Hello and welcome back to the Messy Mompreneur podcast! I’m your host, Alysha Sanford, and I’m so happy to have you here.

If your fall season feels like a whirlwind of school schedules, client work, and never-ending to-dos, this episode will help you breathe again. I’m walking you through a simple, life-first content rhythm designed for busy mom entrepreneurs and small business owners who want to stay consistent without burning out.

We’ll talk through my three-part marketing framework, a sample batching schedule that actually works for work-from-home life, and how to repurpose your blog, podcast, YouTube or email content so that you can spend more time with your people—and less time chasing the algorithm.

Main Topics included in this Episode

  • Why simplifying your marketing this season matters
  • My three-pillar Life-First Marketing Framework
  • A four-week batching rhythm for creating and repurposing content
  • How to stay visible without daily posting and inevitably doom scrolling
  • Encouragement for balancing parenthood, business, and the rest of your personal life

Resources Mentioned

  • “The Friday Mix" sign up (A weekly newsletter with a mix of tips, insights, recent favorites, tools and resources that I don’t want to keep from you!)
  • Metricool (scheduling game-changer)

Connect with Alysha

Music Licensing Info

Music by Eli Lev - Dancin' on the Lawn

Link

Episode Transcription

Hello and welcome back to the Messy Mompreneur Podcast. I'm your host, Alysha Sanford, and I'm so happy to have you here. If you haven't listened to the previous episode, please stop right now and go listen to that one first because it gives you a lot of context into where this show is headed. Please listen to it. And anyway, if you're ready for this one, let's jump in. If you're listening in real time, it is the fall of 2025. Your inbox is already filling up your To-Do list and workload is piling up. School's back in its germ season and you need to keep showing up online. But what if you could lean into less and still move your business forward? What if your marketing could feel easier instead of heavier, especially in this season? If you're juggling life's work, maybe little ones, this episode is definitely for you. I'm going to walk you through a simple fall friendly content creation routine, one that leans on strategy and system so that you don't burn out. And it also keeps you top of mind for bookings during the slower season following the holiday craze. What you'll walk away with today is going to be my core life first marketing framework. A batching schedule that you can adopt or adapt practical tips and tools that I actually use and encouragement for doing less but better. Why simplifying matters right now? Well, life is full, especially if you have kids and you've got work and then health concerns with germ season, your energy is finite and not to mention the holidays coming up. That's a whole other thing. But marketing doesn't take a holiday. Your audience still needs to see you. Simplifying isn't stepping back, it's being intentional. About where your effort lands. Systems let your marketing work for you and not against you. OK, so I want to introduce my framework for life first marketing. This is what I taught my workshop on in person about half a year ago and to go through the entire presentation, it would take us well over an hour. There's a lot to it as far as like all the detail, but an overview that I want to share. With. You today is made-up of three components. The first one is what I call your digital home base. That's your website and e-mail list where you control the space. You're not reliant on an algorithm, and you're also. Safeguarding your business for the days that Instagram is unavailable or Facebook is glitching or whatever else that always happens and it's out of your control. You don't own your audience in those. Platforms and so you want to make sure that you have a Direct Line of communication to your people and access to all your messages that might be important. Don't let them live on just social media. So your website and e-mail list, these are your anchor. Everything else that you do and create should feedback to these two things. It should point back to it. It's your big picture. The second component is your content ecosystem. So we're starting with long form content and that is in the form of blogs, podcasts or YouTube videos and that becomes your whole big picture content. It is the fundamental content. And I'm going to have a whole different episode on. All of this but. It's what you should put your attention and focus and time into. It should live on. It shouldn't get lost in a social media feed and you should be able to link back to it for resources and then repurposing that long form content, chopping it into social media posts, emails Pinterest pins. So much more. Umm. Yeah. Repurposing for the short form content with the short shelf life on social media. And the third component for life, first marketing would be your connections. This is your community, your collaborations, your referrals, your client experience and testimony. Meals. These people focused touch points helped to carry you when content slows again. If we if we lost the Internet today, you would still have these in place and they are so, so powerful people trust other people, especially people that they know they already trust, they love. They will. I should find a statistic. I'm not prepared with one, but I know firsthand how much a good review and word of mouth. Can add to your business, so focus on it. You don't need to do all three of these components perfectly, so pick one or two to nurture this season and work to build your full system out as you find the time. I would personally start with your connections and all of that. Start there. Start with people. OK, so I'm going to give you a sample batch rhythm for fall and you could do this any season, but it's especially helpful during fall. We're going to go through an example month, so let's start with the first week. Focus on creating your long form content, so write and publish one blog post or record a podcast or a YouTube video. Just something that can live on and you can repurpose. Make sure to include keywords so focus on SEO. For extra searchability and discoverability and real quick, if you're not as comfortable with SEO and keywords, it is. Basically what your ideal audience or client or customer is typing into their search bar. What are they asking? How are they wording it? Use those words, not jargon, that they might not be familiar with. That's more industry specific. Answer Client questions in this long form content. And have clean calls to action. Once it's live. Optimize it for search in Google Search console. If it's a blog, just to make sure it's being indexed OK, so Week 2 focus on your e-mail marketing pull snippets, stories, tips. And. Takeaways I guess from the long form content piece Draft 2 to 4 newsletters in that one sitting from that one. Heavy long form content piece and then link back to it. Week 3 would be your social media content, so repurpose that blog content or the podcast or the YouTube into multiple social media posts. You can design reels, carousels, graphics stories using the same talking points. And justice sprinkled through. This gives you kind of a theme for your social media posting that month instead of being all over the place. Everything has a bit of a theme and. Common topic and you would point back to that long form content to drive people back to where they can learn more and drive the traffic to your site and off of social media. I would start with the social media post types that take the least amount of effort or cause the least amount of stress. Like for me personally. I feel like I lose so much time when I'm designing carousel posts or creating detailed reels because they're just. It's hard when they glitch, obviously, but. If you're a perfectionist or you overthink things, which I'm an overthinker carousel post, take me forever and it just. I would much rather stick to Instagram stories that are more spontaneous, but. Personal and a static post. That's what I'm more comfortable with. So just start with your comfortable. And then schedule it all so that you don't have to think on it daily or remember, oh, shoot, I got to post today. Let me hop on real quick. Before an appointment or whatever. So I personally use the metric tool for scheduling and this one. If you create your free account, you can always upgrade. You can connect all of your social platforms and even more you can connect to your website, your blog, your Pinterest account, your YouTube channel. There's so much you can connect and it's like one main dashboard to do your planning and scheduling and posting. And it's a serious time saver. But it also keeps you organized. I have a link in the show notes for you if you're interested in metric cool. OK, so week 4, you're going to focus on traffic and amplification? So you're going to design and schedule Pinterest pins that lead back to your blog or your video, or your podcast episode. Use keywords and those keywords everywhere. Monitor your Google search console for indexing and impressions. Share blog posts with partners, clients, and collaborators. We've talked about sharing it in your e-mail, but you can always share it in a client resource or if you have an onboarding process. Or any client. Communication that's regular with many services that you provide. You can link to. There. And then make sure to update your Google business profile and your posts there so that you can be found even more on Google. You can pause or flex the rhythm around your life, so even doing this for one to two months gives momentum into and beyond the holiday season, and you can do more than that. You can even. Start with a couple of. Long form content pieces. If you're wanting to batch batching and batch work. And reducing your task switching, there's a lot of power in that, and that can save. You so much time. All right. So that was the example of what you could do for kind of a rhythm for a month of work to set you ahead for the coming season. What I'm doing so that you can see it in real life or visualize it. I guess in the middle of this past summer, I slowed my daily social media posting. Aside from spontaneous stories and shares and networking, I wasn't focused on posting daily or weekly even we were. In the middle. Of a move. Life was crazy. There's just I had to obviously prioritize how I was spending. My time. So I focused on one blog post per week because for me that just comes naturally. I guess. I don't know. I like to write and create, but I knew that these were long form content pieces that my time would be best spent in. So I did that one a week and I would even batch them when. Could. And then I would send out my weekly e-mail. Yes, it's a newsletter, but. It's. It's a fun twist that I started mid-summer or early summer, I guess, and I call it the Friday mix. You can sign up for it in the show notes. It's really fun and I share a lot of snippets of recent. Blog posts, tips, learned lessons, favorite tools, discounts, links. Freebies and even favorite episodes of other podcasts that I listen to, because as you've heard me say, I'm a podcast junkie and I actually counted as a side note, I counted how many shows were in my subscribe list on Apple Podcasts. I subscribed to 64 shows, which is. Insane and some of them are maybe seasonal and I don't always listen to every episode of all of them because there's just no way. But I have listened to thousands of hours of podcasts over the last, I think, five years now. And I like to share my favorite episodes in that Friday e-mail episodes that I think are way too helpful not to share with. You. So yeah, sign up for that. Yeah. So I focused on the blog post and the e-mail each week and not social media. And these two anchors kept me visible without burning me out, and I knew I could always get back to repurposing for social media later, which in real time right now I'm getting back into. But it wasn't my focus then, and it doesn't have to be when I don't have time. I've just recently resumed. The repurposing. But I'm giving myself grace while I stay present with my family and my clients, especially coming into this busy season. So this is your invitation. You don't have to maintain perfection, just maintain progress. All right. So the key takeaways and what I want you to remember doing less with better systems will outpace doing more in a frantic state, your long form content library, which is the blogs podcast, YouTube videos, is your gold mine. Everything else should flow from it and point back to it. Batch plan and schedule what you can. Don't just fully wing it day-to-day in busy seasons. Choose one area your digital home base, your content ecosystem, or your connections to strengthen now on, and work on the rest later. And give yourself grace. Consistency over perfection wins long term. You don't have to do it all, you just have to do the right things with intention and the right systems let you rest while your content carries more of the load. If you want a printable version of this batching plan or a template, drop this episode into your ChatGPT chats and ask it to build you a step by step outline based on today's points. If you haven't done this before, it's pretty cool. I've done it with a couple of other podcasts that I couldn't take notes for. I was just in a rush and it. Created the notes and even a checklist for me, so try it if. You. Want you can DM me on Instagram at hey, Alicia Sanford or send me an e-mail to tell me which part you struggle with the most or share when you give this a try. And make sure to subscribe to the show for so much more to come. I would hate. For you to. Miss out and remember your business is part of your life, not the other way around. Let's build marketing that supports you and doesn't drain you. Or require your constant attention on social media. I can't wait to see how this season unfolds for you. All right, until next week. Bye.