I’ve been talking to a lot of business owners and if there’s one thing I’ve noticed, it’s that 2024 has been ROUGH.

I know y’all are dealing with a lot—family stuff, aging parents, the economy not being our friend, weird weather…it’s all a lot.

I also know we are not immune to feeling it in our lives and businesses.

So what happens when life starts life-ing, and you just don’t have it in you to keep the content machine going?

That’s what we’re going to talk about.

Give yourself permission to do less

Let’s talk about peripheral vasoconstriction.

That’s when you have hypothermia, and your body tries to preserve heat and keep its core temperature by narrowing blood vessels in your arms and legs, reducing blood flow to those areas. The goal is to save your warmth for vital organs, like your heart and brain.

Your business can have the same version of that. If you only have so much fire in you, then save your warmth for the vital organs of your business. Maybe that’s not trying something new in marketing. Maybe that’s scaling back on how often you post on social – or if you do at all. Maybe that’s taking a look at your analytics and sticking only to the activities that will give you the highest ROI.

Whatever it is, if you’re in survival mode, it’s okay to stick to what’s vital for this season.

Go back into the vault.

All that is old can be new again! And your audience is not paying as much attention as you think.

For example, I had a client who told me in June that she was going through it. Life was life-ing and she needed her attention to be somewhere else over the summer. She simply did not have the headspace to even think about what emails we should be sending out.

So what we did was go through her old emails and identified the ones that had the best engagement. We updated them and sent them out to her audience again.

No one noticed. The information still had plenty of value and she was able to keep in contact with her audience and keep in the front of their minds with minimal effort.

Ask for help.

If you have a budget to delegate, then now’s the time to consider doing that. A good virtual assistant (and I have recommendations if you need someone), social media manager or content writer can help you keep things running when you’re not up for it.

But what if you don’t have the budget?

You can still ask for help and it doesn’t have to cost a thing.

1. Turn to your community. Ask your business besties to share or engage with your latest post. Maybe a friend can read over something you wrote to make sure it makes sense.
2. Shine the spotlight on someone else. Give a complementary business a chance to share with your audience, whether it’s a guest blog post or a cool collaboration.
3. Ask your audience questions. You should always be doing this but asking your audience what their burning questions can help your content write itself.
4. Use AI and other free tools (carefully).  Let ChatGPT help you get started. Grammarly can take the wheel on a lot of your editing.

Be prepared before you need to be.

Fun fact: I used to work as an administrator at a fire station. I learned that firefighters constantly make sure their equipment is ready to go. They’re checking the trucks, their equipment, breathing apparatus, etc. Everything.

A firefighter doesn’t wait until they’re heading to a fire to make sure that their truck is stocked.

I hate to be a Debbie Downer, but life is going to happen. Smooth sailing doesn’t last forever. Whether it’s a sick kid, a flare-up in your own condition, or something else, there’s going to be times when you’re just not your best self.

Don’t wait for that day. Start building a vault of ideas, learn how to recycle and reuse your content and get familiar with easy frameworks that can help you write your content more quickly.

How do I build my vault? I think about everything as content and jot it all down. On a discovery call and someone asks a question? That’s content. When I’m writing a blog, I’ll have a separate document open and pull out chunks that can serve as emails or social posts. When I read something that I find really inspiring, it goes into that document too.  Keep a running “in case of emergency” list locked and loaded and ready to go.

Another great place for content ideas: Wordstream has monthly articles on content ideas. (For example, this is October’s.)

Surviving until you’re thriving

I hope this article helped. Ideally, I would hope you’d never need it, but even for someone as unfailingly optimistic as me, I know that isn’t true. In the meantime, I am always here to answer any of your questions, listen empathetically and help you come up with a plan to keep treading water until this season passes. Feel free to book a call here.