Speaker 1: As a successful blogger and content creator, I'm sure you understand you have to be creating a lot of content and oftentimes across multiple platforms. But how do you keep that organized and how do you stay consistent with it and then make sure that it makes sense for your brand across all of these platforms? Well, today I'm going to give you some insight into how I do it. Stay tuned. What's up y'all? Welcome back to the channel. I'm Nikisha if you're new around here and today we're going to be talking about content calendars and how to use them to successfully disperse your content online. So a content calendar is simply a place that you are going to put all of your ideas and your content that you want to create in one place to keep it organized and to also help you to stay consistent in creating. Now there are several ways you can create a content calendar. It can be as simple as opening up your notes app in your phone and start to make a running list of your ideas right there in your notes app. You can get a google sheet and start making a list there. That's actually how I started out doing mine because my mind coming from corporate really works in sheets and all that and so I created this very simple spreadsheet of my content ideas and I just had multiple tabs on there. But I found with this that it was a little bit harder for me to stay consistent on all of my platforms because I would simply be focusing on one of the sheets all the time which would be my YouTube or my blog and oftentimes I would fall off on Instagram because that was on a separate sheet. So I decided it would make a lot more sense for me to have all of the content that I create online in one place so I can see it all and nothing gets neglected and so I started using Trello for my content calendar. I found Trello very useful because it works in lists and I am a list maker. As you can see here I have a list for each of my content creation outlets. I have my newsletter, the blog, the YouTube channel, then Instagram and then I even have separate lists for series that I've been creating on each of my platforms so I can stay up to date on those. One reason I really started using Trello and I find it really beneficial is when you're working with a team of people. That's one of my biggest goals this year is to bring on a team to start helping me with my content creation and Trello has been amazing for that. I feel like it's really easy to add team members and so that you all can work from the same document and there is no confusion about the things that are going on. Right here I have everything for the blog. These are all of the posts that are going to go live this month and then I have a series called my complete money makeover where I'm walking you through my financial journey. That'll be super fun and then this is the blog post template here that I'll be using with the virtual assistant. Pretty much is how I like my blog posts laid out. You know and everything that I do in order to get them up on my site step by step. What I do and what that person would need to do to get the blog post up and then after the blog I go into my social media platforms over here. One of the platforms that I really needed help with was my YouTube channel because it's so involved and it takes so many steps to get these videos up and out here for you all. So I created a template and as you can see here the template is basically how I get ready to do a video and everything that it takes in order to get a video up on YouTube. At the top I pretty much start out with the idea and the concept of that video and I go all the way down to everything that it takes in order to have a successful video including the promotion of that video because that's something that I often forgot as you're just creating and you know doing your thing the promotion of the video. So as I'm creating my content ideas I will simply go into Trello and start listing out my ideas in cards. So each of the ideas will have their own individual card and I'll just start listing them out because you can go back and start to add the content inside of those cards and script out that blog post or script out that video or whatever it is that you're doing. And as you can see you also can color code each of those cards. So I have my YouTube card it's in red because obviously I from the YouTube logo I'll know that that's for YouTube. Then the Instagram is like this pinky purplish color. My blog being in blue and then my email newsletter being green. One thing I love about the color coding too is that when you look at this in calendar view you can see all of the color coding right there and when you're trying to get an overall glance of what you got going on for the month or for the week or whatever you can see those tags and it really identifies what you should be doing and what's going live when. Now this calendar feature is a called a power up inside Trello so it's an add-on and with the free plan because I use the free plan I do not pay for the the premium one but the free plan I think you get one power up and the calendar is the one that I chose just so I can see it in an overall view like this. Now Trello is just the platform that I use for my content calendar. Obviously there are several others you can use. There's Asana, there's ClickUp. I'm sure like I said before you could just do it in a Google Sheet. Whatever is going to work best for you. The point is to have all of your content housed in one place so that you can get an overall view of all of your ideas and all of the content that you have going on for that month. Now what I like to do is sit down at the end of each month and literally brained up all of my content ideas. Even though I have a running list of ideas I still like to sit down and come up with new ones. You can never have too many because there will come a moment where you can't think of anything and you will need to tap into this list and so I love to do a brained up while the ideas are flowing. After doing my brained up I will go and take a look of all the ideas that I have and then I will just start plugging different ideas into different dates based on the month it is, based on questions I've been getting, based on a number of factors. I will start to plug different ideas in. Now how do I come up with the ideas? How do I create this list of content that I want to create? Now there's several ways that you can do this. I personally like to go and do multiple things to get ideas for content. One of the very first things I will do is go in and look at my analytics on my blog. Which blog posts did well on your site say within the last 90 days? What are people clicking on? Is there a reason why they may be clicking on that? Can you tell where they went after viewing that one post? So I'll go and look at my blog analytics to see if there are any trends there or if there is a post that's just been doing insanely well. I will take that as content cues. So if they're coming to my site about how to start a blog for instance, I will think to myself okay maybe I should create another blog post about what to do after you start your blog or something like that. So I get my content ideas from my blog analytics. Next I will take a look at my YouTube analytics. Now with my YouTube analytics I like to look at the information from the last 30 days or so because I feel like with YouTube things are a lot more current right and so whatever people are looking at right now is probably a good indication of what they're wanting to see right now. Whereas the blog a lot of that content that I have is evergreen even though I have evergreen content on my YouTube channel as well. But again I like to look at the last 30 days. So if we go in my analytics here you see there's a section in the analytics that tells you the top videos in this period. I absolutely love this area. You see I got the clubhouse videos here and then the ebook videos obviously my blogging videos and then followed by some affiliate marketing stuff. So if I were to look at these videos here these would make great foundations for new videos. So some follow-ups or just adding on to what I talked about in these videos here. And then next I will go into my Instagram analytics and do the exact same thing. Literally you go up here to the settings and then go down to the insights and see what the top performing posts were say for the last 90 days. So whatever type of pictures I posted or whatever the captions were on those top posts I'll make sure to look at those so that I can recreate them in some kind of way. You know obviously people like them. Why did they like them? What's going on there? And so I try to see and find a theme there or a reasoning as to why those certain photos performed better than others. Now if you're a newer blogger or content creator and you just don't have the data to go back and look at maybe like I have with the content that I've created. Another good way for you to find ideas is to look at Pinterest. First you want to make sure you check out your home feed to see what you're being recommended. There could be some great ideas for current stuff there. Then you can just go in and type whatever you're looking for. I'm looking for one pot meals for myself not for content. But I would take a look here and see what's being recommended and why. How many saves does it have? Are people making comments? You know see if you can find some sort of trend and then use that idea and make it your own. And then in addition to Pinterest you also can find other people in your niche that are creating content similar to you and see what type of content they're creating. Now I'm totally not telling you to go and copy anybody's content. What I personally would do is go and look into the comments see if anybody is asking questions that maybe that person did not answer in the video. I'll just go and see some content topics because for me I don't want to start coming off as somebody else or copying anybody's idea. I just you know get inspired by maybe the topic that they're creating and then I will go and look through the comment section and just see what people are saying about the video. And if there's something that continues to come up over and over and over again maybe that's a topic that the creator did not go deep enough on and then I say okay do I think that I maybe can make a video or make a blog post about that topic and go a little bit deeper and do it better then I will go ahead and do that idea. But again we're getting inspired we are not copying anybody. The point of being online and the way to be successful online is to have your own sauce your own way of doing things and just authentically being you. That does not include copying. And then after you have all of your amazing ideas in order you just want to simply start listing them out. In Trello I just start listing them out as cards just as I would any regular just list. And then you can go back in those cards and start adding the outline for the blog post or the YouTube video or whatever it is and start color coding them and adding the color tags based on for what platform it's on. And then once you do all that your content calendar is ready to go. It should be here a general overview of what you're going to be doing for the month. This will keep you organized. This will keep you on brand. This will just keep you ready because you know what they say when you stay ready you don't have to get ready okay. And then one of the biggest things that you have to do after you have this content calendar in place is to do the content. Go ahead and film your content. When it comes to getting your content up and staying consistent with it scheduling is huge and scheduling will help you tremendously. Inside of WordPress you can plan out your blog posts and schedule them for a future date. The same here on YouTube. You can get all your videos filmed and you can schedule them out in advance even though personally I do not like to schedule out videos more than a week in advance because I like this YouTube channel to be a little bit more alive and a little bit more current right. Like I said before I think that when things happen and trends happen I want to talk about it in the moment. I don't know but that's just me. But you can schedule your videos out and then when it comes to Instagram my last main platform I use something called Planoly. It allows you to see all of your photos inside of the app. This allows me to keep everything looking cohesive on my page and you even can schedule your content inside of Planoly to post automatically to Instagram. I personally do not use that feature but it is there for you if you need to go ahead and plan your stuff out in advance. So those are all the things that I do to create a content calendar that keeps me organized and consistent. If you want some insight on how I write blog posts that win on my blog go ahead and take a look at this video and I'll see you over there.