Yesterday, my husband and I had friends over for brunch. After a few hours of chatting together, the boys retired out to the backyard to talk about manly things (RC cars and bicycles, I assume?) while my friend and I stayed inside to talk about womanly things, like entrepreneurship.

She and I are both authors who are branching out from the traditional “write a book, sell a book” model of running our businesses. She’s building a membership community, while I’m creating Story Rebel.

Different businesses, same basic problems: defining audiences, creating sales funnels, nailing messaging, pricing what we’re worth, and...

Oof.

Staying consistent with our content.

Which, yeah.

Most entrepreneurs I know struggle with this. They’re wearing the hat of “marketer” along with every other hat, and content creation takes a lot of time! It’s easy to feel like you’re caught in a hamster wheel you can’t break free from—and it’s extremely easy to fall out of that wheel.

Sound familiar?

If so, you might have told yourself you need more discipline. But that’s probably not the case.

You’re an entrepreneur, so I’m guessing that you’re a goal-oriented person who normally gets things done. The problem is that there’s just SO MUCH to get done.

And creating content—newsletters, blog posts, social media—takes a ton of time.

Here’s the thing, though. It doesn’t have to be such a time suck.

How much time are you wasting on content?

Think back through the last few times you sat down to create content for your business. Where did you spend the most time? If you’re like most people I’ve talked to (and like me), your biggest time sinks are probably:

1) Trying to figure out what to say

2) Trying to say it perfectly

When you know what to say and you’re confident in how it’s coming out, the content flows.

When you’re spinning your wheels, second guessing your topic/audience/message, and then—once you’ve finally written it—spiraling around whether or not it’s perfect?

That takes forever.

I promise, it’s not that you’re “not a good writer.”

I’ve worked most of my career in content marketing. I’ve worn a marketer/strategy hat a few times, but mostly I’ve worked in the trenches as a content creator, creating pieces according to the strategy the marketing team at Amazon or Whitepages Pro or wherever was crafting.

I can knock out a blog post, no problem… when it’s for someone else. But I spun my own wheels until I finally did some soul searching and realized I was ignoring a glaring, basic lesson from my career as a content marketer.

So here’s the real reason you’re wasting time on content.

You're treating content as one job, when it’s actually two.

Getting off the content hamster wheel

Most entrepreneurs are acting as content creators, stuck on a hamster wheel of creating individual content pieces and hoping against hope they connect with their audience.

But if you’re an entrepreneur, you need to be a content marketer.

There’s a thousand courses out there on how to go viral on TikTok, how to use AI to write your newsletters, and how to slay with LinkedIn posts.

And those are all great skills for content creators to have—as an entrepreneur, you’ll probably still have to be your own content creator for much of your business.

But fewer people are talking about how entrepreneurs can become content marketers. And if you can do that, I guarantee we can fix those time wasters we talked about above. (And then some.)

Let’s dig in a bit deeper.

Content creator —> Content marketer

What do I mean when I say there’s a difference between a content creator and a content marketer?

In most marketing departments, those are literally two different roles. You have someone with a birds-eye view developing strategy and deciding what needs to be created, and someone at the ground level creating the pieces.

Most solopreneurs I know know they need to be spending time on strategy but end up scrambling in the creator role, never able to catch their breath enough to strategize.

We can do better—and I can teach you how to put on your content marketer hat without adding too much more to your plate.

(Partly because once you start acting as a content marketer, you’ll wast a lot less time when you put on the content creator hat.)

So.

What’s the difference between the content creator mindset and the content marketer mindset?

Content Creator Mindset

• Focus is tactical, piece-by-piece: “What can I post today?”
• Measures success by likes, views, or going viral.
• Works in isolation: each blog, video, or reel is its own project.
• Consumed by output (“I need to post more, faster, better”).
• Often reactive—posting because they “should” or saw others do it.
• Content feels like a to-do list item rather than a strategic lever.
• Priority is creating more efficiently (faster writing, AI tools, batching).

Content Marketer Mindset

• Focus is strategic, big-picture: “Where does this fit in the customer journey?”
• Measures success by business outcomes: leads generated, conversions, sales.
• Works in systems: sees how each piece flows through the funnel (TOFU → MOFU → BOFU).
• Consumed by impact (“Is this moving people closer to becoming clients?”).
• Proactive—plans content to match launches, seasons, and customer needs.
• Content feels like an investment in growth, not just busywork.
• Priority is strategic alignment (clear messaging, storytelling, funnel fit).

In other words:

Once you get in the habit of acting like a content marketer, the questions a content creator asks basically answer themselves. No more spinning your wheels trying to figure out what to make, or stressing about whether or not it will work.

Time to get practical

Welcome to the start of a new series about content marketing. (Thanks for the idea yesterday, Tonya!)

Over the next few weeks I’m going to break open the toolbox of professional content marketers for you, and help you claim these tools for yourself.

We will:

• Address the root causes of “I just don’t know what to say”
• Learn how to think strategically and create a content calendar
• Build systems to keep your content marketing on track
• Demystify metrics and learn how to asses ROI
• Learn how professional content marketers save time by batching and reusing content
• And more.

Along the way, I’ll give you tours of the different tools I use to speed up content creation.

And—oh yeah.

I’ve also got some tricks up my sleeve to help you beat that perfectionism time suck. ;)

I promise this mindset shift will actually free up time, not add more things to your plate. So if that sounds good, stick around. We’ve got a lot to talk about.

Talk soon,

Jessie