Why does content creation take so long?

Why does content creation take so much time?

Here’s an outline of why content creation takes so much time.

First, it takes a financial planning qualified and skilled writer between 30 and 60 minutes (per 100 words) to create and finish a solid educational Insight of between 2,000 and 3,000 words.

Yes, that sounds like a slow pace of writing – and yes, you can knock out a short 300-word post – at a much faster pace than that.

It just takes disproportionately more time to develop longer form content – because there’s a lot more to think about.

You need to scope the work, consider the right order for your ideas, so they’ll flow like a story.

And you’ll need to undertake a lot more research.

The actual time taken on each Insight will depend on:

• The complexity of the topic – and how difficult it is to find some objective truths – which is difficult in some areas – particularly on questions of investment risk and behavioural science.
• The challenge in making the topic interesting and explaining it in plain English. (You’re wasting your money to create anything else!)
• The length of the Insight which, as noted, results in longer pieces taking much more time.
• The writer’s experience and skill.

Some leading professionals creating educational content in finance and accountancy service, spend more than 60 minutes per 100 words on some sections of their work.

Indeed, some tell me they occasionally wrestle with a handful of words for half a day in the search for that perfect, high-impact phrase.

Of course, in other areas of marketing and branding – around business names and straplines for example, an agency may charge days of effort (and take weeks of elapsed time) to find a string of words to inspire your audience.

They (and you) want your clients to understand exactly what you do – and why your services are valuable.

So, it’s worth spending plenty of time getting that right – although I’m not sure ‘Aberdeen’ should have paid any fee to have their name changed to ‘abrdn’ !!!

So, there are no golden rules here.

All we know is that anyone with a track record of creating content that gets results will tell you it takes a lot of time to:

1. Develop a compelling title, which you may change many times as you develop the content!
2. Undertake proper research to check your claims and the facts – a task on which Chat GPT fails, by the way!
3. Structure the content into a series of sections, like short chapters.
4. Draft and restructure the content – probably several times for longer works – noting that longer works engage people the most.
5. Create or select appropriate images to bring your ideas to life.
6. Edit and re-draft the insight to cut out any waffly messages. (and please don’t pay a writer by the word; you want clarity, not padding)
7. Edit again after your ‘nearly complete’ draft has been honestly and harshly reviewed (for understandability and interest) by people like those you’re targeting with this work.
8. Finish the insight with a copy edit – or use an AI App like Grammarly to suggest improvements.

If your charge-out rates and creative writing speed differ from those assumed here – you can adjust these estimates, but as you can see, this content creation game is not cheap.

Of course, you’ll then have to find time to maintain or replace the content as it becomes outdated.

Your maintenance costs will depend on how much of your library is ‘Evergreen’ – and I recommend creating a foundational programme of that sort of content.

Either way, content maintenance will likely add 10% each year to your upfront investment – so you’re facing a potential cost of around £200,000 over the next 10 years.

Sounds a lot, perhaps, but it’s not much (£20,000 a year) if it transforms the reputation of your business, right?

Head over to this page for ideas to seriously cut back on your content creation costs.

And thanks for dropping in.

Paul