Being a solopreneur is exhausting. In the world where content is the king, the workload gets more and more ridiculous. Some people (OK, it’s mostly only Gary Vee) go as far as claim that quantity is more important that quality. I used to be offended by that notion, now I reluctantly tend to agree.

This is the thing: the Internet is getting louder and louder. To stand out, you have to produce something of unsurpassed quality that is better or more innovative than anyone has ever seen before, or simply increase the odds of getting noticed by pumping out more content. And let’s be honest here, #2 is far easier and more realistic for the majority of content creators. It sounds incredibly tedious, but it’s feasible.

And that’s where we hit a roadblock: we have finally figured out what to do, the question now is how to find time and will to do it. Being on social media daily is unbelievably time-consuming. On top of it, you have to have a strong command of your attention span to make sure that it doesn’t drift away.

So, how do you keep up with all the work? You need the right tools.

The simple truth is that noone, even Gary Vee, expects you to spend all day on social apps. Creating content “in the moment” is authentic, and is great to connect with your followers, but it is the most exhausting way to produce content.

Instead, you can create your blog posts, images and videos in batches, and then schedule them to be posted in the appropriate time slots. You can use apps such as Planoly, Buffer or Hootsuite to set up scheduled posts and have everything on auto-pilot. Services like Tailwind allow you to re-use your old content and integrate Pins from other people to enrich your feed. The list of useful tools varies from business to business, and you might need to Google different options to get the ones that will cover all the social profiles that you need.

They’ll make your life so much easier, I promise! Your workload is at least 20% less, and you don’t have to set up notifications and alarms to get your content out there. Stuff gets posted when you work on something else – and you don’t have to get distracted to upload yet another Instagram picture.

Bonus tip – turn off notifications for likes, and leave them on for comments only. I cannot stress enough how much this little change effects your social habits. There’s no more obsessive phone checking and jumping at every buzz once the post has gone live – I just check on the comments in an hour or so to make sure that anything really important gets my attention.

Bonus tip – turn off notifications for likes, and leave them on for comments only.

Social might come naturally to some people, but it’s not easy for me. I’m the type of person who doesn’t enjoy the highs and the lows of social media, its hits and misses. I prefer consistency instead.

One bad post with poor engagement would throw me for a spin and make me wonder why I’m even bothering. I know that a lot of people feel this way too. But remember, it’s not your fault that social media website are what they are. You just have to play the game if you want to be a part of it.

I let social media crush my soul for a while, but it’s over now. Not being able to manage my social media presence has led me to believe that I might not be as hardworking and dedicated as I’d like to think, until I realized that I just didn’t know how professionals play their part in this game.

This post is really just an introduction to a research I’ll be doing soon – practicing consistency on social media to see how much difference it makes.

Growing social media profiles still takes a lot of time and effort, but I like how the focus switches to creation and scheduling rather than last-minute chaotic “authenticity”.