How to Develop a Foolproof Content Creation Strategy for Beginners

Everyone is different in how they plan their content strategy. But I guarantee that if you follow this step by step process, you will reduce overwhelm, be more consistent in your posting, and grow your channel and brand much faster. Now, whether you're someone that is super organized or someone like me that lives in disorganized chaos, writing things down can be a game changer in your content creation strategy. I was always the kind of person that just went off the top of my head or I kind of kept everything in my head. I never wrote anything down. And I felt I was always playing catch up, like, oh, I forgot to do this thing, I forgot to do that thing. And when I started writing things down in a very specific way, I noticed that my stress levels came way down and I felt much less overwhelmed as a content creator. So this video is going to be broken up into three parts. I'm going to talk about a very important first step in the content creation process that all content creators should be participating in. Second, I'm going to go over different ways you can organize your content creation strategy depending on how your brain works. And lastly, I'm going to be going over my specific content strategy and how I go about planning for my content creation. Now, before we get started, make sure you scroll down to the description below and click on the link to grab my free content creation Strategy Planner. It's a printable PDF that you can use week to week and month to month. Now, the first step in the creation process is just to do a brain dump. All right? And what a brain dump is is just sit down 15, 30 minutes, an hour, however long you want to, and write down every single content idea that you could come up with around your topic. These might be questions that your clients might ask you. These might be course ideas. Okay, These might be ideas for your website. It doesn't have to always be related to video. Some of these things should be long form content ideas, short form content ideas, imaging graphic posts. Maybe you're going to post something on Facebook or Instagram with just an image. What's the story? What's the caption going to be? So all I want you to do is just brain dump as many different ideas down on a piece of paper, because then we're going to take those ideas and put them into our content creation strategy. Now, once you do that, you have to decide how you're going to organize your ideas. Are you going to do this daily, you're going to do it weekly, or are you going to do it monthly? Now, my recommendation I Used to be the person who would do a daily to do list, you know, and I write out this big long to do list of all these things I had to get done on a certain day. But then something would come up, all right, Life happens, all right? And something would throw a wrench in my to do list. And then at the end of the day I would feel really crappy about myself because like, maybe I only got half my to do list done. And I'm like, shoot, I have so much work that I need to get done and I didn't get it finished. So what I do now is I go to my brain dump and I pick out a number of items that I would like to work on this week over the course of a week. And I give myself the flexibility to say these are the items I'm going to complete this week and I'm going to plot them into a weekly calendar. And if something comes up and say, I planned Monday that I'm going to do my newsletter, I'm going to record, you know, four shorts or whatever I'm going to do on Monday and I only get the four shorts done and then a phone call comes in and I have to leave to go do something else. I, I understand that I can now move that newsletter or that other thing onto Tuesday. If I didn't get it done on Monday, that's okay. The goal is that by the end of the week I got all of my content ideas done. And then in combination with that, I like to use a monthly planner just to kind of plan out what am I going to be doing this month, what are important things and what are important deadlines that I need to hit. So your weekly planner is a little bit more detailed, a little bit more specific, has a lot more action items, while your monthly planner is more of a guide for you to understand where you're going to be allocating your time week to week. So what I'm going to do now is go in for a close up to show you step by step how I use the content creation planner and how you can use it to reduce overwhelm and create more content starting today. So here's step one in the process. It is the brain dump or any idea you have, you're just going to write it down. This could be course ideas, it's going to be lead magnet ideas, and anything that comes to mind, just write it down. It doesn't always have to be in terms of video, but you could write down long form video ideas, short form video ideas, you could Also write down image ideas. Maybe you're going to put a post on Instagram, maybe you're going to put a post on Facebook. What's the story behind that? What's that going to be about? Anything that comes to mind, just write it down here because then we're going to go and plug it into our calendars. Now next, I like to jump to the monthly planner. This is kind of the big picture overview of what we're going to be accomplishing for this, this month. So here we go. We got the month of January and we do have a four week calendar here. So, you know, fit it as best you can with each month. And this is for the month of January. So first we're going to talk about what are our monthly goals, what are our biggest priorities. And I recommend not doing more than three priorities per month because you could overwhelm yourself very, very easily. These are very big picture things to help move your business forward. So for the month of January, the goal is to wrap up the, that we're doing here. We want to do an email launch for that course. We're wrapping up a course. We want to do an email launch, let people know, hey, this is done. So that's very important. And then also it's January, so we want to organize our tax stuff. I want to get all the tax stuff done, get everything over to my bookkeeper so that they can keep me updated with the irs. Below that we have the to do list. And this really doesn't change much, much month to month. But the most important things for me, at least on this channel is I have to do for long form videos. Okay, one video every week is what I'm trying to do on this channel here. I also want to do YouTube short form videos. I had eight of those. I guess I must have left out the number, but I try to do eight, two week. And then we have the weekly newsletter that I send out, the four new website pages and the two 2023 marketing strategy. And as I get done with doing these, you know, I plug them into my calendar, I check off and be like, okay, good. I recorded my long form content. That's all set, that's done. I recorded my short form content. These are kind of like the most important things that I have to get done. And then any other of the miscellaneous items that come into play, we can plug those in on the weekly calendar. So here I've just filled this in and you can see Monday, I have, you know, my meetings, my emails, my paperwork. I do a lot of that stuff on Monday, I kind of get prepared for the week, meet with my sales team. Hey, how are we doing on sales? All right, maybe I'll. I'll reach out to my va. How's the content creation coming? Awesome. Tuesday, I will do content research. Okay, so I'm gonna do my brain dumps on Tuesday to try and figure out what's good stuff for me to do content ideas on. All right, and then you see here, content research. Content research. I could do this every week. Sometimes I'll be like, all right, I don't have to create anything or record anything this week, but I want to go watch and see what other YouTubers are doing and what are other content creators doing. What can I borrow from someone? What can I do and insert my view on this, my experience on this? So maybe you do it every week. Maybe you do it the first two weeks, But I have it in here on Tuesdays that, hey, I'm going to pop onto YouTube or I'm going to pop on to shorts. I'm going to see what other people are doing and maybe create some more ideas for me to put on my brain dump list. And then Wednesday I have record content because Wednesday tend not to book a lot of things on Wednesday. So I might do a couple hours of recording on Wednesday, and then I also have content recording on Friday. So if I get everything done Wednesday, awesome. If not, I can spill it over into Friday. And then on Saturday, I review and upload the content and then we kind of start the next week. And you see it's very, very similar. All right, mailing list, webpage. Mailing list, webpage. You see, I'm not. This is just big picture. I'm not piling a bunch of items, but this is the general flow of what I'm trying to do over the course of the month. You know, on Thursday, I had my meeting with my copywriter to come up with the marketing strategy for the year. It's only going to happen once. It's a very important item. So I put it on there. And then you can see on Wednesday, hey, you know, maybe I did this, this review, or maybe when I was, you know, reviewing the content from my va, this actually happened last week. Um, I played the wrong thing, so I had to go and rerecord the close up for this guitar exercise. So sometimes that happens. I. You know, there's times where my microphone has died halfway through doing a video, or, you know, all of a sudden something stops working and you have to rerecord content So I just schedule that in. I might not need to. And if I don't, great, I have this day free to do whatever I want that week. Next thing we do is we want to get granular with what we're doing week to week. So here's the blank weekly calendar. You can see it's just Monday through Saturday. I usually take Sundays off. I try to make that a family day. I might work for a couple hours doing some email and some paperwork stuff, but for the most part, I try not to do too much on Sundays. So here's what it looks like filled in. So this was week number one, January. And what are the priorities this month? Remember those priorities that we're trying to get done. Most important thing is I got to wrap up this course and I got to do my email launch, all right? And the tax stuff, too. But for my business, wrapping up the course and doing the email launch are very, very important. I have to get those done no matter what this month, all right? There's no way I'm going to drop the ball on those priorities. And then Monday, have, hey, review content edits from va. Review sales numbers from last week, all right, so that I can over with them with my, my sales director and say, like, hey, you know, can we, can we do another promotion this week to maybe bump. We were a little low last week. Can we do a promotion that will help us bump sales this week? Tuesday, plan and research January content. That's what I tend to do on Tuesdays. Record shorts for January and review YouTube videos for posting. So maybe I'm going to hop onto YouTube, do pop into analytics a little bit, see how the channel's doing, what things are working, what things aren't working, and schedule out some videos for posting again, I have Thursday off. Maybe something came up. Maybe I have a doctor's appointment. Maybe it's going to be a beautiful sunny day and I want to go for a walk on the beach. Probably not here, January in New England. But, you know, things come up and it's okay to take a day off, all right? You don't have to grind until you're exhausted. I do that sometimes. And my brain, when I feel like I'm mentally exhausted, I usually take a day off because you need to recharge the battery so that you can start pushing again. And then you see here Friday. So this week I was like, you know, I'm going to do the shorts on Wednesday. I'm going to do the long form content on Friday. And again, if something comes up Wednesday, Maybe I'm going to put the shorts and the long form content on Friday or maybe I'll move it over to Saturday. So you can see here I'm not again, I'm not piling a bunch of things on here. These are like one to two hour work sessions and I can add or subtract to that as much as I want to week to week. But when I get to the end of the week, my goal is to check off all these items. Did I do all the things that I wanted to record that week? All right. Whether I did it over three days, two days or one day, that might depend on how the week worked out. But did I get everything done? And it's way less overwhelming when you work on a weekly basis versus a daily basis. But it is good to schedule things in so that you can try to stick to a timeline. But when you do this on Monday, so I will plan this out this week out on Monday. So that's part of the paperwork. It makes the rest of your week way less overwhelming and it allows you to focus more on the content. In the content creation, make sure you go to the link in the description below and download the PDF planner. And if you're looking for different ideas that you can use to create content, then go make sure to check out that video right over there.