How to Create a Consistent Social Media Content Calendar That Won't Burn You Out

I'm going to share with you a truth about repurposing content. So when you hear so many entrepreneurs tell you to repurpose one piece of content into hundreds of pieces, they're lying, meaning that they aren't doing it themselves. They have a team of writers, graphic designers, assistants, video editors helping them do this. And for a small entrepreneur, it is impossible to repurpose your content into that many pieces. And I have fallen victim of communicating this message as well. But I have put into place some templates and systems that I want to share with you here today that did allow me to at least repurpose one piece of content in realistically seven to eight ways by myself. And then creating, like I said, this system that when I brought somebody on that could help me a few hours a week, they could do it as well. This, I promise you, is going to allow you to be more consistent without burning you out or stressing you the f out. And at the end of this video, I'm going to start to show you how you can start building out a color recorded calendar so you can see every month what your content calendar is going to be color coded by the type of content that's going out. And one quick disclaimer here. It doesn't matter what project management tool you're using. Asana ClickUp Monday, whatever. I'm going to show you in an easy way that you can adapt it to whatever you're using. Before we dive in, I need a quick favor from you. If you struggle staying consistent with your content or tend to take long breaks because you're not sure how to get back into the swing of things again, hit that like button. Because I think we all need to understand that we aren't alone in this. And so by us clicking that like button, we're going to be able to see all of the other people as well that feel this pain and this struggle as well. As a content creator for our business now, I shared this in last week's episode where I broke down four tips for a social media strategy that works. But to get a content calendar that's going to work for you, you've got to focus on one primary platform. This is your permission. You don't have to tackle all of the platforms that are out there. You don't even need to repurp to all of these platforms either. I need you to pick one solid evergreen hub content that's going to live for a while. I personally love YouTube now. I did an entire video just a few weeks ago about why I really think your hub content should be YouTube in 2022 and moving forward. But the main reason why I think YouTube needs to be your hub content every single week is because of searchability and recommendations. So because you create YouTube videos, not only do you show up on the world's second largest search eng in YouTube, but also Google, the world's largest search engine, you're also creating this content that lives for years. I've mentioned in a few videos that I have a video from 33 months ago that still gets views to this day and still grows my email list. And like no other social platform up yet can do that, not even a podcast. And then of course, the recommendation, if you use YouTube and you build a strategy the way I teach, by implementing my piggyback strategy and the firework approach, you're able to get in front of new people and more people that may have never even even found you on places like Instagram, TikTok, Facebook or even podcasts. But again, if you want to hear more detailed, if you're still on the fence about YouTube, I would definitely watch that video next because there's some real data in that video on why YouTube is kind of the platform you should be focusing on as your hub content every single week. Okay, now I want to be a nosy nancy and I'm curious, what platform are you focusing on right now? Like that's where you're creating content for. That's what you're working on growing. Let me know down in the comments. What platform is that for you? And there's no wrong choice here. I just love getting it sense of what people are focusing on right now. Now let's start mapping out our calendar. So let me walk you through how you can literally get started in Google Sheets because that is free and everyone can use it. I quickly set up a idea of how you could create a content calendar here in Google Sheets. So you can see I just added the weeks here, I added the days of the week here. And what I did here is I started adding color code keys. So what I would do is for YouTube, my color code key is going to be red. For TikTok, I'm just going to say it's blue. For Instagram, I'm going to go ahead and say orange. And for my newsletter, I'm just going to make that pink. Now what you can start to do, if you're going to do multiple things on the same day, go ahead and insert a row up here under each week. For example, what I mentioned, every single Wednesday, I have a YouTube video that goes live. And we're going to make sure that we color code that red. I also have my newsletter to go out as well. So we're going to color code that pink. And I also have a Instagram that will go out as well. Now, let's say on Thursday I want to do another Instagram about this particular content, make sure we color code that. And maybe this time I want to do a TikTok and you can customize this to make it however you want. So you could honestly put in here Instagram stories and we can color code that something different. And then you could also start to add your ideas in here. So what I'm going to do is feature Friday highlight BSA student Kelly. What I can just do is format and wrap this so that it's in there. I can quickly come here every single time I need to be reminded what my content calendar is and just build this out from here. Now, the other option that I love is Asana and I love to look at Asana in board format first to build out my content calendar. Then I will look here at the calendar version. What I always do as well is create cards that are templates. So every single thing that I'm publishing, there is a workflow, there are checklists, there are things that I need to make sure that I do. So I make sure I have a templated card that has my entire process checklist on it. So what I would do is template YouTube video. Now, we want to make this color coded, right? So you need to come into this card and the way to make it color coded in Asana is come to these three dots, add a tag, and I have YouTube already added. What you would do is just type this in and you could add your own color coded tag as well. Now let me just fill this up real quick and show you what it looks like on a calendar. All right. This is just a build out of what one week could look like. So now when you go to your calendar form, you can start to see how this is built out color coded. So this is how you can really start to build out a content calendar with the idea of your hub content and then how to break it up into other pieces of content that are doable for you for each particular platform and how that platform likes it, which is really important. And I'm going to be diving into that in next week's video video why we need to be creating content specific for each platform. Here's my thoughts on batching. I am a batching queen I love batching. In fact, today as I'm recording this, I filmed all of my August content, so four videos. But at one point I was batching about 12 YouTube videos at a time. But that is too much. Now, realistically, as a solo entrepreneur, or maybe you have one other person helping you, here's what I think your content plan should look like so that it's effective. But you don't hate it, obviously. I think YouTube should be your weekly content every single week. Then you can send a newsletter briefly talking about why this video is so important, kind of your key takeaways and that they should go watch it so that you're nurturing that email list, which is your money maker. But you're creating evergreen content over on YouTube that can continue to send people to your email list and continue to grow your business. I personally like to send my newsletter within the hour after my YouTube video is published because the more people that watch it, the more the YouTube algorithm sees, oh, people are watching it, people are engaging it, that they're going to test it with new people. I also like to post a carousel on Instagram that same day as well. So we already have an Instagram template that we've created inside of Canva. So when I finish a YouTube video, my assistant, yes, I have an assistant and I'm going to run down everybody that's on my team at the end of this video for full transparency so you can see what I'm working with. But my assistant takes our template and she plugs in the key takeaways that I bolded in my YouTube script. So it's super easy. And that all happens for me the first day, my YouTube video comes out the next day. So for me on Thursday, we will pull out clips of the YouTube video to put on stories. It's about three 15 second clips that we just clip out of the YouTube video to promote on stories. And I will just use the little link sticker to try to get people over there as well. Now we're looking at Friday I published the entire video on Facebook. We are running some ads over on Facebook. We don't put a lot of money into ads over there, but I want fresh content if, if people happen to find me on Facebook. But I'm not really sending people off of Facebook to that YouTube video. I will also prerecord stories for Friday as well and it may just be a little bit of a mini training in regards to that topic. So that gives me Wednesday, Thursday and Friday's worth of content. Now that's Kind of the extent of my content lifecycle. I could absolutely do more, but I don't have an extensive team to do that with. So on Mondays, those are more of like a wild card fun day for me. I don't necessarily stress over it. If I post on Mondays, I don't. But if I post on Instagram, it may be more of like a selfie of me where I share a little bit more about me and my story. Again, I don't say that I have a solid Instagram story strategy. I'm just doing on Instagram what works for me. And again, all of my efforts are focused on my YouTube content driving me leads around the clock. And when I said I was going to talk about who is on my team, I have an assistant. She is actually an account manager in my agency. She uploads my YouTube video and she does all the optimization stuff for me on YouTube. I also have a content writer, Latasha. She's magical. She turns my YouTube video into a blog post and she also writes that newsletter and three social posts for me. And then I have a video editor. In fact, in my agency, we kind of have a team of video editors. We have three different video editors that we work with. This is why, like, I'm able to do this and why I'm saying you do not need to repurpose everything for every platform and how it's still hard for you to repurpose. But I'm going to walk through some things that you can do right now to make repurposing a little bit easier on yourself. Let's talk about templates in Canva. So one of the things that's easier to pump out content to is Pinterest and Instagram carousels. So we have these templates inside of Canva that we just use over and over again every time we create a new YouTube video. And all we need to do is just change out the text of the title of the video. We also have our carousel templates as well. You can see we have that title and then we dive into typically three to four different takeaways and then why they should go watch it and where to watch my video. Remember when I talk to you about building your content calendar templates, we add links to these templates and that's going to make your content creation life easier when you have all of this in place. One of the hardest parts about staying consistent with your content calendar as well is coming up with content ideas. And I think this might actually be better suited for an entire video if you Want to see a video on how to generate consistent content ideas? Say content idea video down in the comments below so that I know you actually want this. Because again, I think this video needs to be much more intensive than just giving it a little shot here in this particular video, the reason why I say maybe this should be a different video is because the way I choose the content ideas that I'm going to do is based on my current business goals. For example, this month in August that this video is going live, our entire goal is visibility. Our goals are to get in front of as many people as possible over the next six weeks to help me promote a free challenge that I'm hosting in September cause a kickstart your YouTube video Spark challenge. Now if you want to learn more about this free challenge, go to the link that is on your screen right now. You can sign up for totally free if you're there early. It may be a wait list, but this is our whole purpose behind our content plan right now. While it's a lot, it's not going to be a lot forever because our default Strategy here on YouTube is our Firework approach that we always talk about and it focuses on creating one core video that sends people to our offer to our funnel and following that up with four to five Spark videos that we try to get on the homepage of people's YouTube channel and then send people to the core video again to our business to continue generating leads and revenue in our business while making the YouTube algorithm happy. This is why it is so important when I said the first thing you need to do is pick one platform to focus on so all of this can fit into place and you don't start to get confused on what you should be posting, where you should be posting and when you should be posting. This is the key to creating a content calendar that is not going to burn you out and you're going to see a return on investment with the content that you do create. There's a goal and you're not just checking the to do list off of creating content. And if you are ready to stop dragging your feet on starting your YouTube channel, are really using YouTube strategically in your content calendar, then join my free kickstart your YouTube Spark challenge. During this five day challenge, I'm going to walk you through how to create create one YouTube video that will drive you organic traffic for years to come. Plus I'm going to teach you the process to be able to do this again and again and again. So you are simplifying that content plan and you're creating content that lives longer than 48 hours, like Instagram, if you're lucky. Still not sold on YouTube yet. I get it. So I highly encourage you to click the video that's on your screen right now, because I walk through some key Data that shows YouTube should be the primary marketing strategy that you're using in 2022 and beyond. If you don't want to be burning yourself out on a content calendar that you just can't manage.