How To Create A Content Plan For All Your Social Media Needs!

Do you wish you could somehow be more organized creating content? Like, ideally, you would have all of your content scheduled out weeks in advance. Sounds like a magical world. Creating consistent new content for your business can be incredibly time consuming. Do you ever wonder how somebody can consistently post a new blog post every Monday morning and send out a newsletter and make a social media post? You know, they don't have more hours in the day than you, so how are they doing it? So consistent. And in this video, I'm going to share with you my process for creating consistent content using a content calendar, some free scheduling tools, and how to keep it all organized. Hey, welcome back. My name is Trina. If you are new here, and today we're talking about getting consistent with your content. The first thing to do in creating consistent content is coming up with ideas, right? What are you going to post on YouTube? What are you going to send on your newsletter? What are you going to write on your Instagram caption? So what? So what I like to do is keep all of my ideas in a Trello brain dump, especially for YouTube videos. So I may be watching videos on YouTube and be suggested a video and I think, wow, that'd be a really good idea. Or I see in my subscription feed Amy Landino posted a new video and I think, wow, that's kind of a cool video. I could have a different take on that. So I keep all of these ideas down in a brain dump list in Trello. That way, when time comes for me to create content, I'm not having to pull all of these ideas from thin air. I also prefer to keep it in Trello because if I keep it in a notebook, I tend to have five, 10 notebooks lying around at any given time. And so for me to flip through all those notebooks and find that one idea that I thought of in the shower two weeks ago right before I went to bed. It's just much more easier if I keep all of those ideas down in Trello and get to them a lot quicker. The other place that I'm coming up with content ideas is what's working well on my YouTube channel and what's working well on my website. So I. So I like to log into my website analytics and my YouTube analytics and see which videos are currently getting the most views in this past couple of weeks. The same with my website. Which blog posts are getting the most traffic in the past couple of weeks? Then I think, can I redo these videos? Can I do an update on these videos? Can I turn these videos into a multi video series. And then I put that down in my Brain Dump idea. So now I have this list of ideas. When the time comes for me to sit down and plan out my content for the month, I'm looking at what's going on this particular month. Are any of those video ideas in that Brain Dump column able to fit into that particular month? When you're looking at your calendar, you're thinking, are you launching a new program this month? Do you have vacations scheduled? Is there some kind of special social media holiday like Ice Cream Day that you could really use in your content? That's what I'm saying. When you look at your calendar to start to see what you can create content on, then I want you to start creating themes for each week. So remember, if that National Ice Cream Day is one week the month, maybe you're creating content around ice cream or you're talking about ice cream or your favorite type of ice cream, something like that, because that's going to help you create easier content. Now, outside of social media holidays, the content themes that I'm talking about are themes that you talk about on your blog or your YouTube channel. I want you to think of your themes as like content pillars. These are the pillars that you rest your business on. These are your areas of expertise. So while I talk a lot about YouTube strategy and YouTube tips here on my channel, there are other things that I can help you do to get you on YouTube, right? So for me, my four content themes or pillars are YouTube strategy, productivity tips, tips on building a business, and confidence building tips. All four of those easily fit together and I can pull a common theme through all of them. So, so it makes sense for me to put on my channel and it also allows me to switch up the content that I'm talking about. So I'm not always talking about YouTube tips, but when I talk about productivity, I can talk about how being productive gives you more time to launch a YouTube channel. Or if I'm giving you business tips, I can talk about how doing this email newsletter can allow you to promote your YouTube videos more. See how that common thread pulls through all pieces of your content. So the reason why I say four is because there's generally four weeks in a month, right? So I just make it easy like that. So let's say week one, I'm going to post a video on my YouTube channel about YouTube strategy. So I know my YouTube video comes out on Wednesday. I'm going to send a newsletter about that video on Wednesday. I'm going to do an instagram post an Instagram story about that video on Wednesday. Then maybe on Thursday I'm talking a little bit more detail about that specific video and I'm telling people to go watch it. Then maybe on the weekend I'm getting a little more personal with an Instagram post, but I'm still tying in to maybe what that tip or strategy did into my personal life. And then on Monday or Tuesday I'm going to post something else about that particular content theme because on Wednesday my next video comes out and that video may be about productivity. So the next seven Bs, my content is gonna be themed around productivity and getting things done and tying back into that video. So, so a couple weeks ago I did a video on how to plan your week to get more things done. So that week I did Instagram stories about my simplified planner and how creating to do lists that get things done in my business allow me to have a three day weekend. And then I posted about the weekend and what the kids and I do on that Friday that we have off. See how this all starts kind of filtering out through your content. But the key is to have these content themes or these content pillars to know what you're going to talk about throughout the week once you come up with your themes. So mine is YouTube tips, productivity, business building and also confidence. I can start to look at the list of ideas that I came up in my brain dump list and start to see where they fit in. I like to alternate videos so that I don't get tired of talking about the same things and you don't get tired of hearing about me talking about the same things. So I will do YouTube tips, productivity, business building and then confidence building and start back over with YouTube tips. So I'm looking at all those videos to see which ones can fit in where. I also like to be super organized. So I will color code these. So productivity videos may be pink. So they'll be pink and Trello pink and Google Calendar just so me and my team can also see, okay, this week is pink, that means productivity. This week is red, that means YouTube tips. Just makes it easier. Once I have all of my ideas on the calendar, I want to dig into a little bit deeper on those ideas because I'm going to start scrolling scripting them. Yes, I script all of these videos. I will do four weeks at a time because I'm gonna sit here and film my videos in one day so it's all done. So generally I'll film my videos about a week or two weeks before that first One goes live, and I will film a month's worth of videos in that particular day, which is what I'm doing right now. So when I'm researching my content, I'm looking, have I done this video before on my YouTube channel? How did it perform? What did the audience retention graph look like? What, when did people leave that particular video? And how can I make it better this time around? I'm also looking at other videos that are showing up on YouTube with a similar topic. How are they delivering that content? Which videos are performing well? What do their thumbnails look like? What do their titles look like? And I'm keeping note of all of this information in the Trello card for that particular video idea. So I do this for all four of those videos so I can really come up with a title and a scroll. So when the day comes to film, I have that all done. All right, so once I have all these titles determined, this is a new step for me. I start plugging this into a content calendar so my team can access it as well. Whether you have a team or not is an easy way for you to look at a calendar and see, okay, this day, a YouTube video goes out. This day an Instagram story goes out. This day a Facebook video goes out. So you can see on my content calendar, each theme starts on a Wednesday. Since that's when each of my YouTube videos goes live, I will also add in the calendar that my newsletter needs to go live because they need to know I have a video. I will add an Instagram post on this topic. I will add an IGTV video and a Facebook video, plus a blog post and Pinterest image. And I just keep this all on my calendar so that I can see when things are due. So I know everything is done in advance, I get it scheduled, and I know when it goes live. And so now, since I have a team, they can easily see as well when these things need to be prepared and go live. So as you can see, Wednesdays are massive content pushes for us because that's when new content comes out. Then the rest of the next six days is just resending people back to that major piece of content that went out on Wednesday. Let me know if this is kind of making sense for you or if you're going to start creating your content calendar. Let me know down in the comments below. So it's basically just filling out this Google Calendar from there if I have any ideas about a post that I want going live that week. So since this week is about productivity, maybe I want to post an Instagram post about my favorite planner as a simplified planner and how it helps me be more productive just to get ideas down to get them rolling. Okay, so now that I have the plan, now it's time to start creating. So I mark a time on my calendar where I'm gonna spend that day shooting videos. And that's what I'm doing today. I'm shooting five YouTube videos. I'm also shooting five IGTV videos. And the reason why I'm shooting those separately is because I'm making them about to three minutes long. If you want to check them out, head over to my Instagram and watch my IGTV videos. But in those videos, I'm giving just a little bit of content from this particular video and sending people who watch IGTV to go to my YouTube video to watch the rest of the video. Okay, so it's giving them a good chunk of content some help, but it's also telling them to go to my YouTube video to learn more. Again, I will sit down here in one day, shoot the YouTube video, shoot the IGTV video, shoot the thumbnail photos, and get all of that content creation piece where I need to be on camera done in one day. Then I'm going to set aside a day to write some of the content. Especially if you're writing your own blog posts and your own newsletters and your social media content, you want to sit down and write on one particular day. I know for me, when I'm done shooting these videos, I'm going to be wiped out. It takes a lot to sit here and talk in front of a camera. And so for me to think about writing content today is just not going to happen. So I may plan on writing all my content next week and doing that all in one sitting. Another piece of this plan that you'll want to batch is also creating templates. So maybe templates like Pinterest templates, We have two of those for every single video that I publish. Or thumbnail templates so that you're alternating your thumbnails. We have about five or six of those so that when the time comes to get your content out, you're not spending time recreating graphics over and over. You. You have templates in place to make things go a lot quicker and also are consistent with your branding. So now that you have all your graphics templated and you have all your content shot now it's going to be scheduling, and I'm going to share some of the tools that I use to Schedule my content out. Now, YouTube is great because you can schedule your YouTube video to go live whenever you want as long as you upload that video to private, not unlisted, you must upload that video as private. You can then go into YouTube and schedule it to go live when you want it to. Then the same thing for Facebook, you can upload a native video to Facebook and Facebook has its own scheduler that you can schedule that video to go live whenever you want it to, absolutely free. So for my website, I use Squarespace. And again, Squarespace allows us to schedule when our blogs go live. So when we create a blog, not only do we have the written up content for the blog, we also embed the YouTube video and also have the Pinterest images so people can share that blog post. Pinterest. And again, we can schedule that through Squarespace totally free. So you got YouTube, Facebook and your blog scheduled for free. So the other two places that I schedule content is Instagram and Pinterest. With Instagram we use Planoly. It's just something that I had tested a while back and I liked it. You can see your feed, you can automatically schedule it to go live when you want it to and it pushes it. You don't have to go in and manually do it. You can also schedule stories, which we've been testing a little bit. But some problems that we tend to have is the stories go upload out of sequence. So that's something you need to test with. And Planoly costs about $9 a month for the solo plan. And if you pay by the year, it's $84 a year for the solo plan. Then for Pinterest we use Tailwind. Because what happens with Pinterest is you really gotta be consistent pinning every single day. So you're not always pinning your content to Pinterest to see results. You can, you've got to be consistent pinning, you know, five, six, seven, eight times a day. And Tailwind allows you to do that. So when our video goes live on a Wednesday, we will schedule about two of our pins that are our pins for our video to go live on Tailwind. And Pinterest is more of a long term game. Just because we put a pin on Pinterest that day doesn't mean we're going to get a lot of traffic from it. But it's going to start circulating through the Pinterest world to drive us. Evergreen traffic and tailwind costs about $10 a month. Also, if you want to learn more about Pinterest and tailwind. You definitely should check out Vanessa Kind's YouTube channel. She's a Pinterest strategist, one that I've worked with for many years, and she's got a lot of great information on her YouTube channel. If you're interested in Pinterest, and if you're wondering how in the world are you going to get this all done, make sure you watch my video right here where I show you how to get more done. In a week. I break down how I create my to do list, how I get it all done. So click over there, watch that, and I'll see you there.