Speaker 1: If you're trying to become a successful content creator, which if you're watching my channel, then most likely you are, then you're probably familiar with the fact that there are countless different platforms that you could and probably should be creating content for online. Keeping track of all these different platforms and the content that you're making for them can be a challenge, which is exactly why I have a very detailed content calendar. In today's video, I'm going to walk you through how I have created my own content calendar. And this is not just for Instagram. This is for my Instagram content, YouTube, my podcast, and my email newsletter. This is all of the different platforms that I create for all in one place. Sounds like a lot, right? Well, it is, but I can keep track of all of it because of my trusty content calendar. And I'm excited to show you how it's done. There are a lot of different ways that you can go about creating your own custom content calendar. In the past, I've done it with just a word document, a Google sheets file. Those are all perfectly good and free ways to keep track of all of your content. Lately though, I've become a huge fan of using Trello for my content calendar. I've used it for a long time for my client work, like the social media marketing agency that I run with my team, because it's great for collaborating and keeping track of tasks. But more recently, I've started using it as a way to keep track of all the different content that I'm posting. Now, before you start skipping ahead, no, this is not an ad for Trello. I kind of wish this video was sponsored by Trello because I could earn back the money I spend on their premium subscription, but no, it's not. This is just genuinely the way that I do it. And I think that it's really effective. So I wanted to walk you through exactly how I've set up my Trello board that is for my content calendar and how you might want to do it too. Now, if you're familiar with Trello, you might just be thinking, but how do you use it as a calendar? Isn't it kind of more of a list sort of thing? And you'd be right. Trello by design is more of a list based task management app, but there are these really cool things that Trello offers called power-ups, which are like additional apps or additional functionality that you can add to your boards to be able to use it to its full extent. So let me introduce you to my favorite Trello hack, which is the calendar power-up. Thankfully, you can use up to one power-up per Trello board on the free account. So you can use the calendar power-up on your Trello, even if you don't have a premium account in order to enable the calendar feature on Trello. All you have to do is create your new Trello board for your content calendar or use an existing one, go to the menu button in the top right-hand corner and look for the power-ups option. When you go into power-ups, just search for calendar and then click enable. And you'll be able to view your Trello cards in a monthly calendar view. This was a game changer for me because not only am I able to organize all of my content ideas into lists based on their category, I can give them a due date. I can attach links or other files to it. I can leave comments on it and I can see it all organized in this calendar format, which for me is just such a better way to visualize how much content I'm putting out and where it's going rather than seeing it in a list format. I just feel like my brain works better in the calendar view. All right, now that you've got the calendar view set up in Trello, let's take a look at some more of the steps that I take to really make the most of this feature so that I can have a really organized content calendar. First of all, I've created multiple lists for all of the different places that I create content for. I've got a list for Instagram, I've got a list for my podcast, and I have a list for my email newsletter. Now for YouTube, I've done this slightly differently because YouTube is really my primary platform for content creation and I have a few different series that I produce for my YouTube channel. I've got several lists here that are all under the YouTube category. I've got my list for my series called The Social Experiment, which is where I test out different Instagram or social media strategies on my own profiles and see how effective they are. Then I've got Insta Scam, where I talk about different scams that happen on Instagram and how to avoid them. Then I've got two general categories called the How of Social Media and the Why of Social Media, and then I have a category that's called Just for Fun. These are all for my YouTube channel, but it made sense for me to break them up because for me, coming up with ideas for content really starts from having specific categories or prompts to create for. So that's why I find it useful to have different series or different categories to create for and I've organized them in Trello that way. Now in addition to all these different pieces of content having their own list, I also have them color-coded, as you'll notice, with different labels. I've basically chosen these colors based off of my kind of general associated color with each of these different platforms. So YouTube obviously is red. To me, Podcast is purple because the Apple Podcast app icon is purple. I've made email newsletter blue and then Instagram is pink. The reason why I label all of these in addition to having them in their own categories is so that when I look at it in calendar view, the cards are all color-coded and I can very easily see which days I'm posting which kind of content. And I can also tell if a card is supposed to be a YouTube title or an Instagram caption idea. The other color that you'll notice here is this lime green and that represents any piece of content that is sponsored. This color could be paired with any of the other colors depending on if it's a sponsored YouTube video, a sponsored Instagram post, etc. I really love this color-coding system because it allows me to look at my calendar and at a glance, get a sense of how balanced my content is between all of these different platforms. Now, I do have a regular schedule for all of these different pieces of content. For instance, on my YouTube channel, I post every Tuesday and Friday. I upload a new podcast every Monday and I send out my weekly email newsletter on Thursdays. And then I try to post on Instagram pretty much every weekday, as much as I can do that. My process for planning out my content with this system goes like this. Usually I start by opening up Trello in the list view and I'll just start brainstorming content ideas based on the categories that I laid out earlier. Often these ideas will come from questions that I get from you, conversations that I have on Instagram or just like shower thoughts, you know, whatever. And so we'll categorize them based on what platform I think they're going to work the best on. Once I've got them in the right list, I'll make sure to label them with the correct color. And then I'll start assigning due dates based on when I know I need content for. So if I'm working on coming up with YouTube ideas for December, I'll start filling in the Tuesdays and Fridays on December. Once I have them all filled out, then I can go into calendar view and I can start clicking and dragging different cards around to put them in the day or spot that I think makes the most sense. So I kind of get them assigned to general dates at first, and then I'll shuffle things around until it seems like a good schedule. And what a good schedule is really just depends on the time that I have to produce these videos and other content. Like some videos take more time than others. So I might need to space out two of my more intensive videos throughout the month, rather than having them in the same week, for instance. I also try to make sure that my sponsored content is spread out. So it doesn't feel like, you know, every video for two weeks is a brand deal. I want them to be more, um, occasional, infrequent, spread out, whatever. Plus the cool thing about these cards is that I can create to do lists on each of them. And so for the most part, I do this content on my own, with the exception of my podcast, my assistant Taylor edits my podcast for me. So I create checklists on all the podcast cards with each of our different tasks. So we can keep track of when the work is getting done. But for other cards, like for instance, with my Instagram content, I can attach imagery. So this is something that I do a lot. If I'm creating some Instagram reels and I do this series, that's called Pinterest, but make it midsize where I recreate Pinterest outfits on my midsize body. And I will get my Pinterest inspiration image and I'll attach it to that Trello card. So then I have a place that I can access it when I'm actually working on shooting. And that's pretty much how I set up my content calendar for all of the different platforms that I post to. It is a lot to keep track of, but I have found using this method has been super helpful for me because it's flexible. I can easily click and drag and move things around, but it's also a space where I can schedule not only Instagram, but also YouTube, email, podcast, et cetera, and just see it all in one place. So I hope you found this video helpful. Let me know in the comments below if you've ever tried Trello, or if you think that you might sign up. If you want more of an in-depth approach of how to come up with the actual Instagram content for your content calendar, I have this video that I made a little while ago, but I dive into more of the brainstorming and the ideation process rather than just the logistics of scheduling it. So you can check that out next if you want and make sure you subscribe before you do that. So you don't miss any of my future videos. And as always, thank you so much for watching and I'll see you over in this one. Okay. Bye.