Create Consistent Content in Less Time

Keeping up with all of the different social media platforms out there is a lot I know. But the key to any real social media success, as in growing your audience and making money in your business, is consistency. I'm not talking about posting consistently every single day, multiple times a day. Heck no. Who has the time for that? I'm talking about consistency in your posting schedule, consistency in the value of your content, and consistency in the messaging that you have in your content. So in this video, I'm going to walk you through my process, my equipment, my tools that I have used to keep me consistent on social media, specifically YouTube, for the past six years. Hey there. Welcome back. If you are new, my name is Trina, and on this channel we help you create content that converts. So content that converts into building an audience or making you money in your business. My very first secret to really staying consistent on social media is pick one. Seriously. I got started six years ago. I started with YouTube. I dabbled in some other platforms, but the only one that I was consistent, that I knew was my Number one was YouTube. I was able to master my strategy here on YouTube, master my process, create templates, and really get into a flow on being consistent on YouTube before I moved on to another platform. This is your permission to focus on one social media platform. Okay? Don't listen to all the other people that say you need to be on every single one. Focus on one. Master that one first. It's going to save you a lot of stress, a lot of sleepless nights if you just pick one and really get your system going there until you add on a new one. Now, don't get me wrong, I talk a lot in my business about repurposing. In fact, my agency clients, we take their YouTube videos that we edit and we turn it into an Instagram TV for them, we turn it into a Facebook post for them and Instagram stories. I'm all for repurposing. You just gotta have some kind of flow or process down for one platform before you start adding these other ones on. I actually have a video coming out in the next couple of weeks where I talk about my new approach to the video multiplier formula. So make sure you're subscribed because like I said, I'm filming that today in my batch day and I think it comes out next week. You won't want to miss how I'm approaching repurposing now in 2022. So I'm not sure how many times I've said it up to this point in the video, but the very first key here in creating an effective social media strategy is consistency. That is what all the social media platforms, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, what else is there? TikTok, Twitter. They want creators, they want accounts that are consistently showing up with content. So don't spread yourself too thin trying to do them all. Pick one, get consistent, then add the next layer. So I guess that was number one. So let's move on to the second thing you can do. You have got to create content that your audience wants from you. Now, I know this can kind of seem like, well, yeah, duh. But I see this all the time and I've personally fell victim to doing this as well. We have something fun we want to talk about. We have something we're really passionate about and we think people are going to want to hear it. But your content isn't about you. Your content is about your target audience and what are they struggling with? What are the pain points they are having? What are they feeling right now? They want to look to you for a certain answer. So what is your zone of genius that you can help them with? For example, I would love to talk about YouTube analytics and creating YouTube funnels to build your business. And I absolutely add some of this content into my content plan. But a bulk of you watching, a large part of my audience watching is just struggling to hit a consistent monthly revenue of 5,000 or $6,000, maybe even hit that consistent $10,000 a month mark. Right? In fact, let me know in the comments right now, what is your biggest str when it comes to your business? Because the whole point of my YouTube channel moving forward is going to be helping you create this content. Not just to create content to check something off of your to do list, but to help you create the content that drives the right people to you, that ultimately will want to buy from you, work with you, and get you to that consistent $5,000 a month, $10,000 a month revenue. So if I can clearly understand what my audience wants you watching right now, but that really allows me to zone in on the type of content I should be creating here, on YouTube, on Instagram, on my blog, and anywhere else I'm creating content for. So let me know in the comments. Where are you struggling when it comes to your business? Is it social media? Is it consistent revenue? Is it finding clients? Let's talk. Other than asking you all here in the comments, one thing that I do every six months in my business to really make sure I'm on that guided path to creating content that you need from me is I send out a content feedback survey. In fact, I just sent one out back in December. And by sending this out, we got hundreds of responses. So I could clearly understand what it is that you need, what it is that you're struggling with. And to make sure that's what I'm giving you in my content. Now, if you don't have an audience right now, or you can't get your audience to help you out and fill out a feedback survey, I would take a look at your niche, neighbors, technically competitors, but look at people in your niche or in your zone of genius, and what kind of content are they creating? So if you're an SEO specialist and you help people SEO their website and help them create SEO blogs, what are other SEO specialists talking about here on YouTube or on podcasts or on Instagram? What is the content that they're talking about? What are the topics that they're talking about? Are you talking about those as well? Adding your secret sauce to that? Or if you're a graphic designer, what are other graphic designers talking about on podcasts, on YouTube, on Pinterest, on Instagram? Are you talking about that? And how can you put your own opinion into those topics and then think about what are the trends going on in your industry? For example, with a graphic designer, at the start of the new year, Pantone always announces the colors of the year, right? So is that prevalent to your audience? Does your audience need to know that? Is that something that they want to hear about? That's some content that you should create for your audience and why knowing these Pantone colors is important to their branding or their business, right? So once you really nailed down and got into your viewer and your audience's head, the content that you will create is going to be so much more effective and ultimately grow your bottom line. Again, whether that bottom line for you is followers or revenue. In all right, number three, I think we're doing numbers here. You got to plan time to create content and put it on your schedule. Look, you cannot be posting in the moment, especially here on YouTube, as in, you know, a video needs to go out on YouTube tomorrow. You need to film it today, edit today, maybe get it uploaded on time tomorrow. Whoa. Major overload and stress. Major overwhelm. And that's why I highly recommend putting a planning and recording session on your calendar and treating it like any other appointment, like a dentist appointment or a doctor's appointment. Right? In the first couple years of my business, I was a team of one solo entrepreneur doing it all, creating the content, editing it, uploading it, engaging, doing all the client work, creating the course content, doing the launches. I was there not very long ago and the best way for me to manage content creation even with a two year old and a four year old at home was to batch about two months worth of content at once A couple times. I did batch about three months worth of content at one time, but I do not recommend it. But remember the first couple of years in my business when I was a team of one, I focused predominantly here on YouTube. So YouTube, one video a week was the only thing I was focusing on getting out. So how that looked for me is I put on my calendar a day to research and plan my content, and then I put on my calendar another day to film my content, and then I put on my calendar another day to edit my content. Because my content is my marketing material. I wasn't dumping money into ads at the time. I wasn't even going to conferences at that time. I had babies at home. And so my content on YouTube was the only way I was attracting new people to my business, that I was getting new leads and I was getting sales into my course. And so if I didn't create videos, I didn't generate leads. And I really quickly understood how important that was. And that's why I prioritize creating YouTube videos every single month. Now that I do have help, I have a little bit different of a schedule that I'm trying out for 2022. And what I'm trying to do is record videos every two weeks. If you've noticed here on my channel, we've upped our content posting to two videos a week. And so what that allows me to do is four videos in one day. So right now I'm sitting down filming four videos, which is two weeks worth of content. But yesterday I sat down and planned out these four videos. I'm not doing both on the same day. The reason why I backed down to two is first of all, I do have people helping me now that I can get back into having fun with content again. And it also allows me to get creative. Like I said earlier, I felt myself falling into just creating a checklist of okay, got to do a YouTube video, got to do a YouTube video. And I felt like I'm boring and I just sat here kind of like a robot spewing content at you. In fact, I talked to somebody in my email who we really talked about how I'm different than other people and how a lot of people go just surface level. And he really enjoyed when you go a little bit deeper and you share a little bit more of the application of what I'm talking about. And that really hit me hard thinking, okay, that's how I want to be different. Because I don't just want to say spew tip 1, 2, 3 4, 5, 6 or hack 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 for you. I really want to show you how you can take this content and then implement it into your business to see the results. And so that's why I decided to pull back and film every other week so that it gets me back into my creative zone and I'm not just checking off doing a YouTube video again. The one thing that I am doing well in advance though, is I'm planning three months of content ideas. So the week before January, that last week in December, I did a video last week. I will link it right now. I showed you how I plan out my next 90 days of content. I had an idea, a theme for each month. I knew what I was promoting, what I was leading into. I talk about my firework approach to content here on YouTube that helps me drive more leads to my business. And so I'm not just sitting down here to come up with content ideas. I have a general direction for 90 days at a time. And then when I create my videos, when I script them, write them out, I already know what I'm talking about. I just need to dive into the details of what I want to actually see, say on these videos. And then that also helps me know what I'm going to be posting on Instagram, because Instagram is the second platform that I'm really zoning into this quarter. Like I said, I'm really planning my years in 90 days. And so I'm going to evaluate every 90 days how it went. But my home here is YouTube. My secondary platform is Instagram. And like I said, I'm getting back to the basics. I just have YouTube and then I'm adding a layer as Instagram. That's it. This is kind of a great lead in now to talking a little bit about batching, because I know batching can be overwhelming for some people. It can be life changing for some people. But it can also be kind of weird to figure out how batching can work for you and what type of batching is best for you. Because I'm going to tell you, one type of batching doesn't work for everybody. And so you've got to really find your flow when it comes to batching content the way I batch as you could kind of Pick up in the past couple of minutes in this video is I batch planning and researching my videos all in one chunk. And so I'll do four of those at a time. Remember, earlier I batched kind of the concepts for 90 days, so I have the concepts for 12 weeks. But then I have a day where I plan and research, kind of do my video game plan for four videos at a time. Then I batch recording. Like today I'm sitting down, hopefully getting four videos done. But there are children home today, so you can never guess what's going to happen there. And then I will batch, creating the description box content, creating the Instagram content, the captions, all of the writing things on another day. Batching really improves your productivity when you can work on the same thing in chunks of time. So I don't mean batching one entire video at once, like researching, planning, recording, editing, not that type of batching. Doing all the recording at once because you're using that piece of your brain and you're not having to switch tasks. When you switch tasks like planning, scripting, recording, editing, you're constantly switching tasks in your brain and your productivity dips a little bit. So when you can stay in caption writing mode or researching mode, that's going to help you speed up your processes and get more done. Okay, so we know how important planning is, right? And putting it on your calendar. Put it on your calendar. Let's move into number four, having a repurposed plan. This is where I'm going to get into talking about how I've changed my thoughts on the video multiplier formula and why I don't think it's as important for you to show up on every single platform in kind of like a spray and pray method. When I got started with the video multiplier formula, it was back in 2018, 2019, and since I was creating video, all the other platforms were hungry for video. Because not everybody was bought into video yet. Not all of us wanted to show up, do our hair and makeup, and be on video. And so when you just posted video content on these platforms, you were really rewarded for that. But social platforms change frequently, and as the writing on the wall became very clear to so many content creators and business owners, video is where it's at. So now more people are creating videos, more content creators, more ads, more businesses are creating videos. So there's a little bit more competition, and the platforms are going to reward something a little bit more differently than just slapping a video up. So you really need to start being strategic with the type of videos you are repurposing to these platforms. Like I said before, we just slapped up our YouTube video into a vertical format. Boom, IGTV was up and we just slapped up a square version on Facebook and boom, Facebook was up, right? But when you are doing that, you also have to think about engaging with people on those platforms, right? You can't just slap it up and leave. You can't post and go. You need to take the time to be investing in those conversations and those comments and having that engagement on your content for the platforms to A, serve your content out to more people, but B, build that community on this platform. Then when you're spraying and praying everywhere, your time gets very limited. You can't always be commenting on a Facebook video or an Instagram video or a YouTube video, right? So when you are repurposing your content, you've got to think about the time that you have to put into each platform to engage. Because if you aren't engaging, you're pretty much wasting your time putting those videos up on these platforms. Because what is the purpose? You're putting these videos up but you're not creating any relationships on these platforms. And I know I have fallen victim to this big time. So what we do now is like I said, I'm really focusing on Instagram this 90 days and we put about two to three minutes of this YouTube video over on IGTV and I'll either have a verbal call to action or we'll put up a title screen that says go watch the full version over on YouTube. It'll be a better viewing experience because IGTV typically has about a 2 to 4 minute retention on videos because it's on your phone and people just don't watch videos as long as they would on YouTube. We do see an increase in traffic to our videos and to our clients videos when they are posting it on igtv. So we know we can get people from Instagram over to YouTube. When it comes to Facebook. Totally different ball game. It is nearly impossible to get people from Facebook over to YouTube unless you have a very active Facebook group and your audience really loves you in your Facebook group and you publish in your Facebook group about a new video, then we see traffic over on your video from Facebook. But if you're just posting clips of Your video, your YouTube video on your business page on Facebook, it's really hard to get people to go from Facebook to YouTube. So what we do instead, we just put the entire video up on Facebook. Basically like a dedicated Facebook video. And then for a little bit last year in 2021, we tried taking YouTube videos and clipping it up to make reels with the YouTube videos I was already creating. Yeah, those don't work. It wasn't worth the time for my video editor to sift through the clips to figure out which ones to put a 15 to 30 second reel. And so what I'm doing now is taking the key points I talk about here on these videos and then create a reel, a native reel, because I've already done the content, I'm already done with my hair and makeup. And so by filming those reels right after this YouTube video that I'm filming, it saves me time. It's content I already created and it gets me more leverage on that reel to make it worth the time. Okay, let's move into some tools and how I can manage all this content that's going on. First of all, when it comes to video, make it simple. Since I've decided to up to two videos a week here on my YouTube channel, I am a little bit less on time. So all I've done recently is when I've gotten into a crunch, I honestly use my phone. I just vlogged it a couple times because I needed to get the video over to my video editor. So keep your video content super simple. Use what you have. Don't think you need to set up like a fancy camera and audio and all of these lights. Just make it simple and incredibly valuable. When you are creating video content, you got to think about all of the space you're going to be taking up on your computer. And I'm going to be the first to admit I am not very good at organizing all of these video files that I create. I'm trying to figure out a new way to do that. But what I have done is keep a lot of the video files on an external hard drive. If I'm ever doing any editing on my own, I make sure all of my libraries, my like, like imovie libraries, my Final Cut Pro libraries are all housed on a external drive. This is a lacy external drive because video takes up a butt ton of space. So think about that. Also, when you are starting to create video content, you got to get some external hard drive or your computer is going to hate you. I also use Asana. You've heard me talk about it a lot here. It really allows me to not only see my content visually in color coded format. I did a video about that a few weeks ago. I'll link to that. But it allows me to just write in there all of my thoughts, post any examples that I have, link to any examples that I have, and I can see exactly what needs to go live or posted every single week. I can write the content up on my computer because I like a keyboard and then I can grab it off of my Asana app on my phone to just post on Instagram when I need to. That's what I love Asana for. And I'm in it all day, every day. I also use Canva for all of our graphics. So when you see our Instagram carousel posts, when you see our Instagram story graphics, when you see our Pinterest, that is all Canva. And what I've done is I've created templates for every single piece of content that you see and saved it into a brand folder inside of Canva. So every time we create a new video here on YouTube, we just use that template and update it to the text that we need. I've been thinking about sharing how we organize our Canva and create our Canva templates. If you would like to see a Canva video from me, comment below. Canva video, please. And we'll make sure we get that on our content calendar because I'm not sure if that's right for you guys or not. So let me know. Now let's talk about delegating as part of one of my tools. And this is really important to understand. I know it may feel like at this moment there's no way that you could hire somebody and you don't need to hire an employee. A full time employee. I didn't hire my first time employee till like four months ago. Know that there are people that you can hire for just a couple hundred dollars a month that could really take some things off of your hands. And some things that I would think about taking off of your plate is editing YouTube videos. Because how long is that taking you to do, right? What if you could just pay somebody $500 a month? I know it sounds like a lot, but if you're paying them $500 a month to edit, what could you be doing on the back end? Could you be engaging in comments? Could you be creating a course? Could you be creating processes? Could you be having discovery calls and book new clients? Could you take on more clients because you're not editing videos? You could also find somebody for just a couple hundred dollars a month that could help you upload or comment or answer emails. And like I said, I know it's very scary and I know it seems Like a lot. But there are some amazing people out there that will really help you for a few hundred dollars a month, or maybe you have a sister or a husband or a significant other that could help you take something off of your plate. So you could really focus on the things that are going to grow your business so that you ultimately could be making that consistent 5 to 6k a month to hire somebody. Alright, so that was number six. Now let's move on to number seven which is really important if you're going to find somebody to help you. And it's, you have to have systems in place, you have to understand what it is you're doing every step of the way. Because if you want to get to the point where you get somebody helping you out, they need to know how it is that you do something. This was so hard for me to get down on paper, so to speak. We use loom. I will use loom. I will record exactly what it is that I'm doing on my screen and then we have a training video for anybody that we ultimately hire. Right now we're at one full time employee, one half time employee, part time employee. Since I have a video that shows them exactly what it is that I do, they can clearly understand how it should look, how it should go. Now you could go a step further, turn this into an Asana checklist or a Google Doc checklist. But getting your processes in place, even if you are videos, posting on Instagram, sending an email newsletter, right, These are things that you can start to process or create processes for that you could then hire somebody to help you do for a few hundred dollars a month. Now, if you want to figure out which platforms you should actually be on, since I talked a lot today about not needing to be on all of them, how to set up this digital content calendar Asana that I've been talking about and make sure your content strategy is actually clear in moving the needle in your business. Make sure you watch the video that is on your screen right now because I'm going to show you in that video exactly how to create a digital content calendar from scratch and make it color coded and pretty. Plus it's going to help you stay consistent on social media as well. So click that video and I'll see you over there.