How Reflecting and Realigning Has Shifted My Content Buckets

There are a few things that clients tell me they’re planning to do that always make me cock my head to the side and ask whether that is the most effective use of their time right now. These things are my alarm bells of procrastination. They’re the things that scream of someone fearful of putting their business out there, and therefore busying themselves with Very Important behind the scenes work that no one will ever see and that won’t make any difference. Updating their website is one of these things.

And when I say “updating their website” I mean anything that will take more than an hour. I’m not talking about an important clarifying tweak to sales copy or adding a couple of buttons to make sure people are being directed efficiently round the site. I’m talking about changing page hierarchies, re-categorising blog posts, changing pictures on posts from three years ago. Every few years a website refresh is nice but 9.5 times out of 10 these deep back end jobs are a waste of time.

So guess what I’ve been doing…

You may have heard me talk about content buckets before – certainly if you’ve taken Campfire you will know allll about content buckets. Simply, content buckets are how I describe organising your content themes. You have 3-5 thematic buckets that you can fill up with ideas for blog posts, captions, newsletters etc., and these make sure everything you publish is varied yet on-brand. My own content buckets (Simple Marketing, Simple Working, Simple Living) were also the categories on my blog, and it was all very neatly tied in a bow like I really knew what I was talking about.

However, over the last year in particular, I’ve known my content buckets haven’t been quite right anymore. I could never think of anything to say for two out of the three, and realised at the end of last year that every single blog post had been put into Simple Working for months. I had a content vat, rather than a nice selection of buckets.

What was happening was that my purpose, and the focus of my work, was shifting, and I hadn’t got around to changing the buckets yet. It was as if me and the business were on one of those airport conveyor belts, moving tediously slowly away from the buckets that were still on firm ground.

This is one of the reasons I never did anything about it, because the conveyor belt was moving so slowly it didn’t seem to matter; the buckets were still in sight, they still just about made sense. I also didn’t do anything about it for the reasons outlined at the beginning – I knew that this was fiddly structural work and I always had something more important to do.

Until I started trying to plan content at the beginning of this year and just felt ugh about it. This is an alarm bell because I never feel ugh about planning and content because it involves my two favourite things: planning, and content. As I sat there looking at my content buckets (again, if you’ve taken Campfire you’ll know the buckets are integral to my planning process) I just sort of…hated them? They looked so out of date, so like a relic of what I was and so antithetical to where I wanted to go. More importantly, they didn’t seem reflective of my work and my purpose. They needed refurbishment.

First of all I wrote down my Why, and then stared at it for a bit. In all its Instagram bio perfection I was struggling to chip it apart and into themes, especially as I’ve been using Simple Working/Marketing/Living for all these years I was struggling to break out of their framework. So instead I wrote down, in the most basic way I could, what I wanted to do: help people create fulfilment. Ok, that’s what the content has to do. Now, in what ways can I help them do that?

That was the unlocking. You see, the reason this is hard because I know what the content I’ve been putting into that one content vat has been doing, but putting into words something you know so intently is so hard (I talk to Agnes about this in this podcast episode). I needed to crack open the way into wording this wordless knowing that was inside me. I also found it helped to group the topics I wanted to cover and try to find a word that summed up all those topics.

And so, after several iterations, here are my new content buckets (and blog categories!):

HOW IT FEELS

the emotional experience of living/working differently; staying the course, personal insights, trust, mindset (if it’s not glaringly obvious, this was the hardest one to name)

CLARITY & ORGANISATION

planning, goals, productivity, focus

INTENTIONAL ACTION TAKING

knowing what to do, efficiency, actions

This really makes explicit the shift that has been happening in my work over the last year. It’s not really the marketing stuff itself that’s hard for people; it’s not hard to, say, write a newsletter, and there’s practically nothing you can’t look up how to do. What’s hard is how it feels to take a risk and believe in yourself. What’s hard is not being able to focus and having no clue where you’re going. What’s hard is not knowing which of the five million things you could do are actually best for you. And that’s what, actually, I’ve been talking about for a long time. But now I have blog categories that say I talk about it too.

While it was faffy, and I still believe that doing this kind of thing is mostly procrastination, it did remind me of the importance of having everything aligned. I often talk about marketing being a big machine with lots of moving parts, and when one of the cogs deep in the oily middle is wonky wow the rest of the machine goes weird and makes an awful noise. Sometimes you do need to take it all apart so you can give it a clean before putting it back together – but only if you can look me in the eye and promise it’s not procrastination.