The night before: It’s 10:00 p.m. on a weeknight. Everyone’s asleep – the kids, tired out from their daily shenanigans, the husband from work and being an equal parenting partner. I quickly take a shower and prep for my upcoming client call at midnight. Tonight I am doing a Skype session with a client 12 hours behind, time zone wise. We will be talking about building a content strategy for her real estate business. I have a clear idea about her business thanks to our earlier discussions. So tonight’s session will be purely focused on actionable advice to help her focus and create content that meets her business objectives. I am excited about this one because there’s so much potential!

9:00 a.m.: The kids are in school and I need to have a video uploaded ASAP! I start the upload to YouTube, and spend considerable time on the following: writing out a title that can be found through organic search (YouTube is the second-biggest search engine after all!), writing a description containing keywords and adding tags and metadata to help the search organically. Then, I head over to Canva to design the video’s thumbnail because a great custom thumbnail is what gets clicks on your vids.

10:00 a.m.: I go to my website to write a blog post around the video. I embed the video inside the post and then turn the transcript into a blog post. The blog post needs to be easy to read, easy to scan, contain certain elements (such as anchor text links to my call-to-action, custom tweetables). I add in custom tags, featured images and then use an SEO plug-in to work on the metadata (or in layman’s terms, tweak how the post will show up in search results).

11:00 a.m.: Now that this piece of content has been created, I need to work on distribution channels. First up is the email newsletter. My subscribers hear from me regularly once a week (and more when there are special announcements). I craft the contents of this week’s email newsletter using a pre-designed custom template. I schedule the email to go out at peak open times according to my subscribers’ past behaviour. Then I schedule my social media posts pertaining to that week’s topic. Each piece of content gets three to four different headlines (to test) and at least two images associated with it.

Noon: Once the content creation is complete and scheduled to be delivered, I am on school pick-up duty for the kids. The afternoon is largely devoted to being a mom. Hey, I need the cuddles to recharge me!

3:00 p.m.: With lunch over, I take a bit of downtime to schedule my social media calendar. I hop on Twitter, YouTube, Instagram and Facebook, respond to comments, answer emails, see what people are talking about on Facebook and Quora, read a book chapter or magazine and so on. I usually get tons of ideas from this focused browsing and reading and those ideas are then brain-dumped into an Evernote notebook specifically for this purpose.

4:00 p.m.: My editorial calendar tells me it’s time to work on my guest posting commitments. I plan out article outlines for the existing places I write for regularly – Entrepreneur.com and The Huffington Post. Then I plan out one to two more guest post pitches to niche content marketing sites. These will eventually aid in increasing web traffic. I then work on the sales page for a DIY course I am building on content marketing tools and tips. This is for entrepreneurs and start-up marketers who want a system they can use and replicate for their business.

6:00 p.m.: I meet up with entrepreneurial friends for an evening chat. You know what they say about being the sum of the six people you associate with the most – yeah. I like having smart friends around who are building their own businesses; it keeps the competitive spirit kicking in me.

7:00 p.m.: This is purely family time. We reconnect; have dinner, play games, talk.

10:00 p.m.: It’s time for another Skype session to end the day; this time I am being interviewed on a podcast! I absolutely love doing these, because meeting and talking to other content marketers around the globe is amazing for exchanging ideas and furthering our respective reach. My interviewers today are two gentlemen from Ireland with the cutest accents, haha! I am going to enjoy this interview as I settle down with my cup of green tea.

Salma Jafri is the host of weekly video show Content Marketing Tips on salmajafri.com.

info@salmajafri.com