How Leonie Dawson Edits 2 Weeks of Social Media Posts in 1 Hour

Leonie Dawson edits two weeks of social media posts in about an hour. She runs one post a day, and by her count the editing for the last two weeks took “1 hour.”

Daily publishing has not always worked for her. In a 2014 post on her blog she wrote: “I used to try and blog once a day. It nearly killed me.” In a September 28 email to me she said the short form of social media “just didn’t work for my brain AT ALL.” Her current setup splits the job: Claude turns her long-form teachings into short posts, she drops them into Canva templates, and Blotato schedules them out.

I founded Blotato, and Leonie uses it. Her numbers below come from her email, and her background and lesson quotes come from her website.

How Leonie Dawson Turns Long-Form Teaching Into Daily Social Media Posts

Leonie called herself “sooooooo much better at long form teaching and writing” in that email, and her blog backs it up. Her 50 Lessons From A Decade of Blogging post opens with her starting to blog “waaaaaay back in 2004,” and it holds 50 numbered lessons, many of them several paragraphs long.

That archive is the raw material. Each short post starts as something she already wrote at length, so the daily work is shortening and checking, and the schedule handles the posting.

The scheduling half is the easiest part to borrow. You can set up the same one-post-a-day schedule on a free 7-day Blotato trial: it takes a card, nothing is charged during the week, and you can cancel before it ends.

Who Is Leonie Dawson

Her site, leoniedawson.com, describes her as a “Self-made multi-millionaire, bestselling author and your loving buttkicker.” It lists “$16M earned online” and “24 years selling online,” and says “500,000+ humans” use her My Unicorn Year workbooks. In her email she added that she has run her online business “for a couple of decades” and has “about 50,000 people” on her email list.

She teaches through The Leonie Dawson Show podcast and her YouTube channel, and she is on Instagram and TikTok.

The Workflow: Claude, Canva Templates, Then Blotato Scheduling

Here is the whole system in her words: “I use Claude to turn my long form teachings into short form posts, drop them into Canva templates, and use Blotato to schedule them all out.” Her email did not include her prompt, her templates or her schedule settings, so where I add detail below, it is my version of each step, and I say so.

Step 1: Claude shortens her long-form teachings

Claude takes a long-form teaching and turns it into short posts, the format she said never worked for her brain. If you want Claude to keep your back catalog on hand instead of pasting it into each chat, Claude’s Projects let you upload documents as a knowledge base.

This is the starting prompt I would use. It is mine, not hers:

Turn the teaching below into 5 short social media posts in my voice.

Rules for every post:
- One idea from the source per post. Add nothing the source does not say.
- Reuse my own sentences and phrases wherever you can.
- Under 60 words, so it fits a Canva template.
- End with one line the reader can act on today.

After the posts, list any words you added that are not in my original.

Source:
[paste one blog post, lesson, podcast transcript or course module]

The last rule gives your edit pass a place to start, because the added words are the likeliest spot for a post to drift from what you meant. You still read every post. The 60-word cap is my guess for a typical template text box, so set it to whatever your font and layout actually hold.

Step 2: Each post drops into a Canva template

She reported about 3 hours setting up Canva templates. Once a template exists, each new post is a paste into a layout she already designed, which is where I think a lot of her time savings sit.

Step 3: Blotato schedules the posts out

The finished designs go into Blotato and are scheduled out. As of her email she was running one post a day and said she “can defo ramp things up now.”

Here is how I would set up a one-a-day cadence like hers. In Blotato, open Calendar, select Weekly schedule, then Add slot. Enter a time, select every day of the week, select the accounts the post should go to, and select Create. When you schedule each design, choose Next free slot time and it takes the next open slot. The content calendar guide walks through those screens.

Two habits keep a daily schedule honest. Check Posts and filter by Scheduled to confirm you have the next two weeks covered, then filter by Failed once a week. A failed post looks the same as a quiet day from the outside.

If you would rather have Claude build the designs and post them too, I walk through that version in Canva and Blotato inside Claude. That route uses Blotato’s MCP server, which the free trial does not include, so plan on a paid plan for it.

A Worked Example From Her Own Lessons

To show what the shortening step does, here are three lessons from her 2014 post, each cut down to post size. These are my demo posts, built almost entirely from her published sentences. They are not posts Leonie has published.

Lesson 5, “Do it your way,” runs several paragraphs on how often to publish. The short version:

I used to try and blog once a day. It nearly killed me. I prefer writing longer, more intensive articles. My own deadline is one a week. Work out a rhythm that works for you and serves your overall goal. And make sure you press publish.

Lesson 7, on which metrics matter, walks through comments, RSS subscribers and page views before landing on the one number she says to count:

I used to think comments, RSS subscribers and page views measured my blog’s success. Unless you run a magazine or advertising model, they don’t. Count how many people you can get on your mailing list. Your mailing list is where the gold is in your business.

Lesson 11, “Stuck for topics?” is already short enough to post as written:

Stuck for topics? Ask your audience what they want to know about. They have really, really good answers. Listen to ‘em.

Two of the three needed real cutting, and Lesson 11 needed none. A big archive works like that: some of it is already the right length, and part of the work is finding it. If even half of her fifty lessons became one post each, that is more than three weeks of daily posts from a single article.

The Results, In Her Numbers

What she reported	Her words
Traffic	”Traffic up 3x across all my channels”
Posting volume	”only doing one post a day so far”
One-time setup	”About 3 hours to set up the Canva templates”
Editing time	”1 hour of editing for the last 2 weeks of content”
Going forward	”Going forward, that’s just 1 hour of edits”

At one post a day, two weeks is about 14 posts, so her hour works out to roughly four minutes of editing per post. She also wrote that “so many people are telling me they’re seeing me EVERYWHERE lately.”

The traffic line is her own reported figure. The screenshot she sent with it is not reproduced here, and she did not say which metric or time window the 3x covers. If you copy this setup, decide what you will count before you start. My suggestion, borrowed from her Lesson 7: count new email sign-ups.

Why This Works for Course Creators and Newsletter Writers

Leonie’s setup fits a specific reader: someone with years of long-form teaching and a quiet short-form feed. If your newsletter or course has a few years behind it, you already have the raw material for a daily post, and the job is shortening it in your own words.

The edit hour is the part I would keep no matter how clean Claude’s drafts look. It is where the person who wrote the original checks the short version.

Start With One Teaching, the Way Leonie Did

Leonie kept the part she says she is good at, long-form teaching, and handed the short version to Claude, the look to Canva and the schedule to Blotato. If your best work lives in long pieces, build it in her order. Set up your templates, run one teaching through the prompt above, then use a Blotato plan to keep one post a day going out while you get back to writing.