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I’m Hailey – content strategist and founder here at Your Content Empire where we help you create more profitable, purposeful and productive content — and hopefully enjoy yourself more while doing it too. Learn more about me here >>
If you're a business owner who creates content there is one practice that will help you come up with more stories, more original ideas and just more words overall—journaling! But diving into journaling can be a little tough without some guidance (and great questions) so in this post you'll find my top journal prompts for entrepreneurs to help you get started.
When I started journaling I found that I was more focused on the right things, reflective on what needed to change and how and more tuned into my own voice. I can’t wait to show you a behind-the-scenes of my process and hope it’ll inspire you to come up with your own!
There’s a reason journaling has become such a popular trend, as it:
There are so many other benefits of keeping a regular business journal – but my favourite – using your weekly journal as a GOLDMINE for content to share through blogging, social media, and other content outlets.
So in addition to all of the ways journaling has benefited me personally, it’s also been one of the best things I’ve done for my content strategy.
The biggest thing that I use my journal for is to help me create content—like my newsletters, some extra shares for social, thinking through presentations, even mapping out new systems. So once a week (Sundays), I’ll start by coming up with the areas I need to journal on. For instance, this week I’m working on my next month’s newsletters, a new welcome sequence and updating our team onboarding systems.
Then once I have the general areas decided, I come up with the questions for each individual email, post or project. For each piece of writing, I come up with 1-3 questions to guide the writing.
So for instance, with the weekly newsletter that sends this blog post to my community, I might write:
And I’d repeat this process for each of my pieces.
Then I format the journal by having 1 page for each piece of writing with the questions at the top and a box for writing. I create this in Google Sheets and then export it as a PDF to my iPad.
Every morning, after my am routine, I start my workday by completing one page. This wakes my brain up, starts my day working on something creative and primes the rest of my day to be more creative too.
I do the same thing as a way of wrapping up my workday too. I move to my couch, snuggle with my pup and complete one more page.
Depending on how many pages I have, I may do one mid-day as well or spend Saturday wrapping up the rest of the pages.
My Sunday morning ritual includes everything I need to do to prep for a great week ahead:
For my business journal, this is also when I process my previous week’s writing. I’ll type out my writing for the week. While the app I use (Noteshelf 2) lets you auto-transcribe your writing, I like to take the opportunity to edit things as I go. Once I’m finished typing it up, I move the pieces of writing to their proper spots (my editorial calendar, project folder, etc.) and then create the next week’s journal.
I can say with confidence that journaling has been one of the best things I’ve done for my content strategy. By creating a weekly business journal, building journaling into my am and pm routines, and processing my journal as part of my Sunday routine, I’m guaranteed to have a goldmine of content always on hand that I can share through blogging, social media, and other content outlets.
I promise that adding journaling into your schedule will do so much for you, personally and for your content.
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