A Day in the Life of a Digital Content Manager

Did you know my mom is a digital content manager?

She’s been doing it for a while and wants to share what her workday looks like, so she’s taking over this article.

But wait…what the heck does this have to do with cats?

Well, two things: 1) managing a pet Instagram account is content management, and 2) this article is aimed at anyone who enjoys making and sharing digital content for their pets and might be interested in doing it as a career.

So, what exactly does a digital content manager do? Here’s an overview of what my mom does for work (and how you can do it too)!

Digital Content Manager Job Summary 

Every job is different depending on the client, their products or services, and the tools that they use. Here’s a brief snapshot of my meowm’s responsibilities.

The Basics

My mom is essentially in charge of a company blog and some social media stuff. This means she has to research new content ideas and keywords, produce the content, publish it at the scheduled date, and monitor and update it afterward. It’s not a tough job, but it can be stressful when your content is not performing as it should or when your article is not in the number one spot on the Google search results page.

All in a Day’s Work

The first thing my mom might do on a Monday morning is to check the comments on the blog. It’s a good practice to answer as many comments as possible, if not all of them, especially if the commenters are interested in becoming customers.

Then she might check up on social media to see how recent posts are doing and look at the performance of recent blog articles.

If she has writing to do that day, she’ll get to work on outlining and writing an article, or she might be editing an article she wrote another day, uploading it to the content management system, and getting it ready for publishing. On occasion, the article might include an infographic, so she might be putting one together in Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop.

If it’s publishing day, she’ll publish an article and make sure she shares it to all relevant social media channels.

When it’s time for a break, she might feed me Whiskas, change my water, or clean my litter box. She also checks my Instagram page a few times a day if she can to keep on top of tags and DMs and to see what furriends are posting!

If it’s the first of the month, she’s likely working on reports for social media and blog content for the previous month, just to keep tabs on everything. She might record site entrances, bounce rate, top articles, and more in these reports.

Towards the end of the day, when she starts getting tired of writing, she might turn towards more mundane tasks like updating old articles and scheduling new pins for them. She might look at her to-do list to see if she’s covered everything, but usually, she ends up adding more items.

Because she’s self-employed, my mom’s day might also include invoicing, tracking business expenses, and paying taxes.

This is just a sample of what my mom does for her job. There are many other tasks that need to be completed on a weekly or monthly basis that she also attends to (filling out the content calendar, email, meetings, etc.)

Content Management Pros and Cons

My mom enjoys her work because she gets to be creative with graphics, social media images, and writing. She really likes that she can directly see and measure the effectiveness of her work. Content management is also a great stepping stone to other digital content marketing roles.

She doesn’t like being pulled in many directions at once. She finds it a little distracting at times, but it also keeps the job interesting and breaks up the day. Like I said at the beginning of the article, looking at the numbers can also be stressful. If rankings or traffic dips, she’s not a happy camper.

How To Become a Digital Content Manager

There are many ways to break into content creation and management work, depending on your ultimate goals. The truth is it’s not very technical, and anyone can do it. My mom started off doing small assignments as a freelance blogger and copywriter and slowly moved her way up, taking on more responsibilities with each client. One of the best ways to start is to work freelance on different types of projects.

This can bring in extra cash and help you decide if you like that kind of work (plus it adds more to your resume). You can also publish guest articles on popular sites and other people’s blogs (In fact, if you have a good idea, feel free to pitch it to me and I can publish it here as a guest post!).

It’s also important that you learn to work with the tools you might use on the job. Try starting a blog, learn to make graphics with Photoshop and Illustrator, explore Google Analytics, or try out different social media publishing tools.

If this kind of work is right up your alley, here are my best tips and resources to help you break into a career in content creation and management:

• Practice writing and editing
• Take the free Google Analytics courses (and get certified)
• Take the free Google Ads courses
• Learn Photoshop and other Adobe tools (video editing is a great skill as well) 
• Browse Subreddits related to the field you wish to work in
• Check out Neil Patel’s YouTube channel (he makes digital marketing super easy to understand)
• Look up jobs on Indeed or LinkedIn to see what they require to point you in the right direction
• Take free courses from Hubspot Academy
• Take free courses from SEM Rush Academy
• Take courses from Moz Academy (not free)
• Subscribe to Content Marketing Institute, Search Engine Land, and other relevant blogs
• Read books about writing and marketing
• Look up job interview questions for your desired work to see what you need to learn 

Note: My dad has excellent skills in career building, and we have to give a lot of credit to him for this list! 

Have questions? Feel free to leave them in the comments, DM me on Instagram (@cathy_permakitten), or reach out through my contact form.

If you enjoy making social media or blog content (or both!) for your pets, there’s no reason why you can’t make a career in content marketing too. 

As always, feel free to subscribe to my blog to get these articles directly to your inbox. Hope you found this helpful or at least interesting. I promise the next article will be more IG cat related 😸

Love, 

Cathy