It’s no surprise we are big planners over here and we get asked a lot about our specific process of planning our content – so we’re here to break it down for you.
Let's get into it:
Step 1: month at a glance
As the month comes to an end, it’s time to plan for the month ahead. Make yourself a calendar or download a digital one – we honestly just use Google Docs and have created a calendar from it. Once you have the month formatted, start to plot out things that you know are going to be happening.
You can add holidays, specific launch days, if you have a regular blog day, or a theme post day. Plot down everything for the month that you know off the top of your head that will need to be prepped/created for posting.
Step 2: colour code
If you have different platforms you post on like Instagram, Facebook, Blog, Email Marketing etc… it’s time to get your colour coding in gear. Make each different platform a specific colour so that when you see your calendar filled out, you know exactly what’s going on quickly. This will be key to differentiate items when the calendar starts to get busy
Step 3: pick your days
It’s time to get a routine in place for your content – we LOVE routine if you couldn’t tell already. Decide how you want your content to go out every week so that you start to create some cohesiveness in your content.
For example, you could choose to post on Instagram Monday through Friday, post a blog on Wednesdays and send out your newsletter on Mondays. Plot those down on your calendar and make them the appropriate colour.
You could break this down even further if you have themed posts. For instance, we have a rotation on Instagram of posting a digital tip, photo, digital quote, photo and then we repeat the cycle. If you have something similar for your business, then you would also add those labels to the specific days.
Step 4: count your content
Now that you have the entire month laid out at a high level, it’s time to figure out how much content you need to create. Start to bunch items together so you know how much creating/writing you have to do for each piece of content.
For example, if you are posting to Instagram 5x a week – that means you have around 20 Instagram posts to create. With that, if you have specific themes to the posts – break those out. In our example above, it could mean 5 digital tips, 10 photos and 4 digital quotes.
If you post to your blog once a week as well as your newsletter – that means you have 4 of each you need to create.
Getting a visual of how much content you need to create ahead of time is key because it prepares you for the next few steps of planning your content and setting aside time to actually create.
Step 5: decide on content creation times
Now that you know how much you have to create and write for, it’s time to plan when you’re actually going to be creating content. The reason content creation can be so daunting is because we leave it to the last minute and then scramble to put something together – but if we plan ahead and effectively manage our time, it doesn’t seem so bad.
You can decide to use a few hours on one day to bang it all out, or on a Friday of every week to create for the following week. You really have to look at your own schedule and see how much time (and creative energy) you have at any given time. But whatever you decide – it should be the same every single time. You need to get into the habit that this is an essential part of your business and it needs to get done – doing it some weeks and not others will make it seem like it’s not ‘thaaaaat’ important.
When you’ve decided on what your content creation days and times are, add those to your regular calendar (and the content calendar if you want) and set it to reoccur on the same day/time of each week or month. Now you know ahead of time that you are blocked off and busy during that time so you shouldn’t have a conflict in your schedule.
Step 6: pick your topics
You’re almost at the stage of actually creating but before that, you need to decide ahead of time what you’ll be writing about. First look at your original lists of content you plotted on the calendar that you knew of (launches, holidays, announcements etc…) and create topics for those items – topics that you would obviously write about for those items.
Now for the rest of the content on your calendar, come up with possible topics. The reason this stage is important is because when you actually start to write out your content, it’ll will come easy having a topic to write about versus trying to come up with something on the spot each time.
What you can start to do is, when you think of an idea randomly or see a post that interests you – write it down in a dedicated notes tab about content creation ideas. As you start to build up this list you’ll have tons of ideas to pull from.
In the meantime, if you’re struggling to think of ideas – head on over to Pinterest and type in your industry in the search bar (nutritionist, hair salon, fitness instructor, jewelry maker etc…) and you’ll see tons of inspiration in terms of possible content like healthy recipe ideas, heatless waves in minutes, 5 exercises to work the booty or ways to keep your jewelry looking brand new. You’ll find tons of ideas and it will give you some inspiration if it relates to you and your business and let you expand and write about.
Another option is to honestly just ask your audience – ask them what they want from you and what they would like to see. You’d be surprised at the responses and it’s a great way to connect with your community.
Step 7: get your images together
Whether you are gathering pictures you’ve taken yourself, stock photos or creating photos in Canva – this is the time to do it. Get all your images together and plot them on your calendar. Make sure everything is formatted correctly and edited the way you like so that when they are ready to post, you just have to grab them and go – no extra steps!
Step 8: create create create
It’s time! If you’ve made it this far, kudos to you – now it’s the easy part – to write and create! Now you may be saying “this isn’t the easy part” but honestly, it is! You’ve done all the work to get you to this point and now you’re just naturally writing about things that you are knowledgeable about – it should come naturally to you. Your audience wants to hear from you in your tone of voice and from your perspective – not robot like where they could have just Googled it. Speak about the topics from your tone of voice and just be natural with it.
Again, we just use a Google doc with the days laid out and write out captions from there but you can do this in any format that you like. You’ve already picked the days of the week or month that you’ll be writing out content, so if you’re on this step it means you’re on this day – so take the time that you’ve set for yourself and write out your content! Once you do this a bit more, you’ll get a good idea of how long it takes you so you’ll be able to adjust your schedule going forward if you need to.
Step 9: post!
YAY, pop the champagne – you are ready to post which is easy peasy because everything is planned, written out and READY TO GO! You can choose how you would like to go about posting whether that’s manually for each platform or scheduling items.
For Instagram, we use the app Later and we are OBSESSED – the desktop feature is key and it’s really easy to use and schedule for consistency.
We do our blog manually on the day of but you can definitely pre-write it and schedule it out and same goes with a newsletter if you have one. Factor the time it will take you to schedule these items into your planning stage.
This may seem like a long process and maybe it is, but once you get the hang of it, it’s SO easy to follow. It’s become a routine for us and exactly the process we follow for our clients. It seems like a lot of work upfront but dedicating a couple hours here and there is WAY better than scrambling every day to create and come up with things – because life is busy and unexpected so it’s hard to ensure consistency in your posting.
The other great part about the process is that you’ve blocked out your time every week/month to create content so it becomes FOCUSED time and energy in that area versus forgetting to post one day and sacrificing the quality of your post because you were in a rush.
Get in the routine of creating a process that works best for you and your schedule and you’ll be thanking yourself later! What’s your process right now for putting out content on your platforms?
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