One of my favorite parts of running a business, is finding ways to streamline & optimize workflows, and when done right, the business is more profitable as a byproduct.
I want to break down this blog into a few different sections. In the first section, I want to discuss how you can actually create a streamlined workflow in general, and what that process looks like. The second part of this blog will be about how to streamline content creation since that’s a problem many of us are dealing with as adult creators. Then the third part of this blog I want to focus on streamlining the scheduling and publishing process. Finally, last but not least, I want to discuss streamlining social media promotion. There is a lot we will be going over so I'm going to jump right in.
How to create a streamlined workflow
The main thing you need to look out for in your business is where you can optimize it and deploy resources to make things run smoother. An obvious way to tell where something needs to be streamlined or optimized is when you feel friction. Friction feels like obstacles, challenges, and places where you procrastinate in your business or fall off track in terms of consistency. The places where you notice these things repeatedly happening in your business, are a good indicator you need to come up with a process or system to prevent it from happening.
Now that you know the tell-tale signs of where the friction exists in your business you can start to build a system or process to optimize for that fail point. Now I'm sure you're wondering "How do I create an optimize a streamlined workflow for those fail points?" This is actually easier than people think.. The way you create streamlined workflows is to imagine your business like a bucket, and everywhere there are fail points in your business it represents a hole in your bucket. As I'm sure you can imagine, if you have a hole in your bucket that means you are losing whatever the bucket is trying to hold - and in the case of business, the water in your bucket is the revenue in your business. Sometimes you can imagine that the water in the bucket isn't just revenue but also fans or subscribers that are getting away because there are holes in your bucket. Streamlining a workflow is essentially finding ways to clog the hole in your bucket. Creating a workflow means you have to identify the problem that's causing the hole and come up with a process to put in place to try and stop the hole from getting bigger or eliminate the whole completely.
One example of this we can use is the retention of subscribers on an Onlyfans page. When I notice that I am losing more subscribers than I am gaining, that tells me that I'm having difficulty retaining my current subscribers, and keeping them actively subscribed to the page. That shows me I have a hole in my bucket. How do I fix that hole? I create a retention offer, that gives expired subscribers 60% off if they return & resubscribe to my page, & I mass message expired users once a week, with that enticing offer to bring them back. Since I started doing this process, I’ve made over $100,000 off expired fans returning to my OF page. That was a 6-figure hole in my bucket. And ultimately I even automated this process using a feature on Fanwire, a software that helps automate things on your Onlyfans as well as provide advanced data and analytics. So now, the expired messages go out the day a user expires automatically with my 60% offer to bring them back. That is how I streamlined the new workflow. I identified the problem, I came up with a solution, automated or streamlined as much as possible, and filled the hole.
Now that you have an idea of how to create a workflow, & streamline it, let’s talk about some obvious fail points in adult creator businesses and I’ll share some of how I’ve personally streamlined workflows to overcome them, because you may be able to take my personal workflows, tweak them as needed & simply implement them into your business.
Streamlining Content Creation
One of the fail points for me as an adult creator was the challenge of creating new content consistently. As many of you know, I run my page very differently than other creators, I put out videos daily on my feed for a high subscription price. Which means I need to film much more frequently than the average creator typically does. (Also, I don’t suggest this business model for most creators, I run mine this way because it aligns with my goal of building a massive clip library as quickly as possible, & I come from a premium snapchat background where I was filming a new video daily anyways - so that is very normal for me).
Anyhow, I needed to streamline a workflow to ensure I was creating new content daily, and step 1 is to identify the fail points in my content creation process. My first obvious fail point, was if I didn’t have hair and makeup done - I wasn’t going to film. That seems silly to some of you reading this, but for me personally, If it’s 1 pm, and the day is half over but I don’t have my hair & makeup done, I almost feel like what’s the point of getting ready at 1 pm, wasting expensive makeup I’m only going to wear for only a few hours.. I would use that as an excuse to talk myself out of filming. It was a fail point for me and a point of friction where I was falling off track with my goal of filming. So I started doing hair & makeup as soon as I woke up in the morning. That eliminated my friction point of ‘not being camera ready’ which meant when my time block for filming came around, I no longer had that excuse not to film.
You’ll notice as we go through this process, that identifying fail points in your business requires brutal honesty with yourself. You have to identify where you give yourself excuses and find ways to eliminate them. Even if the excuses are valid as f*ck. There was a time in my career when I had just undergone surgery & had to film content around healing, incisions etc. Those reasons to not film are valid. But not creating content hurts my business, and let’s be very real, creating content is quite literally a requirement of being an adult content creator. The show must go on..
So I adjusted my strategy.. I pre-filmed content ahead of my procedure to accommodate my healing period, and when I was good enough to film & I created content around the parts of myself I wanted to be filmed. So close-up h*ndjob, BJ content, ASMR content, erotic story content, and feet content.
I hate to say this because I know it’s perceived as controversial, but the reality is when you run your own business it begins and ends with you. You’re solely responsible for your success and your failures. Not the market conditions, because you should be adjusting your business around them. Not the quality of the subscribers, because you should be tracking and identifying where better quality subscribers are coming from and marketing harder in those places. Not the platform, because you can change platforms, or choose to participate in other areas of the industry like clips instead of / or in addition to fansites. When you work for yourself, whether you are simply getting 1099’d or you’re incorporated as f*ck with an LLC or Corp status, it’s all on your shoulders, point blank period. That’s the reality. Okay, sorry for the tangent haha. Let’s get back to other ways I’ve streamlined my content creation workflow.
After I realized getting hair & makeup ready helped me film more frequently, I tried to streamline it in ways I could. This is going to sound silly because, "how can you streamline hair & makeup?" Well, you can lol. First, I do my own lash extensions, using a system called Lashify. It’s lash extensions you do yourself, that last 2 weeks and you can shower & swim in them just like regular lash extensions. There are cheaper versions of Lashify now as well, like Lashview or Falscara. Anyhow, waking up and having lashes already done & beautiful, means with just a filter I can snap a pic and look entirely made up from the moment my eyes open. Doing my own lash extensions also saves me time from putting on falsies each day. Boom. Streamlined my makeup process. To do my entire makeup routine takes legitimately less than ten minutes each morning - and I actually know that because I timed it haha.
So how do you streamline hair? Easy. You do it while you sleep. Every night before bed I use a hair curler that you wrap your slightly damp hair around, sleep in, and wake up to perfect curls. That means now when I wake up, both hair & makeup are done in less than 10 minutes. Boom, streamlined my hair styling process. Crazy right? I can’t express to you how much y husband loves this by the way haha he no longer has to wait for me to get ready before 7 am car shows etc haha.
I can do the sleep-in curlers for about 2 nights before needing to wash my hair. On the days I want to wash my hair, instead of putting the sleep-in curlers on at night, I do my spray tan those nights (again by myself, using Balibody foam mouse for anyone who cares lol) and when I wake up the next morning, because I have to rinse off my spray tan anyways, that’s when I wash my hair. That day I take longer on my hair to blow dry it and style it, but typically those days are when I book all my meetings, & admin work, so it doesn’t end up mattering. Boom, streamlined my spray tan haha.
The other way in which I’ve streamlined my content creation is by eliminating most tools or equipment in my actual filming. Another friction point for me to creating content was having to move my lights and set them up each time. I have a 3-story house and I don’t like carrying 3 separate light set-ups, up and down stairs to wherever I’m filming. (First-world problems I know) But that’s when I started experimenting with cell phone clip lights. Now, when I’m filming, I typically am using a single light clipped on my iPhone. It actually gives a really cool vignette effect to the content and if I want to get really creative, I’ll just add a colored light in the background in addition to my clip-on iPhone light. The result is now I don’t have to move around a big light setup when I’m ready to film. I just grab my clip-on light, and collapsible tripod, and I’m off to the races.
The last part of my content creation process I streamlined was the editing part. I don’t want to waste 30 minutes transferring files off an SD card to a laptop etc to edit content. So I film & edit everything I make right off my iPhone. I film in regular video mode, but also slow-mo and cinematic mode to give a very professional camera effect to my content - and then edit in an app called CapCut. I’ve also used InShot in the past which I feel is a lot more user-friendly, but have since primarily used CapCut because I like some of their more advanced features. Also - for those who don’t know, CapCut has a desktop editor now as well..
To recap, the problems that challenged me in my content creator process were, getting hair & makeup ready, setting up equipment, and editing. I came up with a workflow to simplify all of those pain points & streamline my process. This is an example where we can’t automate the workflow, but we can optimize it. Hopefully, some of how I streamlined my content creation process can help you with yours as well.
Streamlining Scheduling & Publishing
Another massive pain point for adult creators is the actual scheduling & publishing of content. Now for this there isn’t a ton of streamlining or automation you can to, outside of hiring someone to do this for you. (Which is how I’ve automated this process). But first let’s talk about the workflow I use in terms of scheduling & publishing my content.
Again, I have a weird business model on my fansite where I post to feed daily for a high sub price, but if I didn’t, and I had a more normal business model to what most creators do, this is the workflow I would use (and one I used to use before running my Onlyfans like a Premium Snapchat). The way workflow I have for the way I schedule, publish & distribute my content looks like this: First, the content gets scheduled on my fansite, as an Onlyfans PPV mass message.
After that, the content gets scheduled to publish on my fansite feed for subscribers.
Then, the content gets distributed to any secondary platforms, like say if you have a second fansite like Fansly, Fancentro, Loyalfans, etc (same process first in PPVs, then on Feed)
Finally, the clip lands in my clip store to be purchased a la carte, so that would be like a ManyVids, Clips4Sale, iwantclips, etc.
If you use a fansite that has a clip store built in like Fancentro & Loyalfans do, the final step would be adding the clip into that clip store there as well.
To recap, the geral outline is:
-Content published as a Mass Msg PPV for unlock
-Content publishes to Fansite Feed
-Content publishes to Clip store
For those creators reading this who still manage a Premium Snapchat, you would make your Premium Snapchat your first publishing point because the content disappears from your Snapchat story in 24hrs. So for you, the outline would look like:
-Content published to Premium Snapchat
-Content published as a Mass Msg PPV for unlock
-Content publishes to Fansite Feed
-Content publishes to Clip store
This workflow is used to squeeze as much monetization out of each new content piece as possible, while slowly exposing it to fans as you go.
The reason you’d first send out content as a locked PPV message on your fansite is so you can capitalize on the part of your fanbase that are willing to pay the higher price point for it. The benefits to the fan unlocking it in a PPV message are 1.) They get to see the content before anyone else will once it lands on the feed, and 2.) It will be in their ‘purchased’ section making it easy to find later when wanting to rewatch it.
When you post this content to the feed, this is when a whole segment of your subscribers who pay the monthly subscription get exposed to it. This caters to the segment of fans who maybe don’t unlock mass msgs, or even respond to DMs at all. Giving them the content on the feed ensures they feel their subscription price is justified, & that they stay subscribed in general. This helps dramatically with the retention of fans. The key to making this work though, is to have the content expire off your feed 30 days later. I’ll explain why in a second. Keep reading 👇🏼
Now I’m sure some of you are wondering, Won't the fans who unlocked it in PPV DMs be mad when they see it on the feed?" The answer is - No, because you can explain to them unlocking it in DMs ensures they saw it before anyone else, & will have it in their purchased section even after it expires off the feed in 30 days.
So basically your fan's subscription allows them to view content on your feed for 30 days, but not to ‘keep’ it for later. This is how you justify paying more for it in DMs VS paying a small subscription to ‘rent’ it or access it on the feed. Genius right?
After it’s published to your feed, (and expired off your feed) this is when you’ll add it to your clip stores where it can be purchased a la carte. Typically on the clip store, I price it lower than I did initially in PPV DMs, but more than what my subscription to my fansite costs. It should be a nice middle ground. Once on the clip store, you’ll let it live in your clip library and make you passive residual income with no extra work from you.
This workflow optimizes how you will schedule your content and when it publishes where. However, there isn’t much of a way to ‘streamline’ all this beyond hiring someone to manually do this process that isn’t you. Believe it or not, you can hire a virtual assistant on Upwork to take all this on for less than $300 USD/month. So once you’re in a place financially to buy back your time by paying $300 dollars to use someone else's, this would be the place I’d do it. Just remember you can't talk about 'adult content' or 'Onlyfans' on Upwork, so create your job listing for a Virtual Assistant, and when messaging them ask for a personal email to explain the details..
Remember that on all these platforms, including most clip stores, you can pre-schedule when content publishes. So if you’re only posting 1 new video a week, you can likely manage it to publish everywhere on your own just through manual scheduling. But when you’re doing a higher volume of content, you may need to consider hiring help.
Streamlining Social Media Promotion
This brings us to the last process adult creators struggle to streamline & optimize, being social media promotion. Some ways I’ve done this is with the scheduling capabilities on each social media platform, but also in how I create social media promo content as well. For example I create video social media promo in TikTok because it will perform best there, then remove the watermark & repurpose on IG reels.
Twitter has a scheduling feature through a free website called Tweetdeck..
Instagram now allows you to schedule posts & reels to publish..
You can schedule Instagram stories (even with links) using FB Business suite.. (which is also free)
I’d advise taking 1 day out of your week to focus on & schedule all your social media promotion using these free built-in scheduling tools.
However, if you really want to get streamlined with this, I’d suggest a paid tool called repurpose.io. Full disclaimer I haven’t fully implemented this yet but am actively in the process of it. Repourpose.io basically allows you to publish content once, & your social content gets distributed everywhereeeeee. It’ll even remove the TikTok watermark FOR YOU when it posts the content to IG Reels, YT shorts, etc. This tool may honestly be the solution we’ve all been waiting for.
Not only can it cross-post your content to Instagram, Tiktok, Youtube, Snapchat, Twitter, Linkedin etc, but it can also even add the social content to a Dropbox or Google Drive for you as well. So that every social content you ever make is now saved & cataloged.. Are you ready to really have your mind blown? Repurpose.io can also cross-post & share your live streams & podcasts - it’s genuinely that badass of a tool.
That about covers it y’all. You should now have a decent idea of how to identify where your business needs streamlined workflows, & how to problem-solve & create processes or systems around it. You have some examples of how I’ve streamlined challenging aspects of my own business, like content creation, scheduling & publishing my adult content & social media promotion, & you should be able to work towards implementing the same for yourself. I hope you found this blog valuable, & if so, please consider sharing it on your socials or quote-tweeting one of our SexWorkCEO Twitter posts to help expose other adult creators to this information. The only rule for being a part of the #CEOsquad is not gate-keeping 💪🏼 I sincerely appreciate you taking the time to read & share this, & I'll see you back here for another blog post next week!
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