So you know you want to work less while making the same – or more! – money. But where to start? Implementing the 80/20 rule is a good place.
What Is the 80/20 Rule
The 80/20 rule is applicable in almost any area of life, and basically means that 80% of results tend to come from 20% of efforts. In most companies, 80% of revenues come from 20% of products, and for most content creators, 80% of income comes from 20% of their content.
While the exact percentages can vary slightly, so far I’ve never once seen the rule disproved. There’s a reason it’s heavily used in both business courses and management consuting projects! And best of all? It’s quite easy to implement!
As content creators, we already know that just a few pieces of content will really take off – we see it time and time again with Google, Instagram, Pinterest, TikTok and any other platform. Most content does just fine or not much at all, and a few pieces of content drive the bulk of the traffic, likes and revenue.
You probably have a few blog posts driving most of your ad revenue, or a few recipes you know will always get a lot of likes if you post them on Instagram.
And if you do an audit of your time and income sources, you’ll probably find that 20% of what you do in a week drives 80% of the revenue as well. Maybe that is time spent updating old posts, creating pins, or creating those 20% of posts that end up doing really well – either way, it’s likely you have one or a few real income drivers in your business.
But it doesn’t stop there! 80/20 applies to almost anything. If you have a messy house, cleaning it from top to bottom might take you a long time, but you can probably get it looking 80% good in 20% of the time by focusing on the big stuff like tidying up and cleaning the sinks.
How to Use the 80/20 Rule
As we’ve now seen, the 80/20 rule applies almost universally. These are the steps to put it to use in any area:
- Decide on an area where you want to improve effectiveness. This can be your overall workload, your content topics, or your Pinterest strategy.
- Decide how to best measure results in this area. Is it income, pageviews, likes, units sold or money saved? Look to your goals for this. If your goal is to make more money, look at income, not pageviews – the posts getting the most traffic might not be the posts making the most money…
- Find out what 20% of tasks, products or topics provide 80% of the results. How you do this will depend on the area:
- For weekly tasks, you can do it manually or using a time tracking app.
- For content topics, you can use an extract from your ad company and either Excel or ChatGPT.
- For Pinterest Pins it’s a bit more difficult, as you can’t get a complete list of your pins on Pinterest. Instead, look at the top performing pins in your Pinterest analytics.
- Focus your efforts on those 20%, and cut down everything around it to a minimum. Either by not doing it at all, or by outsourcing it.
Then move on to the next area. After a set time period – a quarter is often good – start over from step 1 for the first area, and do 80/20 on your 20%. This is how you get really focused!
Great! But Where Do I Start?!
To figure out where to start, think big. Where do you spend the most of your time? If it’s creating content, perform a 80/20 analysis on your content topics. If it’s Pinterest, do it for pin topics and/or pin designs instead. And so on. Aim to do at least one area per month, and then come back to the first area again after 3 months.
Another way to do it is to start where you are making the most money. So if you’re making most of your income from sponsored posts, look at what 20% of sponsored posts are bringing in 80% of the revenue.
How to Use the 80/20 Rule When You’re Just Starting Out
80/20 is easy in hindsight, but when you’re just strting out it might seem impossible to implement. How can you focus when you have no idea what will resonate?
I hear you. My top 3 recipes were created 6-7 years ago, but so where hundreds more. I had no idea these specific recipes would be “the ones” (and honestly, if I would have had to bet it would not have been on either of these!). But oh, am I happy i decided to post them!
In the beginning, the key lies in being quick to test things out, and quick to discard them. Instead of repeating your 80/20 analysis every quarter, do it every month. For channels like Instagram or TikTok, you might even want to repeat it every week at the start.
Try things out, keep what works, and discard the rest – and keep doing this until you have your footing. You can then move to a longer cycle, but don’t forget to still come back to your 80/20 anaysis periodically.
Do you have any questions about implementing the 80/20 rule, or need help doing it? Don’t hesitate to reach out! The easiest way is to DM me @worklessgrowmore on Instagram or send an e-mail to hello [at] worklessproject.com.