5 ways to reduce stress while growing your audience

Hey friends,

As you know, we’ve been evolving Story Alley to deliver tried and tested audience building resources, tips and tricks directly to your inbox. One thing we haven’t talked about yet is the stress that comes with having to constantly create content in order to grow your audience. It’s rarely talked about, but it’s a source of anxiety, even for the best audience builders.

At Salley, our goal is to put an end to this. We envision a world where building an audience doesn’t have to involve constant stress. In fact, we think that hitting your content goals should be rewarded with things that reduce the stress in your life. What if you got a free fitness class or a meal subscription just for setting a goal and achieving it?! That’s exactly what we’re building. Soon, you’ll be able to set goals and unlock rewards when you hit them. Interested? You can join our waitlist here.

Now, what can you do to mitigate the stress related to audience building before Salley is released? We’ve curated 5 things some of the best-in-class audience builders do to increase their productivity without compromising their mental health.

1. Repurpose content

We can’t emphasize this one enough. The lifespan of a tweet is short, which makes it easy to repurpose. However, this advice also applies to other platforms. For example, it you have a newsletter, you can summarize each post in a Twitter thread. If you have a podcast, you can cut out short snippets and post them on TikTok. The list goes on.

2. Come up with a killer daily routine

Amanda Goetz has built an audience of 80K+, which has allowed her to find investors, recruit a team and launch a women-focused wellness brand. She’s also the single mom of three kids. To manage all of this, she has come up with a daily routine that helps her stay focused and juggle multiple responsibilities.

Finding the routine that works for you may require some experimentation, but once you get it down, it will pay off.

3. Create a personal content cheat sheet

Amanda Natividad went to nearly 110K Twitter followers in the span of a year. While consistency was definitely key to her success, she created a framework that allows her to always generate fresh content ideas.

You can take inspiration from her to create your own cheat sheet, or just copy the one she has. We promise that the content ideas will flow.

4. Work like a lion

This one is pretty self-explanatory but we can’t emphasize it enough. Too many of us feel compelled to work 24/7, but it ends up burning us out. When it comes to creative work, you’re much better off working in short, inspiration-filled bursts. Surely a reminder we all could use.

5. Seek inspiration by exposing yourself to more ideas

Many of us forget that creativity is often driven by connecting seemingly unrelated ideas. To maximize inspiration, seek out different ideas and experiences. You can do this by consuming content about other industries, watching a movie or talking to a friend. You never know where great ideas may come from.

Bonus: our favorite stress reduction techniques

While we love to take inspiration from the greats, over time we’ve also discovered some techniques that help us alleviate stress and recharge. Here’s what we like to do:

• Exercise: few things help us reduce stress more than moving. Our latest obsession: Rumble classes.

• Massages: our monthly treat to ourselves. In addition to helping us relax, this allows us to sleep better and be healthier.

• Sleep: we admit, we’ve been bad with this in the past. But now we try to get 8 hours every night. It boosts performance like nothing else.

• Floatation tanks: we share this favorite with famed physicist Richard Feynman. A monthly float session always relaxes us and unlocks our creativity.

We hope that these techniques will help you stay grounded as you advance on the audience building treadmill. It’s a long, never-ending journey, but it sure is fun.

With love,

Team Salley