We've all had those moments.

The ones where we ask ourselves "What am I doing with my life?".

Maybe it's when we're writing our morning social media post or running through a presentation or sales call. You can feel the pressure mounting. We know that what we're doing is important to us, but we still feel overwhelmed. We question if we're doing the right thing and if we'll ever make any money from our side hustle or freelancing business.

Original content is the lifeblood of the internet. It’s what makes the search engine bots happy, it’s what gives you good search engine rankings, and ultimately it’s what brings potential new clients to your door.

If you are a coach, a creator, or an entrepreneur, and you are struggling to grow your business or your client base, you are not alone. It is absolutely normal to make mistakes when you are just starting out. You don't have the right connections, the right marketing strategy, or even the right content strategy. With so much to learn, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed and captivated by all the shiny tools and systems calling out for your wallet.  

As a coach and creator myself, I know just how easy it is to fall into these traps and make silly mistakes in the online space, no matter how long you've been in it. One of the biggest challenges coaches, creators, and entrepreneurs face is keeping up with their social media. You pour everything you have into creating amazing content that you think your followers will love, only to see it fall flat because you failed to promote it. And then there's the even bigger challenge of creating a consistent schedule of content to stay on top of mind. Some days you can't even think of a blog post idea, let alone write it.

To help you prevent making these mistakes, here are three of the most common mistakes that plague coaches, creators, content writers, and entrepreneurs, and how you can avoid them.

1. Not Writing Often Enough

Let's face it: social media can be extremely time-consuming. Between planning, writing, creating, organizing, scheduling, and responding to comments, shares, and other interactions, even the most enthusiastic and passionate social media users can find themselves overwhelmed by the amount of time it takes to manage their accounts. (I’m guilty as charged! 🙋🏼‍♀️)

Writer's block can threaten your business' success because social media is a cornerstone of your business' marketing strategy. As with any type of writer's block, the key is to find ways to break through the mental blocks that are preventing you from creating high-quality content.

Many people who are new to content writing aren’t aware that it is a skill that has to be learned (and acquired over time). Many think that as long as they just write what they themselves would like to read, other people will share it naturally and automatically. This is a common misconception!

As a coach, creator, content writer, or entrepreneur, you know how important it is to stay engaged with your audience. You know that the best way to do that is through the valuable and helpful content you create. And you know that when you don’t have content, you don’t get engagement. The problem is, it’s incredibly hard to come up with new content ideas on a regular basis. That’s why so many coaches, creators, and writers have writer’s block.

Have you ever had this experience:

• You discovered a pretty interesting blog online but the owner hasn’t published anything new in the past two years. This situation is a tad more forgivable if it’s a mom blog, a personal lifestyle blog, but if you discover a business blog that’s outdated, that hurts the owner’s credibility and makes the reader wonder if this person is still in business.

• Or consider this: how about being subscribed to an email list where the owner disappeared for months or years and then tries to warm you up by emailing again as nothing has happened? If I am on the receiving end, I’ll click on the ‘unsubscribe’ button in a heartbeat because the lack of consistency pushes me away from wanting to learn more about the owner’s business and services.

Solution: Create a consistent writing schedule or outsource the writing tasks so you can avoid both of these scenarios. Life events can certainly affect how frequently someone communicates with their audience but if you’re in business for the long haul to make a profit and impact, you need a smart content writing plan, publishing on a consistent schedule so your audience will expect and look forward to reading your content.

2. Always Sounding Like a Sales Letter

"I'm not a salesperson!" I hear this from industry peers all the time when we start discussing social media strategies. It's a fair sentiment: most of us don't go into business to sell things, and we don't love the idea of hawking our wares to anyone who'll listen. And yet, social media is not just a space for sharing content. It's also a space for selling yourself, and your services. And we tend to get EMOTIONALLY invested based on the time we spend on social media, and we indirectly correlate the time spent to the results we’re expecting.

For a coach, creator, and entrepreneur, it's important to be able to share your expertise without coming across like you're trying to hard-sell your services.

Unfortunately, many aspiring and new coaches, creators have the same common slip-ups, such as posting too much promotional material (ME, ME, ME, BUY MY PRODUCTS) and not providing their audience with enough "value-add" content. (And the latter is what will keep your audience interested and coming back for more.) As such, many have trouble expressing their expertise without sounding like a salesman.

In general, all your content should provide value to your readers, and while there’s certainly a time and a place to use sales pages, BUT not every blog post, email, or video should be a hard sell to your coaching programs, services, or signature product.

You need to be able to have your ideal audience qualify themselves through your content. They should be able to read your content and know if they are in the right situation in order to achieve results in your program or get the benefits from purchasing your products or engaging your service. And if the results/goals are in line with what they are wanting to achieve.

And providing value content is how you speak directly to them and build up warm leads and interest in your offers without paying for ads.

Consider my advice:

Build up at least 3 content pillars for your personal brand and/or business, and rotate sharing valuable content between these pillars consistently. You will grow to enjoy creating content that adds value to your people instead of pushing out mostly promotional posts. It’s a great place to build up your Know, Like, Trust (KLT) factor and engage with your people regularly on social media.

Solution: Answer your readers’ questions. Address their fears. Discuss changes in your industry and how they may affect them. Give them a behind-the-scenes look of your home office, or how you record videos and schedule your content. Show them your customers’ testimonials whose words speak volumes of your work ethics and the results of engaging you. These are all topics people can relate to and they will feel like you’re speaking directly to them, wanting to help them, instead of just wanting their money. And lastly, build up your content pillars.

3. Not Editing or Proofreading Before Publishing

While social media is an easy way to reach out to a wider audience, it is also a wonderful platform for building your brand and connecting with your ideal audience. The danger is that if you put too much effort into it, you can end up spending hours every day on social media scrolling through a rabbit hole, and never getting anything else done.

In addition, we can all agree that it's easier to publish content than ever before on social media. Unfortunately, this also means that content has become a lot less meaningful, as people struggle to even write coherent sentences.

If you want to publish good content, it's not enough to just write well—you also need to proofread your work. You can do this yourself, but it's much more likely you'll miss something that causes you to lose credibility as a blogger, a coach, a creator, or an entrepreneur. Fortunately, there are solutions: hiring a proofreader or using online writing & editing tools such as Grammarly.

Now, let me ask you this. How do you feel when you see typos in your local newspaper or some other authoritative resource? Don’t you wonder why they don’t have a proofreader on the payroll? Does it make them look sloppy or less professional? Do you want that perceived image for yourself on social media?

Solution: Let your content sit and incubate for a few days before you go back to edit it. Use online writing and editing tools like Grammarly. When you look at your content too long, your brain becomes blind to glaring mistakes and if you hit the publish button, any error or typo may cause your audience to perceive that you look sloppy and unprofessional. Also, look into hiring a Virtual Assistant or proofreader on a monthly basis who can review all your communications so you don’t get bogged down with the nitty-gritty manual task.

‘Til my next post, BOSS!

All my best,

Sherlene