Pick four core themes, assign each a color, and arrange them across twelve months so no two consecutive months repeat. This creates a pattern for weekly videos that work together through YouTube's recommendation system. The presenter offers a free content calendar template at contentcalendar.cherylplouffe.com.
Chapters
Imagine having a video content plan for the entire year ahead. Today, that's what we're going to talk about— how to develop a 12-month video content calendar specifically for YouTube. I've done a similar video on my Facebook page in general terms about the importance of having a content calendar, which is essentially a calendar that keeps track of your content and helps you with planning for that. But today I want to take a step back and talk more about the strategy that you can use to help you determine what am I talking about? What are my videos going to be about specifically to YouTube? So this is really reverse engineering the process and starting from a blank slate. So you can use a notepad for this exercise. You can use a flip chart like I'm using. You can use a whiteboard. Name your, name your vehicle. It doesn't really matter. So what I'm going to do is walk through this and show you how this works. If, if you were planning for a 12-month period of time for content, here's how I would approach it. The first thing you're going to want to do is identify themes for your niche or for your industry. Now, this is going to likely change from time to time, but you have to start somewhere. Sometimes it's good to look back if you've had some experience with clients and customers. What are the things that they ask for the most? We're really looking for 4 different themes that we can identify. So let me give you an example, and actually it could be themes, it could also be a process. So for example, for me, one of the things that I teach in my programs and in my courses is that I have a 4, uh, 4P framework. So that is to plan your videos, to produce them, to pub— to publish them and to promote them. So for me, that kind of would make sense. I could have my themes be plan, produce, publish and promote. I'm in the video marketing space. And so for me, 4 themes could be— and this is actually true— productivity as it relates to video. Video marketing, video production, online business. Those are some real themes that come up for me in my business. So you have to identify what those themes are. But for the purpose of this demonstration, we're going to use plan, produce— excuse my writing— produce, publish, and promote. OK. OK. So you choose your 4 themes. Notice that I've color-coded them. So I've just used some sticky notes that I have. If you have, you know, the full-size stickies, it doesn't really matter what color coding you use or what colors you choose, but identify the colors. So for the planning theme, I'm going to call that purple. Produce is pink. Publish is green. Promote is orange. Up here, I've identified 12 months of the year. January, February, March, April, May, June, July, August, September, October, November, December. And, and these obviously, you know, there's 3 months per quarter and each one right now is identified with a color. So what I would do is I would look at this because we don't want— you certainly want to think about themes from a monthly standpoint because that can really drive more views on your videos and YouTube and create bingeable content. But what I would do is then I would start taking these tabs and moving them around a bit. So let's move these colors around a little bit here, and you can have fun with this and determine how you want to do this. Maybe I'll take this one and move it over here, move this one over here. But what it's really doing— let's move this one to, uh, let's see, the orange. You know, like, just have some fun with this and move it around. What we're really looking to do is to have really a kind of a rainbow effect here at the top and move things around so you don't have colors back to back. So I could continue with this process, but I think you get the point. You want to have this mixed up color-wise. So why is that important? Because now what you can see here is, as we, as we look at our legend, we're mixing up the themes so that we're, we're not talking about planning for 3 months at a time. Right. So you could be, you know, for example, we've got purple. So in January, I'm going to be creating my content. Let's presume that it's weekly because that's really what you want to do is have at minimum weekly content on YouTube. So your purple here in January is about planning. In February, we're going to talk about publishing. In March, you're going to talk about promoting. So the 4 videos you create in January, the 4 videos you create in February, the 4 videos you create in March will be about those themes. And that's a way to help drive more views to your videos. It allows you, especially with YouTube, when you create your videos, let's say your 4 videos in the month of January, that you can link them together with cards, with end screens. There's lots of different things that you can do in YouTube in order to draw viewership back and forth and not only end up in search results in YouTube, but also in the suggested field, which are— is that all-important place on the right-hand side where you're watching a video and then a suggested video comes up on the side. Your videos can show up there, but you can also cross-promote your own content within your own videos. So it's a really powerful strategy. If I were planning 12 months of video content for YouTube, this is how I would look at it from the standpoint of what am I going to talk about? The hardest thing you're going to find with this is coming up with the themes, and, and that's really where the strategy comes into play. So what I would recommend that you do is, at very minimum, you're going to download my content calendar and really start down the path of incorporating these assets and these tools in your business content. I'll leave the link below this video, but it's contentcalendar.cherylplouffe.com. It's a free download. You get a video tutorial that explains what a content calendar is, why you want to use it, how you can download and swipe my, my own calendar and use it for your own use in Google Drive. So please feel free to take advantage of that. This part is going to be the hardest part. Let me know in the comments, you know, if you have any struggles around this or you want to bat around some ideas. I'm always happy to do that in the comments section of the videos. I do new videos here on my YouTube channel every Thursday. And so really, the key to being successful on YouTube and with content in general, using something like a 12-month content planning, is there has to be some keyword research and some reverse engineering of the videos to find success. I wanted to just present to you today an overview of how you might start that planning process. So I really hope that's helpful for you. This is how you develop a 12-month content plan for your videos on YouTube. Thank you so much for watching. Make sure you watch all of these other videos here, and I'll see you next week.
