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Cut my content costs from $500/mo to $0 after realizing I was overcomplicating social media
Posted by on February 19, 2026 at 1:08 amSharing what worked for me after a year of wasting time and money trying to figure out social media for my business. Nothing groundbreaking but it took me way too long to figure this out so maybe it saves someone else the same loop.
The expensive lesson: outsourcing content to someone who doesn't know your voice is a waste of money.
Hired a freelancer. $500/month for 12 posts. The content was fine generically but it didn't sound like me. People who knew me noticed immediately. On platforms like LinkedIn where personal brand matters, generic-sounding content is basically invisible. Cancelled after a few months with nothing to show for it.
The DIY trap: if a post takes 2+ hours to design, you will quit.
Tried making my own carousels in Canva. Each one took about 3 hours. Got maybe 400 impressions on the best one. Did that three times and stopped because the time investment made no sense. This is the part nobody talks about: the bottleneck isn't ideas or strategy, it's the production time per post. If you can't sustain the process, the strategy doesn't matter.
What actually clicked: you're already creating the content, you're just not distributing it.
This was the realization that changed everything. I was writing newsletters, blog posts, long prospect emails, client decks. Thousands of words every month. And then opening a blank canvas trying to create social content from scratch. Once I reframed social media as a distribution channel for content I'd already written rather than a separate creative exercise, the whole thing got simple.
Pick one platform and go deep.
I was trying to post on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram. Different formats, different audiences, zero traction on all three. Picked LinkedIn because that's where my audience actually is. Focus made everything easier – one format to learn, one algorithm to understand, one audience to build.
Batch repurposing is the only process that scales for a small operation.
Once a week I take whatever I wrote that week: newsletter, client notes, a long email, etc, and turn it into 5-6 visual posts. Carousels, quote cards, that kind of thing. Takes about 15 minutes because I use a tool called wavegen that just converts written content into those formats automatically. The point isn't the specific tool, it's the workflow of repurposing rather than creating from scratch.
Results after 3 months:
Went from posting nothing to 4-5x per week consistently. 2 inbound leads last month just from people seeing my content and reaching out. That's more than the $500/month freelancer ever generated. The posts aren't agency-quality. But they sound like me and they actually go out consistently, which turns out to matter way more than polish.
The TLDR for anyone stuck in the same cycle:
Stop creating from scratch. Repurpose what you're already writing. Pick one platform. Make the production process fast enough that you can actually sustain it. Consistency compounds and it beats everything else.
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1 Reply
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The production time bottleneck is so real. I went through the exact same Canva phase where every post took hours and I just stopped. Repurposing what you already write is the move that most people overcomplicate for no reason.
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Ya I think outsourcing is usually not worth it as the cost is not worth the sub-par content. Repurposing is great, and/or do what I do: sit down and write a post each morning. Once you get into a good routine and keep a list of topics so you don’t have to think one up each day, you can knock them out in 5-10 minutes, and/or write 4-5 in one sitting and you’re done
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