Creating content, building communities, & promoting it at the same time is not easy.

Content Creation vs Content Promotion - finding the perfect balance.

Sometimes we focus too much on creation and forget about promoting. Or focus much on promotion and forget about the creation.

So what is the good balance when it comes to creating content vs promoting it?

How much time you should spend on research, writing, promotion, building community etc ?

Following is a very simple rule of “1234” that all content creators can follow.

Research & create - 40 % of your time.

Most important part of a content creators job is to create.

You cannot just create valuable from thin air (unless non-fiction), so we need our research.

Why you should not spend more than 40% of time for research? While content writing is very important part of content creators job, if you are not promoting the content you create, no one is not going to read/watch or enjoy it.

Many creators make mistake of solely focusing on content creation and expect others to magically find the creation.

But in most cases: well promoted average content performs better than high quality less promoted content.

So never spend more that 40% of your total time for content creation. There are many other things to do next.

Optimize and Reuse - 30% of your time.

I realized early in my blogging career that it is possible to make a living with just 10 high-value web pages ranking first on Google.

We often forget this and put our effort all over the place.

Converting/reusing/optimizing content will provide great value to you.

For example, converting videos made for your TikTok to YouTube shorts, clipping YouTube video for shorts, converting blog post to video, video etc. are best examples.

Another option is reusing posts made for one social to others. For example converting tweets to Facebook posts, converting Twitter thread to blog post, blog post to twitter thread etc.

Rule suggests that minimum 30% of your time should be dedicated for this.

Learn & implement - 20 % of your time.

Learning new things and implement those on your content marketing campaign is another ignored part of the process.

This is also the time you can use to update website design, add a new feature, optimize social media profiles, learning new techniques etc. and more.

Industry and the tech around content marketing is moving very fast. You need at least 20 % of the time to keep up with it.

Share and build community - 10% of your time

Posting and sharing the content you created, monitoring the progress, creating reports, posting updates and interacting with members of the community. 10% is dedicated for that.