Summer's not quite over in the UK, but we're starting to look forward to the new season. Change is in the air!

In our August newsletter we asked you to tell us about the biggest challenges you faced when it comes to producing valuable content. We want to try and understand what you struggle with most around content creation and content marketing, so we can share ideas and create courses and resources that will hit the mark.

Thank you so much for all your responses, received from all over the world. We’ve been digesting them and doing a lot of thinking and talking.

It’s really interesting to hear more about your challenges. And to see that the things that you find tough are the things that we find tough too.

When you’re creating and sharing valuable content you put a lot of yourself into your process, so it’s no surprise that some of the biggest stumbling blocks are emotional, rather than practical.

Your main content & marketing challenges

Most who filled in our survey are small business owners - freelancers and those running their own show. Here’s what you struggle with when it comes to your content and marketing.

We analysed your answers to our pre-set options alongside your freeform responses. Looking at the two together, here’s what we heard, and how we break your main challenges down.

1. Time to get the content written and done is the biggest issue of all

A whopping 65% of respondents find it hard to create blogs and newsletters regularly, and 41% struggle to fit the content creation in. When we asked you to tell us more about your biggest challenge, time to write and think came up again and again and again. We also heard about the tricky balance between doing your work, and marketing your work. “Once I pick up consulting contracts my attention drifts from content marketing.” Prioritisation is an issue for many.

2. Clarity on exactly what to write comes next

32% weren’t sure what people wanted to hear from their business, and aligned to that, there’s the struggle to come up with ideas for another 12%.

“What do people really want to hear from me?”

One respondent spelled out the challenge to get to clarity:

“I need to roll back to decide on my ideal client niche, and then set about a redesign of the website, marketing and comms. How do I break it down into manageable steps?”

3. Writing it right is the third main challenge for you

21% of people worry that their content isn’t hitting the mark, that no one is listening. We heard about your struggle to “humanise technical content”, to make your posts lively, educational and engaging enough, and “not being too clever” in order to reach the right clients in the right way.

Emotional blocks - the biggest content hurdle of all

Underpinning these three main challenges there seem to be deeper issues. In your comments you talked honestly about fear and self-doubt:

“It’s scary to write and put myself out there."
“Is anyone actually interested?”
“There’s so much content out there, how can I do better?
"Why would anyone want to hear from me?”
“It’s lonely doing this on my own.”

This has made us think about the emotional rollercoaster that is trying to market your own business. So many of the challenges you told us about are emotional blocks - from self-doubt to the curse of perfectionism, isolation and imposter syndrome.

Making the time to write is one thing. Having the clarity and confidence to use that time to create and share valuable content is another challenge entirely!

There's a lot of advice out there on what you need to do to market your own business, but little that addresses these softer issues, and as you’ve told us - and we know from our own experiences - they can stop many freelance business owners in their tracks.

Yes, you need to understand how marketing works, and you need a strategy and a process for getting the content done. But what we’re hearing is that you’ll really benefit from encouragement, a sounding board, confidence-building, accountability, and support too.

Your blocks to succeeding with valuable content

Plenty to ponder on here as we craft our courses and our own content resources to help you get unstuck, carve out time and find joy in the content creation process, so you create stuff that connects and propels your business forward. That’s our aim!

We’re still in design mode for a couple of weeks, with a few in-depth interviews with our current students to go, and then we’ll announce the curriculum for this next year.

In the meantime, do let us know, what are YOUR main emotional blocks to creating and sharing valuable content. Drop us a quick email. We’d love to hear from you.

Sonja and Sharon

Survey results -the biggest content blocks are … emotional