Content Creation Tools To Make YOUR LIFE EASIER!

What these tools and what this system really allows me to do is to really take time to figure out what type of content I need to be creating that is going to grab the attention of my target audience and get them to convert into my business. Creating templates for all your social media platforms that you want to be creating content for and then you can easily swap them out every time you create a new piece of pillar content. It is impossible to pump out content from multiple social platforms like Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, your blog, Pinterest without some type of content planning tools. Along the way, I'm pulling the curtain back on my business to show you everything I use to create, schedule and.

Post all of my content.

Here's how I'm going to break this all down. First, all the tools I use to research and plan my content. Then how I create art of my videos and what I use to do that. Then we're gonna move into the graphics so the Pinterest images, the YouTube thumbnails, the Instagram carousel posts, and finally, how I automate all this content to come out on its own and the places that I recommend you don't auto schedule. Hey guys, welcome back. If you are new here, my name is Trena. And if you love learning about how to organize and plan out all of your content so you can create more money in your business, make sure you subscribe to my channel because that's kind of my jam. Now before I dive into this, I do have a page, my website, that lists literally every single tool and software that I use in my business. So once you're done watching this video, if you want, you can go over to Trina Little.com forward/resources to see the entire list. One last question that I have for you before I show you exactly all the tools I use to research and plan my content. I would love to know what is your favorite tool that you use in your business or for your YouTube channel? Let me know what that tool is down in the comments because I love learning about new tools that can make my life easier. So feel free to share down in the comments and let's go. So we're going to talk about planning and researching and the reason why this is critical. And the first thing that I'm going to share with you is because I live by the quote, fail to plan, plan to fail. So what these tools and what this system really allows me to do is to really take time to figure out what type of content I need to be creating that is going to grab the attention of my target audience and get them to convert into my business. Plus, it keeps me super organized so that when I do have time to show up at work, because a four and a five year old at home, my schedule can very much fluctuate on what's going on with them. And so I need to make sure the time I can show up at work. I'm getting the most done possible. In fact, the past couple of weeks I've really been breaking down my content marketing strategy. So if you haven't watched this series on my channel, I will link to the playlist right up here.

So when you're done with this, you.

Can go back and watch the entire series where I literally show you every single thing that I do to plan out a consistent content marketing plan that continues to drive revenue to my business around the clock. So where I really plan and organize all of my content is in a project management tool called Asana. We've talked a lot about this this month on my channel, but you can use things like Trello Monday ClickUp. But I really suggest having something electronic to do this because I can create templates for every single thing that I create so I can make sure that I'm not missing anything along the way. And when you get the time that you can outsource some of this stuff, you have a system in place that you can easily add somebody to. Asana is where I literally set up my content marketing calendar. And you can see how I did that in this video right here. But let me show you a bird's eye view of how Asana keeps me organized and consistent with my content marketing plan.

Now, before I show you how I organize my YouTube content, I do want to show you how I organize everything that I'm doing day to day. And it is all color coded here in Asana because if it's not in here, I don't do it. So you can see everything that I need to do in certain days are in here and are color coded. So these are client type things. This is content that I need to create. This is about an online summit. When you are trying to create more content and stay more consistent, you need to make sure that it's on your calendar as well. And so I have in here on my calendar when I am first planning YouTube content and second filming it. I have a time every single month in my calendar where I plan content, I batch plan and I batch film. Actually in 2021 I am leaving all of Wednesday to pretty be video days. You can see I'm recording a presentation here I'm filming YouTube videos. I'm filming a Facebook live. I'm recording attendee group welcome videos. I just found that if I can block Wednesdays as the only days that I really need to put makeup on.

And do my hair, it's also the.

Only days that the kids aren't here. They are just going to be purely content creation and video days. So it is really key for you to add planning YouTube content to your monthly weekly to do list and filming that from there. My YouTube content calendar. I go more into detail in the video that I will link right up above here.

But this is where I keep all of my ideas so that when it's.

Time for me to research, I have a starting off point. I'm not starting from scratch. I'm looking at these video ideas that have popped in my head throughout the month and what is a common theme? Can I pull a theme out of here? You can see there are some series that I'm thinking about planning monthly series. So this is how I keep it all organized. You also see that I have a template card. So when I take one of these ideas and I move it over to title and script, I will duplicate this template task because it has every single step that I need to do. In addition to the date this video goes live, the title of the video, what's the call to action of the video, what's the text going to be on my thumbnail and link to the Google Drive folder where all the raw video assets are. Then like I said, each section of the process is broken down in here. So I know, did I get everything done that I needed to do. I will also add dates and these. So again, we saw that January 19th is a research day for me. So I could literally go in here if this was a video that I was researching for that particular day and add that date in here. And then I know I'm recording these. I could add the date January 20th so that the recording of this video then shows up in my tasks. Then I also have the editing process.

Which I do have a video editor.

So she is assigned to these as well. Then I also have the graphics for these and then uploading and promoting to YouTube and other places. Okay, now I bet your next question.

Is, well, how do you come up with so many content ideas to keep creating consistent content and how do you determine which one of these ideas you should turn into an actual YouTube video? Well, for that answer I use a tool called TubeBuddy. Since my pillar content is YouTube videos every single week, I really Want to make sure my YouTube video is set up for success and able to break through all the YouTube noise and reach the right people that I want watching that video. Since TubeBuddy is the only tool that will provide sales specific data for YouTube, this is how I use them for researching which ideas I should go forward with.

First of all, the keyword explorer. So, for example, this video is about content creation tools, free content creation tools. I can go in here and determine is this a good direction for my video? Right now it is listed on the unweighted score. I want to see how my channel scores here so you can see it does a little bit better because my channel has some authority behind that. I can also start pulling out tags that I want to use for this video. I can literally just check and copy these. So I'll go and add copy to clipboard, come back to my asana, and then just paste those tags in here so I can do tags. And now I already have some of those tags prepared for that video. I also like to use TubeBuddy. So this is the direction I'm going to. Free content creation tools. What TubeBuddy also will let me do is go into this SEO studio to help me determine a good title. So once I pop that in here, you can see that the TubeBuddy SEO score right now is a 62%. I need to include my target keyword naturally in a title. So 10 free content creation tools to make your life easy. That helped the score go up. Then I could even start writing in my description box, content. If you pulled in those tags that you did earlier into there, that would also help you pull up your SEO score. You can go next and put in the specific tags that you want to use here as well. You can also look at the thumbnails and put in a thumbnail idea in here as well to continue to save all of this so that you can literally apply this template already filled out, right? You have your title, your description box, all your tags already saved. You can save it to a draft.

When you upload that video.

When you're done, just add this and that video is ready to go. So this is such a huge time saver inside of TubeBuddy.

Okay, now that we know what my content ideas are and we have them on the calendar for my content marketing plan. Now let's talk about how I create these YouTube videos. I'm going to do a quick equipment run through, but I highly recommend you getting started with whatever equipment you already have at home. So I'm filming right now on a Canon eos, this is a newer camera for me. I've had it for the past year, but I literally created all my content for the past five years on a Canon G7X. But none of that is important to invest in. If you have a cell phone, your iPhone, your Android is a great place to get started and something I highly recommend you actually start with. You don't need to spend any extra money to get fancy camera because the more complicated your camera is, the more excuses you're going to have to keep you from creating video content. So if it's really simple for you to turn record on this thing and pump out video content, this is where you want to get started. Another great option is a webcam. I have used my Logitech C920 for many times when I've been in a Vine. In fact, I shoot some of my course content with my webcam as well. It's not critical that you find or purchase some fancy camera. You need to really use what you have and make it simple. I know I'm going to get asked this question, so I'll run through it real quick, but I do have a video that I will link right up here where I go through everything that I have in my setup right now as I'm filming videos. But I do have a ring light, it's called a diva ring light that I'm using that my camera sits on. I do have two softbox lights as well that sit right here. And I'm using a road shotgun mic on top of my camera. Again, if you want a full list of all the equipment that I use, I will link to that down in.

The description box below.

Now, once that video is shot, how do I edit it? This is another popular question I get and for a very, very long time. When I got started, for the first four years I used Imovie, it was free on my laptop and that's all that I use. Once I got comfortable with Imovie and I had time to add layers. So again, I always suggest starting at the baseline. You can add layers as you get better, but you want to start at a baseline. Nail that before you add another layer. So once I got comfortable with filming my content and I got comfortable with editing on Imovie and I upgraded to Final Cut Pro. Now Final Cut Pro is only available for Apple users, but you could use Adobe Premiere Pro right now. I do outsource my video editing to Annabelle and she uses Adobe Premiere Pro for all of my video editing. And if you want a Course on Imovie, I have a friend, Shelly saves the day, who's got everything that you need in her course, Imovie Made Simple. Another reason that I did upgrade to Final Cut Pro is because it makes it so super simple to turn these videos into square and vertical video. So I still do a little bit of video editing for clients behind the scenes, and when I take their YouTube videos, I can use Final Cut Pro. So simple to just create that square video and give them a Facebook version, give them an IGTV version, give them IG story versions, because Final Cut Pro already has that baked in. Another thing that I want to talk about is being able to record your screen. So you saw in this video I showed you Asana and TubeBuddy. And so sometimes when you're creating video content, it's really important to be able to record your screen to show what it is you're actually doing. So the software that I use is called screenflow. Now this is an app just for Macs and Apple products. But another option available is called QuickTime, and that's free with most computers that you can use. I do have students inside of my Video Strategy Academy program that have recommended Filmora and Camtasia, which works for both platforms, so PC or Mac. Now that we got all the video creation stuff out of the way, let's talk about graphics. And graphics are really important because they can help you create more content, especially if you create templates. And it's super easy for you to just change out the photo or change out the text and something that is going to be one of the first things that you'll be able to outsource to somebody when you have the resources to do so. So I literally use Canva for all of my graphic needs. I can go into Canva and I can create Pinterest pins. And so every time I have a new video, we just change out the photo and the text, the templates already made, and we can crank those out in less than 10 minutes. I also use Canva to create my thumbnails. I did an entire video on how you can create your thumbnail with just using your phone. And I'll link that right up here. But I finished my thumbnail in Canva. Now the one thing that I will use for thumbnail photos as well is Adobe Lightroom. The reason why I use Adobe Be Lightroom on my phone is because I want all of my photos to look better. Really? I'm not a photographer. I don't have time to light everything perfectly. So what I'VE done is I've bought presets for my Lightroom app and what that allows me to do is whenever I shoot a photo, I can just apply that Lightroom preset to that photo so I can have consistency on my photos and images. That's why all of my thumbnails for the past couple of months have looked consistent. It's because I'm taking a photo and I'm putting that Lightroom preset on top of it so they all look like they've been lit the exact same. So I will take that edited photo from Lightroom, I will upload it into Canva and finish out my thumbnail inside of there. We also use Canva to create our Instagram carousel posts to create Instagram stories. So literally everything graphic wise is on Canva and I highly recommend using it. Creating templates for all your social media platforms that you want to be creating content for and then you can easily see swap them out every time you create a new piece of pillar content. I'm curious, I've talked about Canva a lot here. I'd love to know in the comments below, are you a Canva user? If you are, type Canva user below and let me know if you love it, because my business literally runs on Canva right now. Now let me show you real quickly kind of the things that we do on Canva.

So Canva is great because they literally have everything that you need and they have templates already created for you that you could get started with, even if you're starting at ground zero. But for us, we have branded templates already saved. So you can see, for example, some of our LinkedIn quotes, some of our IGTV stories and IG type content already saved in here. But again, if you go back to home and you type in, or you go to any single one of these, say social media, for example, and you want some Instagram story posts, or you want a Facebook post or an Instagram story highlight cover, this is the best place to go. Let's do, for example, a YouTube thumbnail. Once you pull it up inside of here, they have templates that you can get started with. All you have to do is change out the text and the photo to yourself. So this is as easy for me as going to uploads. Maybe I put in this photo of myself and maybe I want to move this here and here. Again, we're just doing this on the fly right now. And let's say since this is vlogging on the phone, I want to do an element And I want to search phone, grab a cell phone element and you could literally create a thumbnail that quickly. As you can see, you can create more templates like Instagram posts. So many different templates inside of here for Instagram posts as well. You can even do animated ones. So they have animated ones inside of here. And then you can come down to all of these different ones that they have under all results. This is literally why Canva is my go to place for creating anything graphics. I'm talking Pinterest, I'm talking Instagram post, Instagram stories, IGTV covers, LinkedIn thumbnails for YouTube. Canva is your go to spot.

Now, one more thing when it comes to creating graphics is having stock photos. Look, I'm not going out having weekly photo shoots. I don't have the time to do that. I am lucky enough to usually schedule about two photo shoots a year with a local photographer here where I can just get some photos of myself. But I don't have the time to do that on a monthly basis. So I use a lot of stock imagery. And one of the places that I use for stock imagery is Social Squares. So let me show you how I use those to get images for my course content, my website content, and even for some social media posts.

So like I said, sometimes you just run out of photos to post or you need posts for Pinterest or your blog. And social squares is great because you can literally come over to this color palette and pick the colors that resonate with your brand. So I do a lot of dark pink, so I can click on dark pink and this is going to curate photos that have dark pink in them. So I could scroll through here to grab anything that I want, or I could also turn that off and come down here and look for specific categories. So maybe I'm looking for desktops. I want to show desktop desktops, people working. I can grab those and just easily download them. I can then upload them here into Canva and make a Pinterest make an Instagram post super easy. Now, this is a monthly subscription, but what Social Squares has also started offering is monthly training as well. So it's been a really great resource to access for all things content creation.

Now let's talk about scheduling and automating the publishing of all this content. Before I dig in, I would love to know if you are loving this type of content. Type in the comments below. Still here. If you're still watching and you are really getting a lot out of this particular video, here's what's great about scheduling your content and automating it. So many social platforms already have a scheduler built in, so you really don't even have to pay for any kind of tool to automate your posts. With our YouTube videos, we literally use the built in scheduler. Let me show you how we do that.

So when you upload your video to YouTube, you can just go over here to visibility and schedule it so you can come into schedule and pick the date that you want. One thing that you will need to remember when you upload a video, you want to make sure it's uploaded under private. If you do not upload your video with the private status, you are not going to be able to schedule this in the future. It's either going to go public immediately, if that's your default upload default or unlisted.

And if you upload it as unlisted.

You won't be able to see schedule it in advance. No special scheduler for YouTube with Facebook.

Again, we use the built in Facebook scheduler. Let me show you real quick how we do that.

Facebook is the exact same way. You can write what you need to write in here, add your media or your video, whatever you're going to do, preview what it's going to look like. You drop this little down arrow and you can schedule a post. You can pick the day and the time that you want it to go live on Facebook and you can literally schedule a month's worth of Facebook content right here in their scheduler.

So again, no money needed. Now, before I talk about my issues with scheduling, Instagram, the other platform we post consistently to that we do use a tool for is Pinterest. We use the software called Tailwind to automate all of our pins on our Pinterest account. Because to get Pinterest to kind of push your pins, you have to be pinning so many times a day. I don't have time for that. I don't actually know completely how Pinterest works. I will reference you to my Pinterest strategist, Vanessa Kynes. She does have a YouTube channel and it gives you a lot of great information on how to use Pinterest the right way. But I did want to be upfront with you that we do use Tailwind to schedule multiple pins onto Pinterest every single day. And Vanessa does that for me. But let me show you what the back end of Tailwind looks like because at one point in time I did schedule these pins myself.

So in addition to being able to schedule everything out here in Tailwind you can also get some analytics and some data in here as well. But let me show you the scheduler. So right over here under publisher, you can see all of the scheduled pins that we have planned for today. We have eight of them planned already. One is mine, another one is mine. But the key here is to be sharing not only your pins, but other people's pins as well. And then we also, you can see, have them scheduled over here. You can schedule out into advance. We have through January, January, about eight pins going live every single day. So you can see right here is our schedule. Again, I haven't done a whole lot inside of here, but you can literally just come and create a new pin right inside of here. And you can literally save these inside of Pinterest. So when you go into Pinterest, instead of saving a pin, you can put it on your tailwind queue.

I can link to Vanessa Kynes, who.

Does my Pinterest how to use Tailwind better, because I honestly have not been in tailwind in months. I don't do this anymore for my business.

But tailwind and how Vanessa schedules out.

My pins is literally how my Pinterest is Getting me over 200,000 monthly viewers and growing my YouTube channel and traffic.

To my website as well. All right, now, Instagram is a tricky little beast. Instagram doesn't like when you use a third party app to schedule posts, because Instagram wants you to really kind of post in the moment they want you to connect on their platform. So doing scheduled posts could technically mean that you're not engaging with your audience. So what happens is when you use a scheduler, your post sometimes doesn't reach the amount of people that it normally would if you posted it manually. So for a long time, we used.

A tool called planoly.

And planoly allows us to kind of get the images that we want and we can see our feed in advance to see if this photo would look better here or this graphic would look better or. Or do we have two of the same things close together so we can kind of see our posts before we put in the captions and we start to plan it out. And before we used to write all the captions and auto schedule it all to Instagram. But more recently, what we've been using planoly for is still planning our posts and writing our captions and then having a reminder sent to me so that I can manually publish that post to Instagram. So literally send me a reminder, it's time to post. I will click on it. It copies the caption and the photo to my phone and I can open up Instagram and aud automatically post to Instagram by just pasting my caption. Let me show you real quick what Planoly looks like.

Facebook does allow you to schedule Instagram posts from Facebook, so that is an option. But what I liked with Planoly is I can easily see what my feed.

Looks like if I wanted to.

Let's say we were going to add this. So does this look okay beside this most recent post? I don't want to have too many of these beside each other so I can get an idea of what this looks like in advance. Then I can click on this and write in that caption that I want and schedule it.

So let me show you how you.

Would do this from scratch. You would add to grid, you would grab a photo. So let's just say we're going to grab this.

This is an example.

We want to upload it as one post. I'm going to come back into it. We're going to do test. I do not want it to automatically post to Instagram. I want to manually post it. So what happens is when I schedule this out, it's going to notify me on my phone because I have the Planoly app that is now time to post this Instagram post. Alright? So I will click ok, whatever that says. It then downloads the photo to my phone. It copies the caption. All I have to do is open Instagram and post it on Instagram.

But like I said, the key for.

Planoly is just to be able to see what your feed's gonna look like in advance.

Now, when it comes to posting reels, IGTVs and stories, those have all got to be done manually to Instagram. And I will tell you, we've had multiple issues uploading and posting Instagram tv. So do know that if you're having problems, it's probably Instagram. We've been having problems for months when it comes to IGTV posting. Look, content creation can be a major headache. But putting a plan in place will make your life so much easier. Like I said, the last few weeks here on my channel, I've been focusing heavily on how to help you create a content marketing strategy that will help you drive more revenue to your business. So if you haven't caught those videos yet and you want to continue binging about my content marketing strategy and my content plan, click the playlist that is on your screen right now to start at video number one of this series. I promise it's not going to disappoint. Grab some popcorn, a LaCroix, and let's binge it together. See you over on that video.