MBA1317 How to Take a Content Creation Break + Free Ride Friday!

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Visit Dell.com deals. Hey, today is Free Ride Friday, so make sure you hang on to the end of the episode to hear who won this week's Free Ride. Every Friday we give away a lifetime membership to one of our courses, one of our programs. These days we're giving away easy course, our 30 day course on how to build your own online course. It retails for $500 over at EasyCourse Co, but somebody's gonna win it for free. If you want to win, just leave us an iTunes rating and review and you enter our weekly random draw we call Freeride Friday. Listen in on Friday to see if you won. It's that simple. It's our way to say thanks for showing us love on itunes. All right, let's jump into today's episode. Hey. Welcome to the Hundred Dollar MBA show, the business podcast for action takers. That's why we deliver daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher, Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of the Hundred Dollar mba, a complete business training and community online. And in today's episode, you will learn how to take a content creation break. Whether you run a podcast, a YouTube channel, a blog, you're turning out content piece after content piece, week after week. But there may come a time where you need to take a break, you may want to go on a long holiday, a sabbatical, or some sort of major event in your life like a wedding. And you need to stop producing content. What are your options? How do you hand, how do you manage expectations for your readers, listeners, viewers? What do you do? A lot of people ask me this question, you know, it's a daily show. How do you ever take a break? Do you ever take a break? We'll talk about all that and more, including if you actually just take a hiatus where the content stops coming out. So much to discuss. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business. So how do you take a content creation break if you have a content creation schedule where, where you produce a certain number of pieces of content every week, whether it's a podcast, whether it's a blog, whether it's a YouTube channel, whatever it is, Your listeners, your viewers, your readers are used to a consistency. They're looking forward to it. They're waiting in their inbox and the next post gets published. You may not believe this, but this is true. I didn't believe it. So how do you meet those expectations when you just need to. To take a breather? Well, you have basically two options. You can either keep the content going while you're on break, or you can have the content stop going. But you need to actually inform your audience, and we'll talk about that option as well. Now, with option one, I'm not saying you actually work when you go away, when you write blog posts, while you're on vacation or on holiday, when you're exploring, you know, the Himalayas. No, what I'm saying is you use the batching method, and that's what I do, where you get ahead with your content. So say, for example, you have a weekly blog and you publish once a week. And you know that four months from now, you're going to go away for a month. You're going to finally take that trip to South America you always wanted. But what are you going to do in that month? Well, that's where batching comes in. So normally you write one blog post a week, but knowing that you're going to be gone for a month, the month before you leave, instead of writing one post a week, you're going to write two. But you're not going to publish both of those. You're just going to publish one. The other one you're going to save for that first week you're going to be away. You're actually going to just schedule it in your blog, so it automatically publishes while you're gone. Same thing the second week, the third week, the fourth week. By batching and getting ahead, you do the work in advance and you just release it to the world when they expect it. I do this for the podcast. I batch episodes. We try to get ahead as possible. About a month to five weeks ahead, just in case something happens, just in case I need to travel. So just in case I get ill. What if I get sick, I get the flu and I can't be on the mic, you know, with a podcast, if you don't sound good or you've lost your voice or you're coughing, you just can't do it. So you have to get ahead. So batching is my choice. Now if I know for sure I'm going to be away, I'm going to be on holiday, I'm going to be shutting off for a certain amount of time. I even try to get even more ahead so that that covers the holiday as well as the lead time. Now batching is a bit of work to get ahead, but it's such a relief when you go away. You know that the podcast will publish, you know that the blog posts will publish. Same thing with YouTube. Even if you can't schedule your YouTube, you have the videos ready, you can just upload them and go live. Or even you could just put them in your account area or they call the YouTube studio, make it private. You know, upload and make it private. But then hit publish or make it public when it's time for you to go public with it. And you can probably just do it on your phone. So simple. And you get to enjoy your break and your audience doesn't miss a beat. So what about option two? What if you just stop delivering content Now I actually know people that do this. They actually take a break. No more blog posts, no more newsletters, no more YouTube. You're just not going to hear from me for a while. I know that Paul Jarvis does this. Paul Jarvis is an award winning author, speaker, business owner. Company of One is his latest book, awesome book and a friend of the show. He has a great guest teacher lesson about having a small business and being a company of one. Check that out. It's episode 1183 and Paul takes pretty much the last couple of months of the year off. Somewhere around November he says, guys, I'm done. No more newsletters from me. You're not going to get anything from my inbox. You're not going to get anything from my blog. I'm Taking a break. And I'll see you back, you know, sometime in January. I don't know the exact dates, but I know it's a big chunk of time. I think it's like two, even three months long. And what he does here is he gives his audience a heads up. And it's kind of his thing now. People know that, hey, Paul's taking a break. He's gonna take it easy. And he actually chooses a pretty good time because it's during the holidays. People are so busy during the holidays, they miss a whole bunch of emails, and it's a good time to kind of wind down. And he gives them all a heads up, hey, I'm not going anywhere. This is just a break, and I'll be back on this date. And when he's back, he's back and he publishes and he keeps running newsletters, and it's all back to normal now. I think this is actually a pretty good option if you have an established audience. You know, Paul's been doing this for, you know, over a decade, but if you're just starting out and you still don't have that consistency or that raving fan base, then the inconsistency of, you know, being off for a couple months may hurt you a little bit. But I think it's totally an option if you've been doing this for a couple years and you want to take a solid break. It's also in line with Paul Jarvis's brand. You know, he believes in enough, like, he works just enough to have enough money to live the life he wants. He doesn't believe in just, like, making as much money as possible and just accumulating wealth. He values his time. He values his time off, and he talks about this in his blog and kind of practices what he preaches with this method. I actually admire that because he is preventing himself from burning out. A lot of people burn out. You may know the YouTuber Casey Neistat. He had a daily vlog for a very long time, I think over three years, but it just got too much for him and he had to stop doing it. He even admits it on the video that he talks about. Stop doing the vlog. But it's good to be consistent. But make sure when you commit to some regularity, some consistency, that you can stick to it in the long run, whether it's a weekly blog or weekly podcast or whatever it is. We have a daily podcast here on the $100 NBA show, over 1300 episodes. We've been doing it for nearly five years. Just under five years right now. We have a very well oiled machine. It's not just me doing this. We have, you know, our producer, Nicole Balduna. We have Carl, our sound engineer and editor, Connor, who's our content writer, does the show, notes, make sure everything gets published, sends out the newsletters. We have a team behind this, you know, and I'm able to be on top of it because of the team. And my job is to come up with the content and record these episodes. I have a batching system. I have certain days that I record certain hours where I'm off basically line and I'm just in front of a mic right now recording my episodes. But it does take a lot of time. It does take a lot of commitment to be consistent. And if it wasn't for the batching, I would never be this consistent. And it's probably one of the biggest things people are impressed by with the show. Like, wow, you've been doing this for five years, that's incredible. 1300 episodes. I'm on like episode 50 and I'm getting tired. Well, that's why it's very important for you to do something within a system that is comfortable for you. Create a system that you can stick to as well as do something that you enjoy. I love the podcast. It's one of the things that is an outlet for me, a creative outlet for me. You know, I'm a CEO of a company where I'm doing a lot of managing and making tough decisions and dealing with other types of stress. The podcast for me is a way to give back, a way for me to share my experiences, what I've learned along the way, and somehow help people that were in my position, you know, not that far, long ago. So it really helps to be consistent and not feel burnt out when you feel that way about the content, about the actual content creation process. Thy ticket lady, Jennifer of Coolidge.

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So when it comes to your content creation, whether you decide to batch and publish, even when you're gone or when you're taking a break, or you actually take a solid break and let your audience know.

The point here is you need a plan.

You need to plan ahead. You can't be publishing that piece of content that's due tomorrow, today, or worse, the same day. Having a publishing schedule, having a plan, and planning for taking some time off is gonna be a lifesaver. Trust me, that first time you go away, on vacation, on holiday, on travel, if you're traveling for business and you don't have to work on that blog, work on the podcast, work on the video, because you've already done it, you've already planned for it, or you've already let your audience know what's happening, you feel great, you feel organized, you feel like you got your things together, so to speak. Well, there you have it, guys. That wraps up today's lesson. But today's episode's not over. It's Free Ride Friday. Let's see who won this week's Free Ride. And the winner is Ibisione. Ibiscione says simply amazing. 5 stars. I love the short teachings from Omar and his guests. I listen to it daily when I'm in my car and when I'm working out. Definitely one of my favorite podcasts. Keep up the great work, Omar. Well, thank you ibc only for the amazing review. You are a Free Ride Friday winner. Your mission is to email me over at omar100mba.net so I can hook you up with the Free Ride to Ezcourse. If you want to win a free Ride to EZCOURS, our 30 day course on how to build your own online course retails for $500 over at EasyCourse co. Just leave us an iTunes rating and review and then listen in on Friday to see if you won. It's that simple. It's our way to say thank you so much for leaving us some love on itunes. All right, before I go, I want to leave you with this. One of the things I love about batching and having a content creation plan and planning for these breaks is that it forces you to commit. It forces you to take this seriously and see content creation as the backbone of your business, really, of your content marketing system. By getting ahead, you're really investing in your business for the long run. Thank you so much for listening and I'll check you in Monday's episode. I'll see you then. Take care. Of.

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