mentioned earlier, you can also outsource this portion of the process entirely by looping a copywriter or VA in on your content library.
Content creation will always be a source of exasperation for extroverts, but it doesn’t have to become the bane of your existence. Once you have the systems in place to support your genius, you’ll be able to create with ease.
