“Do not many of us who fail to achieve big things … fail because we lack concentration — the art of concentrating the mind on the thing to be done at the proper time and to the exclusion of everything else?”
— John Rockefeller
Does your content creation process enable you to achieve your business objectives?
More growth? Profit?
The ability to adapt and improve at a quick pace?
Sometimes it’s challenging to identify the weaknesses in our current process.
But as the 80/20 principle suggests, there’s only a handful of inputs that create exponential results.
I want to share how you can identify these inputs and create exponential results.
Your Content Creation Efforts Are A Process
And within that process, there will always be a constraint that jams the “flow” of content.
Why is this a problem?
Your online business success is in direct proportion to your ability to produce value for your audience and customers.
And your content serves a major role in producing this value. If you aren’t producing both high quantity and quality content… then you’re producing less value.
This puts constraints on your overall business success!
One way to identify these blocks in your content process is by looking for the bottlenecks (and removing them).
The Theory Of Constraints
Dr. Eliyahu Goldratt introduced this Theory of Constraints model in his 1984 book, “The Goal.” Since its conception, it’s evolved and used across multiple business domains.
The basic idea is that every process has a major constraint that’s jamming the “process throughput.” It reduces the flow of the process, hindering your progress towards your objectives.
- A car accident puts constraints on the flow of traffic.
- Toxic relationships put constraints on your happiness.
- Unhealthy foods put constraints on your vitality and energy.
And by unjamming this constraint, the flow improves.
The constraint sets the pace for how fast you progress towards your goals.
If this bottleneck isn’t addressed, it could create some serious problems over-time. Imagine never addressing your health bottlenecks…
But if you can quickly identify these constraints and solve them, then you’ll have a more optimized system in place.
Identifying these constraints is vital.
The Theory Of Constraints And Your Content Process
I started to notice that I had a large quantity of content laying around. These were pieces of content that had been published on one platform… and then never used again.
Something needed to change. I wanted to use these pieces of content to add more value to my audience.
This would allow me to stretch the value of every piece of content I created.
*Side note: Any accumulation of resources that are a “Work In Progress” usually indicates that a bottleneck is nearby.
For me, this meant that I had a bottleneck at the re-purposing phase of my content process.
So I began experimenting with ways to solve this constraint.
This included re-purposing content on different platforms, consolidating relevant content together, etc.
This improved the flow of my content process.
Perhaps you’re having a “duh” response. But when you’re in the trenches of your own process, these bottlenecks tend to be blind spots.
How can we identify them more easily?
Here’s How You Can Identify The Bottlenecks In Your Content Process
Here are the three questions you’ll want to ask when identifying bottlenecks:
1. What needs to be changed?
2. What should it be changed to?
3. What actions will cause the change?
Let’s use my example above to break this down.
What needed to change? I wanted to use the content that wasn’t being utilized and re-purpose it across different platforms/audiences.
What should it be changed to? Having a system that re-purposes this content without spending an obscene amount of time.
What actions will cause change? Develop a system that organizes my content and consolidates relevant pieces together (and then distribute them to the appropriate platforms).
What are the constraints in your content process?
Your ability to diagnose these constraints and quickly resolve them will increase the “flow” of your content.
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