effortless content creation, set up your studio for maximum output

Summary

content creation only fails because of friction. fix the friction and the content makes itself. my framework is EASY.

1. E, effortless setup. a permanent studio. lights stay up. mics stay plugged in. camera stays framed. if you have to set up for every shoot, you’ll stop shooting. the goal is zero setup cost between idea and recording.

2. A, automated production. outsource editing, captioning, publishing. your job is to create. someone else’s job is to produce. trying to do both yourself is why creators burn out at 6 months.

3. S, single channel focus. pick the one channel that fits your strengths and lean into it for 12 months minimum. shotgunning every platform looks like effort but produces nothing that compounds.

4. Y, yield consistently. a publishing schedule you can actually hold for a year, not a sprint you abandon in week 4. consistency beats quality, and consistency beats volume.

content is a long game. the only way you stay in it long enough to win is by removing every excuse to skip a day.

Transcript

introduction to content creation challenges and strategies for consistency

The most impactful business is the business that genuinely improves another human, a better human business. And to grow a business like this, you have to continually improve yourself. This podcast is a documentation of that thesis, scaling businesses and also personal growth. My goal is for you to shortcut this journey.

So if you’re ready to try hard, subscribe. If you like what you’re hearing, please share and enjoy. Today I’m going to show you how to make your content creation effortless so you can actually stick with it for once while still growing your business. This is the better human business podcast. I’m Jerred Moon and I’ve seen it over and over again from entrepreneurs.

They know they should be producing content. They want to, they start and they fail. They just can’t maintain that consistency. And I’ve been a business operator primarily for the last 10 years, meaning not a content producer as my private primary job, but operating and growing a business as my primary job while being incredibly consistent with producing content.

tips for setting up an effortless content creation environment

At the time of recording this, I have done 419 better human business podcast episodes. This feed that you’re listening to right now, 419, it was formerly the better humanology podcast. I also have the garage gym athlete podcast where we publish over 888 podcast episodes. This is over the last 10 years.

I’ve been doing this stuff for a very long time. So that’s over 1300 podcast episodes. I don’t know if we’ve ever missed a week ever other than intentionally this past Christmas taking off like the week of Christmas and letting listeners know we were going to do that. So I have maintained a lot of consistency for a long time and my primary job is not content creation.

It has always been to be the business operator and the biggest thing I have learned in consistently publishing content over the last 10 years is you have to make it easy and I got a nice little acronym worked out for you here. So let’s go over it. Easy e a s y e you need an effortless setup. If you’re watching the video version of this, I’m going to actually take you to the back end of my office so you can see my light setup, my camera setup, my audio setup, everything in between.

So you can watch and see exactly how I have everything set up now for everyone listening. Basically what I have set up lights in my office. They’re permanent. They don’t come down. The lights are always up in here for the video stuff that I do. I have a H six zoom handy recorder that this microphone that I’m speaking into plugs into.

the importance of automating production to focus more on content creation

It’s a permanently attached to my desk. All I have to do, hit record. Same with my camera. It’s not on a tripod. I don’t have to get it out. It is sitting on, um, basically a, uh, it’s called a small rig. It’s basically attached to my desk. The camera is permanently attached to my desk and ready to go framed up how I want it.

And it also has a dummy battery. The dummy battery is a battery that plugs directly into the wall. So I never have to charge this camera. The whole goal in here is like everything is just easy. If I had to set up lights or set up a tripod or charge batteries, I’m not creating content as funny as that sounds.

Like it’s just, it’s going to be too much work. I have too many other things to do today. I can’t just set up, you know, for two hours and tear down for two hours. Like all this stuff. I, I just need to have everything ready to go at all times. So you need to think about that in your setup. What kind of effortless setup could you have?

Like I’ve recommended a lot of people, like you don’t need the lights, the camera, you know, everything, whatever you’re going to commit to, you, you can get there eventually. But ultimately do you have like an old iPhone? Like you know, sometimes we trade in our iPhones and we, maybe we don’t have the, or we don’t trade it in.

the benefits of focusing on a single channel to ensure quality and mastery

We just get the new one. We keep the old one. Or maybe the next time you do this, keep the old one and just have it permanently set up on an iPhone tripod, something like that, that you can just have set up, you hit record, you’re good to go. You got your content created. It’s just there permanently.

Make it easy. Make it effortless. So that’s the E the a is automated production. So I, when I first started producing content, uh, I very quickly when I was doing the podcast, realized how time consuming it was. And I actually really enjoy some video editing and audio editing. I’m not necessarily good at it, but I do enjoy the process of trying to finalize these files and make them sound awesome.

All these kinds of things. It’s, it’s fun to do, but ultimately not worth our time as business owners. So you have to automate that production. And so what does that automation look like? Well, I’ve done this two different ways over the last several years. It wasn’t until the last year I’ve actually hired full time team members to help with audio production, video production, all these kinds of things.

But that’s because I’m, I’m purposefully trying to scale up and make things better than they have been over the last decade. But I used to just record this microphone straight USB into my computer and we use descript for a long time. So you can go check out descript, but ultimately I recorded it there.

It goes to the cloud and then I would have somebody else edit the podcast, do all that, publish it. I don’t have to worry about it because when I was doing all of that, when I first started producing content, I realized it was, it was taking hours. Like I had to prep the content, shoot the content, edit the content.

the critical role of a no-fail publishing calendar in building audience trust

And I know some of you are probably doing that now. You have to automate that. You have to hand it off. So when I’m finished recording this, uh, I have added a step because now I have SD cards. I’ll dump these SD cards on my computer. After I dumped them on my computer, they go to Google drive and now I’m done.

So I do have that one step of, I have to upload the files, but now everyone else knows the process of, okay, we got new work. So video editor starts working on that podcast, a guy starts, you know, uh, producing the audio, getting that published to the feed, all those kinds of things. So I’ll map out the process.

the necessity of long-term commitment in content creation for brand growth

I may even do it the first couple of times to make sure I understand the process and then farm it out immediately. Like I said, I have full time people who do this now, but you don’t have to start there. You can start with, uh, Upwork, Fiverr, all these places where you could hire someone. So for relatively cheap, cause they’re doing a lot of different podcasts and you know, a couple of hundred bucks a month and you have somebody who can just publish and get your content up there without you having to worry about it as much.

So that’s the a automated production. The S is single channel focus. Now this is where I see a lot of friction get added to the content production process. If you’re like, all right, I want an email newsletter. I want to consistently do Instagram. I want to consistently do YouTube. I want to have an audio podcast.

I want to, you know, be on tick tock, all these things. Now some of these things can be reused and that’s great. And I do think that if you can expand to all these different places, go for it. But I built my entire business on blogs at first because I didn’t want to get my face in front of a camera.

I didn’t want to talk. And then after blogs, I moved to audio only podcast. Now these audio only podcasts still went to YouTube. Like garage gym athlete has over 10,000 subscribers and we’ve never really put a lot of effort into building that YouTube channel. It’s really just the audio version went.

So like an image, but the audio is there. So anyway, single channel focus. I went from blogs and then I went to just having audio only podcast and I did that for years and years and years. It wasn’t until this past year that we’re getting more serious about video, increasing audio quality, bringing in lights, all this kind of stuff.

It’s only recently we’ve done that. Now I think that you should focus on one single channel and get good at that and have it mastered, have the effortless setup and have the automated production. And then once you feel comfortable, you’re like, all I have to do is jump on here, record the podcast. Then I’m done.

I handed off to my team, my contractors or whatever, and you do that for a single channel. And then after you feel like that channel is kind of mastered, then you can move on. I even did this recently when I started producing a more Instagram content. So we were doing Instagram reels. I would batch this content, I would shoot it all.

And then it would go to the team. We did that for six months before we ever started doing a video version of the podcast because I wanted to make sure that process was good and it wasn’t going to be too time consuming because ultimately I need to focus on growing the business. I need to be the business operator, right?

So having that single channel focus is really important. So master one, whether it takes you a week, a month, six months, and then move to the next and make sure that you have the team in place to continue to scale on these different channels. Now the last one, why is yield consistently? So what I challenge most entrepreneurs to do is to have a no fail publishing calendar and set it for whatever you think is reasonable for you.

So no fail publishing calendar. Can you do one podcast per week, one video per week, one video per month? It doesn’t matter how you start, especially if content is not a major part of your business right now. Just be consistent. Just be consistent and have that no fail publishing calendar. Then you’re going to commit to it to a certain amount of time.

So if you’re like, I will publish one podcast episode per week and I will do that for a year, I recommend minimum one year. I know when I first started my business, I was blogging and I said I was going to blog for three years and then I would see how it goes. It’s because I had another job at the time I was making income.

There was no rush for me to switch. I didn’t even know if it’s possible back then to have an online business that was going to work. But think about the time commitment there. Three years of writing blogs before I decided to do anything else. Now it started to work. Obviously I started to generate income.

The business started to grow. But you have to commit to this content creation process for a lot longer than you think. It’s not, oh, I’m going to consistently do Instagram content for six weeks or I’m going to consistently do a podcast for six months. Podcasts are very hard to grow. They take a very long time to grow and same with you.

Every channel, to be honest, takes a long time to grow these days. So you need to have your no fail publishing calendar, whatever it is, weekly, monthly. I do recommend weekly for most people and then have it be consistent over a long period of time. One year, two year, three years, and that’s not going to be a big deal.

If you have the effortless setup, the automated production, you’re only focused on one channel. You’re going to be able to yield consistently, but ultimately you need to be producing content for your business. This is only becoming more and more important as time goes on, as AI takes over more and more industries, your personal brand, or at least your personality in your brand.

And I think that those are two different things, right? It’s like, well, I have my brand, do I need a personal brand as well? It’s like, well, you can build a personal brand so you can pivot, launch new things, whatever. But you can also inject your personality into your current brand. And that is also another way for people to know, like, and trust you and to grow your channel and to ultimately get more leads, get more customers.

So if you are failing to do this, you’re not producing content, it’s probably not because you don’t want to. It’s just probably because you have too many friction points that are stopping you. So eliminate all of those friction points, yield consistently, run your business, and hey, try harder.