Speaker 1: It is no secret that Yo Girl creates a metric shit ton of content. I have this YouTube channel, a podcast, an exclusive podcast for my membership group, an email list that I try and send weekly emails to, two Instagram accounts, a Facebook, and probably other things that I'm not remembering. So it is safe to say that this company here is a content machine. So how do I get it all done? What is my content workflow look like? What are the processes behind getting the content out into the world? Well, I'm gonna show you. Hey, howdy, hey y'all and welcome back to my channel. If you're new here, my name's Jessica Stansberry and I am pumped that you are here. If you're looking for all things content marketing and passive income, this is the channel for you to learn how to work less and live more while you make more money. So if that sounds like something you're interested in, please be sure to hit the subscribe button, okay? Like I said a minute ago, I create a metric poop ton of content. And if I didn't have systems and processes as well as a team in place, I couldn't do everything I do. So first let me tell you that if you're a solopreneur and you do not have any team members or any contractors that can help you, you are not at the point where you can hire that yet, please know that I do not recommend you do all of the content I'm doing or even a fraction of the content that I'm doing. If you're a solopreneur, you need to be focusing on one type of content that is search driven, whether that's blogging, blogging with a podcast episode or even YouTubing. And then you also need to focus on one social media stream of content and that will take care of you for a while. Leave all the rest of the stuff alone until you have people in your corner to help you. That being said, in addition to the people I have to help me, I also have software and processes in place to help me make sure that this all runs really smoothly. So I feel like the best way to show you kind of my content workflow is to show it piece by piece. And since we're here on YouTube, why don't I show you my YouTube process first? Now, this is likely to change soon because I am bringing on a team member to start editing my videos for me. I mentioned that in last week's video, But as of right now, this is what it looks like. First of all, we use ClickUp to manage everything inside the team, including the content. And I couldn't create the content I create without some kind of project management system to help me do that. Regardless of what it is or what you want to use, you need something to keep up with it all and all the steps along the way. I used Trello for a lot of years, have been on ClickUp for about two-ish years, and it is absolutely worth the switch if you're considering it. And I have some videos on my channel about ClickUp specifically, as well as a mini course on how to use it and an affiliate link that's gonna get you a discount that I will link up in the description below. But just know that's what I'm using when I'm showing you my screen that we actually use in the company to keep up with everything and to make the processes and the workflow go really smoothly. So the first thing that I do is I pull up ClickUp and I look at my content calendar from a calendar view. I need this calendar view to be able to understand what's happening when and know that I'm not behind, et cetera. So for me, my YouTube videos go out on Tuesday and then very soon will be Tuesday and Friday. My podcast episodes go out on Mondays. And so we look at it from a calendar view so that we know we're not missing a week somewhere. Because if I just had like a list of videos and then hoped that they were going up on the right day, I would get very confused. Plus my content strategy isn't willy nilly. Like, I know why I'm creating a certain type of content, I know the strategy behind it, for my business as a whole, all the things. So I can see a bigger picture of how to kind of plan that out on this calendar view. So first and foremost, what I do is I will go through this calendar view and I will list out the videos that are gonna get done on certain dates. And as I get time before I film, I will go through each of these and then list out the talking points for that specific video. So this is the video you're actually watching right now. So you can see that I've like just bulleted out talking points. I am not a scripter. I do not script my videos. I would go crazy if I had to read a script. So what I do is I know what I want to talk about and I list it out in bullet points like this. And that way I'm going through the list, understanding what I'm filming and making sure I don't leave anything out, but also giving myself the freedom to talk about it how I'd like to talk about it. In my personal opinion, if you're an expert on something, you really don't need a script. So that's a conversation for a different day. Now I know I said we were going to talk about this like content stream by content stream, but just for the purposes of not having to show you this again, this is also what I do for my podcast, for both podcasts actually. So if you didn't know, I have a membership community called the Hustle and Grit Club where I teach business strategy and productivity monthly. And one of the benefits of being a member of the Hustle and Grit Club is that I also release an exclusive podcast episode for those members. These episodes are usually a bit more candid and are maybe about things that I can't talk about publicly, but I would like to share with them or like an expanded version of a free podcast that I've put out or something like that. So they also release on a Monday, they are not weekly, they are only monthly, but they do release on a Monday on the day they do release throughout the month. So we keep both records of all of those podcast episodes from the Hey Jessica podcast and the exclusive one for the Hustle & Grit Club in the same content calendar because it's the same content and that way I can see what needs to be done. Now everything, by the way, with both content pieces are color-coded based on on the status that it is. So I know that purple means that it's completely done, it's uploaded, it's scheduled, we're ready to go, like nothing has to be worried about. Green actually means that I have recorded it and it is ready to be edited and uploaded but Laura hasn't gotten to it yet. And then this gray color for my regular podcast means I haven't recorded it and blue is just the color for me to see where the Hustle and Grit episode needs to go. But I do the same thing with these. So each card is going to have bullet points of what I want to talk about in that episode. And then when I'm done, I'll let Laura know that it's ready to go and any notes I have about that episode, like if we want to promote a freebie or something of that nature. So my content planning happens the exact same for a YouTube video as it does for a podcast episode. There are, we look at it from a calendar view. I know what days a podcast needs to go live. I plan out those topics and then as it is on my calendar to film or record, I just bust through the topics that are there for me to do. And then the other thing I'll show you before I like put click up away is that there are statuses that take us through the process of what happens with that piece of content. So if I click here, you can see that there's statuses for like sponsored content and things like that. But videos in queue, that means these are ones I'm ready to film. I know I want to do it. Once I film it, I can move it to ready to be edited. This could automatically tag whoever's going to edit my video and say this one is ready once I select that status. That's what we have the podcast set up to do. Once it is edited, it can be tagged as ready to upload. So we know that it's not uploaded yet, but it is ready if another person needs to take the helm there, and finalized and scheduled, closed, et cetera. So we have processes built out where we know like this needs to happen, this, this, this, and this, and then the card can move its way through that process to make sure it gets done on the other end and the correct people are notified when it's their turn to take over. Okay, so back to the YouTube channel as a whole. Once I have planned it out, planned out the bullet points I'm gonna talk about, I sit down and film it. with that card up on my computer as I'm filming so that I can pause if I forget what I'm gonna talk about and look over here to remember and come back. Then once I'm done filming, sometimes I'll film two videos in a day, like today I'm filming two videos. Sometimes it's just one. Once I'm done filming, I go ahead and take the memory card out of the camera and offload that footage onto my external hard drive. And I talked about this external hard drive and the importance of an external hard drive in my editing process. in last week's video, all about how I edit more efficiently, but I offload all the footage into this. Now, again, this is probably going to change. I'm likely gonna offload it onto a service of some sort for someone else on my team to take over editing, but for now, that's what I do, I offload it here. And then I go ahead and get any processes that need to start happening in my editing software started. So I mentioned last week that I edit with proxy files and creating proxy files is kind of a time-consuming thing for the software, so I go ahead and get all of that started processing so that I'm not having to wait on it when it's time for me to actually edit the video. But then I edit, and for me, filming and editing rarely happens on the same day. I will plan to film a video or a couple of videos and plan to edit the next day or a couple days later. It's usually not systematic, like I film every Monday and edit every Wednesday, but I do generally do those things pretty close together so I can turn the videos around a little bit quicker. But then I edit, so if you wanna see my editing process, go watch last week's video. It is all about how I edit more efficiently and how I'm editing currently for my channel. And then the next step is just to upload the video and schedule it on YouTube as a whole. This is also where I do my thumbnail. So for me, I create my thumbnails as the video is uploading because for me, it's just like top of mind, it works best for me. However, something I didn't talk about is while I'm filming. So before I actually start filming the actual video we're gonna like be filming, either before or after, most of the time it's before. Before I start filming, I actually go ahead and film a second clip of me just like making weird faces or faces that are appropriate for the video to be used as my thumbnail. So I will literally be on video, like doing things with my face and facial expressions, maybe holding props, whatever. And as I'm editing, I go ahead and chop that up as well and export the photos from that video clip to have as my thumbnail photos. So I do it that way because I feel like I have a bit more flexibility in what I grab as the thumbnail. And I mean, there's so much that can happen when you set like a timer on your phone or a timer on your camera. Like it could, for me, it took more time to try and take actual photos than to just move around a lot in a video clip and cut out photos from that. So that is part of my process that I forgot to mention. But at the upload is when I also create the thumbnail. So I take those, I will put them into Lightroom on my phone. I have a specific Lightroom preset that I use for all of my thumbnail photos right now, and then I will use Canva or Photoshop to add words or things to the element on the thumbnail, and then I'll just upload it and schedule it like normal. Now, after I'm done uploading and scheduling, my job for that YouTube video is done, but the job as a whole is not done, because we do create a blog post with every single YouTube video and every single podcast episode. I didn't even mention that in the list of content I told you I created. So we do do that. But here's the secret. I don't think I have written those actual blog posts in like three to four years. I've always had someone on my team, either a contractor or now currently my full-time employee, Laura, to watch my videos or listen to my podcast episodes and break them down into blog posts that we can then put out into the Google verse to also, you know, utilize the SEO there. So once it's uploaded, then Allura goes into YouTube to watch it before it's live and makes the blog post, gets the blog post ready on the website, embeds any images, creates images, embeds any videos into the blog post, and then the process is done. So you'll notice a couple of things there. My YouTube workflow is very long and also most of it requires me. there's only one step at the very end that does not require me, which is why I'm looking to hand off my editing because that's not something I have to do. It's just something I do do. Now let's talk about my podcast workflow. So it is very, very similar. Like I showed you a second ago in ClickUp, but the difference is that it's a shorter process and that it involves way less of me. So I still plan out the podcast episodes and plan out the notes. And obviously I still record because it's my podcast. But once I have recorded, it is completely off my plate because what happens after I record is I use QuickTime on my computer to record my podcast episodes and I automatically save those into a Dropbox folder for my recorded episodes of the podcast. I then comment on that card where I planned out the podcast and I let Laura know this one's ready to go. She then takes it from that same Dropbox folder. She knows where they are. There's not any searching. They all saved to the same place and she edits in the intro and any like outros or anything that needs to happen. We don't have a rigorous editing system with the podcast. I am okay with ums and you know even like the swallowing of my drink or whatever in that podcast episode, I do not care. I am not that picky. Okay. Um, so we don't edit the actual podcast. I will pause as I'm recording if I need to like answer the phone or cough or sneeze or get a drink or whatever. I will pause the actual recording. So there's no real editing to be done on the episode except for inserting the intro and an outro. We actually use a service called Libsyn Pro now that allows us to add markers in each episode where the ads need to go and allows us to switch out ads dynamically. So we don't edit them into the episode anymore. They happen within Libsyn Pro. So if I want to switch out the ads on all my episodes for something new, I can versus being stuck with the ads that I recorded and put in that actual episode. So Laura handles all of that. She takes it. She edits it. everything. She uploads it to Libsyn. She marks where the ads can and should go. She schedules out any ads that are happening in the podcast. She then makes graphics for promoting the podcast and schedules like social media posts for that, which by the way, we do for YouTube as well. So she does do that. I just forgot about it. And then we are done. So you'll notice that I had a much lesser role in that process. I don't do any of the editing for the podcast and I haven't since about six or eight months into my first podcast I recorded which was called All Up In Your Lady Business back in 2015. That was the first thing we outsourced was the editing of the podcast because it was just tedious and something where I was the bottleneck for the process to keep moving forward. Oh, I also forgot Laura also writes a blog post for that podcast episode and gets all that scheduled up to to go live at the same time as the episode. The process is the exact same for my actual weekly podcast as it is for the one in the Hustle and Grit Club, except that the promotion happens in a different place and we don't do a blog post for the Hustle and Grit one. So she still uploads it and everything like that, but she does promote it just in the membership and there's no blog post to go along with it or graphics or anything like that. All right, moving along in this content overview here, I do have a weekly email newsletter. I use ConvertKit and really the way that I structure this is that I get a reminder on ClickUp every week on Monday that I need to write the email for that week. So I go ahead and write it in the first part of the week, schedule it to go out on Friday, and we're done. So that one doesn't take a lot of time, it's just more so me writing it and it's really easy to schedule so I don't have to pass that on to anybody else. What about social media, you say? Well, our main focus is on Instagram as a whole and I actually have two Instagram accounts. I have my personal one that's at Jessica Stansberry, which is the one where you can directly interact with me and I share more behind the scenes and all the things. And then we have a brand account that's HeyJessicaCo and that one is more so managed by Laura. We developed a strategy for it. She knows exactly what needs to go on it, when it needs to be posted, you know, captions, things like that. And it is more so to represent the brand as a whole on Instagram versus representing me. So Laura completely handles that account based on a strategy we came up with a year ago at this point and if we need to make any changes we talk about it but she handles that account completely. I do handle my account, my Jessica Stansberry account and I really have a bigger focus there on growth and also on stories and connection with my audience. So for me, there's not a ton of like pre-planned content that goes out on that account, but that doesn't mean that's something I don't go through seasons with. Sometimes I do pre-plan content, sometimes I don't. But for Instagram, we use a service called Planally to plan all of that out visually, so we know what is happening and what the feed's gonna look like and things can be scheduled and things like that. All of my other social media, so Facebook, I guess that's really it. I do have a Facebook account that is active. but we don't really focus on that. We just share things there. So Laura is completely in charge of that. So if there are graphics that are made for a podcast episode or a YouTube video, she will also share those graphics on the Facebook page, but that's not our main priority and she just schedules those out within the platform. So honestly, that's the whole workflow. Everything runs because I have Laura right now, but a team in general. because I can tell you if I was in charge of making sure a podcast episode went up every Monday and a YouTube video every Tuesday and a blog post to go along with each other and Instagram posts and Facebook posts, it wouldn't happen. So again, please know that I can only do this amount of content because I have a team behind me. And also know that I'm not doing it for no reason. Every piece of content, every content platform, everything I do is to build the brand and to build the business. And each one has a different purpose and all the things. So if you're like, girl, how do you manage your content? There you go. Hopefully you can take something away from this video in managing your own content, whether that is just Instagram or it's your email newsletter list or you're wanting to start on YouTube or you're on YouTube and you can't stay consistent. Hopefully this was helpful to show you what I do, but find a process that works for you. processes and systems and people are the way you're going to be able to continue to do this. And since I mentioned it earlier, I do have a ClickUp course that is called a course about ClickUp that I will link below in the description. And when you purchase the ClickUp course, you actually can opt in to also getting some templates inside ClickUp. And I have one that is for content creation specifically. So if you're like, Oh my gosh, I want this exact setup. you can get that through the course and through that like add on template. So I just wanted to let you know, you can also go to heyjessica.com forward slash click up course or again, I'm just going to link it below in the description until next time. Bye y'all.