Speaker 1: There are so many tools out there for creating an Instagram content calendar, but how do you find the one that works for you? How do you create your own Instagram content calendar and what needs to go inside of it to generate efficiency and productivity? Let's talk about that. What's up friends. It's Millie. Welcome back to my channel where you can expect weekly videos for me every Sunday and Wednesday, teaching you the latest strategies for how to grow your brand business and social media as an aspiring influencer. As always, timestamps will be in the comments down below because I value your time and you already know why you're here. So let's get into it. Let's start with a list of some of the most common Instagram and project management tools. I see other creators talking about and promoting when it comes to how they create their online content calendars. We have Later, Monday.com, Evernote, Melanote, Asana, and Airtable. There are plenty others out there, but those are going to be the ones we talk about today. Picking which tool will be right for you will depend on these three things, your visual preferences. So how you prefer to organize your thoughts, your goal with creating your content calendar and your team. Don't worry. I've already done all of the hard work for you. And I've categorized these tools into three different types. Then we'll look at the organization style of each tool so you can see visually which one you would prefer. And I'll go over what to include in your content calendar when setting it up. All of these platforms can really be categorized into these three types of tools, social media schedulers, solopreneur tools, and project management slash team tools. Which one's right for you? Within the category social media schedulers, you have platforms like Later, Planly, Hootsuite, Hootsuite, and Metricool. These platforms deliver exactly what they say they deliver. They help you schedule out all your social media content, and that's pretty much it. If you're someone who just wants to get your content organized or your social media content organized, then this would be the best fix it quick option for you. Now within the solopreneur tools, you have platforms like Notion, Trello, Evernote, Melanote, and Airtable. These are tools that I would recommend to someone who is just starting to take their online business seriously. You need somewhere to organize all the things without it being too overwhelming. Keep all of your branding or links in one place to quickly access everything, and of course, and of course, creating your own content calendar. Because these aren't social media schedulers, making the content calendar is a little bit more DIY, but these are perfect for solopreneurs because they all have free options. I used the free version of Trello for the first four years of my business and currently use the free versions of Notion, Melanote, and Airtable. They all have a very straightforward user-friendly experience so that you can basically create whatever you want without it being too overwhelming as someone who's writing solo. Finally, you have those project management and team tools. These platforms would be like ClickUp, Monday.com, and Asana. I would say these are big picture tools that help manage and organize your entire business. Once I started growing a team, we outgrew Trello. We needed a larger, more complex platform to host everything. So now we use ClickUp, which is where I have my Instagram content calendar, along with many other things. A master content calendar, my course launch funnel, products, branding, daily to-dos, my team's daily to-dos, and all the things. If you already have a team or having a more advanced project management software isn't intimidating to you, picking one of these tools is what I would recommend. Now, before hopping over to the computer and diving into what all of these look like, I know how important having the right tools to run your business is, and that's why I want to share a bonus tool that can help anyone watching this video. It doesn't matter where you're at with your journey. This bonus tool is perfect for anyone who is looking to save a little bit of money while growing your business, and that's by using AppSumo, who is also the sponsor of today's video. AppSumo is the leading digital marketplace for entrepreneurs. How many of you have heard of the Great Resignation? This is an ongoing trend that really spiked in early 2021, where people are willingly leaving their jobs. And I'm totally guilty being part of those people who quit their nine-to-fives back in 2019, because I wanted to build a lifestyle as a creator and entrepreneur that I was truly passionate about. And that's where today's sponsor, AppSumo, comes in. As the leading digital marketplace trusted by over 1 million entrepreneurs, AppSumo's mission is to bust open the doors of entrepreneurship to everyone. They have the tools you need to automate all the busy work that comes with running a business, so that you can boost your productivity, scale beyond your skill set, and focus on building something you're deeply passionate about. I just picked up the High Performance Notion Pack because I was looking for the perfect digital planner, habit tracker, and simply business organizer for entrepreneurs. Inside of this pack, you get an already built out notion template so that you don't have to start building out your thoughts from scratch. You can organize your daily to-dos, create a vision board, and track key metrics. I know we're focusing on creating a content calendar in this video, so that's why I wanted to share with you just one of the amazing ways I was able to use AppSumo to help me find an already built out content calendar. You don't have to stay working the nine-to-five if it doesn't bring you joy. Let AppSumo be the engine for your growth and help you build the business that you've always dreamed of with the tools that you've been needing. As a special bonus to my subscribers, AppSumo is giving 20% off to the first 100 people who click the link down in the description. And if you're on their email list like I am, you know that the tools in AppSumo are game changers for your business. I've saved so much time and money with my business over the past few years thanks to AppSumo. Definitely go check them out and thank you AppSumo for sponsoring this video. I will be picking one tool from each category and then telling you what your content calendar needs to have when you set it up. So let's hop over to the computer. First, we're going to dive into social media schedulers. Those are like later, planly, metricool, hootsuite, hootsuite, hootsuite sounds right. I don't know. I'm going to show you metricool, what it looks like, and you can make the decision, see if these sort of platforms work for you. So this is metricool, analyze, manage, and grow your digital presence. All of these are the integrations. And then you can sign up. I already have an account, so I'm going to log in. And this is what your homepage looks like with metricool. You have growth, your analytics, where your demographics are coming from. It tracks clicks, engagement of posts, and all of these are, you can integrate Facebook. I have Instagram linked. I have TikTok linked and, oh, maybe I don't have TikTok linked. I need to link TikTok. And I have YouTube linked. Now with all of these, it's great for tracking analytics, but you can also, like I said, plan out your content calendar. This is what that view looks like. You could go to a day view, week view, or month view. I prefer my calendars to be in a month view, especially if I have multiple social media platforms that I'm using to grow. So here is where your calendar will, this is what your calendar will look like. And you can create a new post. You could do an Instagram feed post. This will automatically post for you. When you schedule reels and stories, you could schedule it into a calendar, but it does not auto post for you. I'm pretty sure that's how it is for every social media tool. You cannot auto schedule reels yet, whether that's with Later, Planoly, all the things. You can't schedule reels so that it auto posts for you. That's just a thing. I think it's because the latest algorithm, there's no capability to do that linking with Instagram yet. So that's just something to keep in mind. Reels, you could schedule it in advance, but you have to post them yourself. So you can select which platform you want to schedule on. You upload your content here, click save, and then it'll show you all of the pieces of content that's scheduled for the month. I think social media schedulers are great for people who just are managing an Instagram account or just Instagram and Facebook, maybe just simple one or two platform businesses. I know each tool you might have to invest into, and they have different capabilities of maybe you can only schedule 10 posts a month for the free version, but on the paid version, it's unlimited scheduling. So on the screen, I'm going to pop up. This is the pricing for Later and all of the capabilities that Later has. This is the pricing for Metricool and all of the access that you'll have with those different subscriptions. And this is the pricing for Hootsuite. Still don't know how to say it. Next let's jump into Trello. Okay. So I actually already have a Trello tutorial for how to set up an Instagram content calendar in Trello. This video right here. If you want to use Trello, Trello was my best friend for four years. I love Trello, but for variety, let's look at Notion. This is like a sample content calendar that I started creating inside of Notion. And let's talk about a few of the things that every content calendar should have. First of all, there should be a place where you can list all of your brain dump ideas. So let's make a Notion content calendar from scratch. We're going to go to add page. I'm going to say test content calendar here. I'm going to do a slash and type in calendar view because content calendar, and we're going to do a new database. Now every content calendar needs somewhere where you just like brain dump all of your ideas. So I want to add down here. Let's add table view, new database. This is going to be our brain dump. And this is kind of like squished. So I want to do the full width view. There we go. And you can add a cover if you want to. So change cover using unsplash. Let's do calendar. Really unique. I love coffee. What's that look like? Sure. That'll do. You can add an icon. So if you want it to be the calendar icon, perfect. Okay. And then we have our brain dump ideas. So maybe you get inspiration and you're like, Oh, I want to do five ways to grow your email list. And then I want to do three reels mistakes to stop doing. And then I want to do how I gained 10,000 followers in 30 days on Tik TOK. Right? So I'm, I'm brain dumping all of my ideas here. Now, another thing that content calendars should have two ways to label. So color coding or labeling, I want to do maybe tags and we want to have the tags be different platforms. So maybe sometimes I have a YouTube video that I need to do or an Instagram carousel that I have to do or Tik TOK. I post my blog. I post an Instagram reel. What else? I have YouTube shorts. These are all like the places that I'm posting and my email list. So this is what my big content calendar master content calendar will look like. So of course each thing's not gonna be all of them, but maybe this one is going to be an Instagram carousel. And I want to add a filter where I'm honing in on the different value pillars that this piece of content is going to focus on. So there's four different value pillars. You have educational, you also have entertaining, relatable, and inspirational. So those four pillars you want to rotate targeting. So maybe sometimes your posts are going to be educational and giving value in an educational way. And then sometimes it's going to be entertaining, fun, behind the scenes, or sometimes it's inspiring, showing a transformation. So I'm always rotating the value pillars of my content. Adding this here will be a great way for me to see if I am rotating all those value pillars, or if I'm just maybe doing too much educational and I want to start tying in other pillars. Now the cool thing is when you have an idea and you're ready to schedule it, we can add a date. So we can add a date here, and then you could drag this over to maybe the 18th. And now we're starting to schedule onto our content calendar. Boom, shakalaka. As a reminder, all the tools that you can use, similar to Notion, you can use Trello, Notion, Milanote, Evernote, and Airtable. All of them have free versions. Personally, I used Trello for the first four years. Again, I have that tutorial already up on my channel. That was a mini Notion tutorial. This is what the inside of Evernote looks like. If that's something that matches your visual preference, you could use that. This is the inside of Milanote. It's very much build it yourself, DIY, if you prefer something like that. And this is the inside of Airtable. Airtable has, it's similar to kind of like Google Spreadsheets and Google Docs, just has a bunch of different options that you could choose from for a lot of other areas in your business. Moving on to the project management slash team tools, monday.com, Asana, ClickUp. My team, we use ClickUp, so that's what I'm going to show you. A lot of them have very similar visual outlines. So there are all very similar. Here's the pricing structure of ClickUp. Here is the pricing structure of Asana. And here is the pricing structure of monday.com. Building out your content calendar inside of ClickUp will go under spaces. We have a content space, and this is what holds all of our content, Instagram, blog, YouTube, all of the things. So as you can see, email, YouTube, Instagram blog. I used to have a Patreon, so that was there. And we have the master content calendar. So inside of the master content calendar is the social calendar. When you go to the calendar view, you can have different views for each thing. This is what the calendar view looks like. The different colors represent the different platforms that we're posting on. Pink is YouTube, green is our email list, blue is Instagram, and purple is our blog. So this is all of the content that is being created and posted on these days. And that's what the calendar view looks like. If you click and open a card, it has all of the details, but I'm going to show you what the board view looks like. And this is kind of what Trello looks like. Trello is the kanban board as well. So now anybody who's working on the emails, this is the pillar that they'll be working in. If somebody is working on the blog posts, this is the pillars they'll be working in. Whoever works on Instagram is here. I'm working on TikTok, ignore. And then YouTube, I also work on the YouTube topics. So this way we're able to, let's see what's a post that's coming up. This one, we'll do this one because it was inspired by Sean Cannell. And then we created our own version. My team will create the carousel, ask for approval. I'll give my revisions. That's the revised version. And then it's approved. I'll change the label to approved and ready to post. That's what that looks like. My YouTube calendar looks like this, but I also have a separate calendar where I could fully dive into detail of all the videos that I'm currently working on in progression. So right now I am filming this video and then I'll give it over to my video editors and we'll put it in review. Review is complete, approved by the brand or the sponsor. We'll start scheduling it. Once it's complete, all of the videos that are posted are going to go into an archive or a separate board called the videos posted board. I use this to keep track of all thumbnails that I've ever had or all scripts that I've ever used. And then we can recycle those scripts into blog posts. Again, I recommend the project management team tools specifically for people who have a team or who are not intimidated by the project management tools. Because for me, when I was starting my business, that was overwhelming. Everything I just showed you was so overwhelming to me. If I was starting like a new newbie starting and I watched my video or this video right now, I'd be like, can't do that. And then I'd be scared to be like, I'm not doing enough. I suck spiral, spiral, spiral depression. I'm just kidding, but kind of. So you don't have to have a content calendar like that. I showed you how to set it up in notion. Notion is great. Trello is so simple. I have the whole tutorial for how to actually set it up step-by-step in Trello. So it doesn't have to be super complex like that, especially if you just need help with one platform. And then as you add a second platform, you could figure out what works best for you and your visual preferences. That's the great thing with all these tools. It's like, it's they're really customizable to you and what you prefer. And if setting anything up like this is overwhelming for you, you can hire an integrator that will set up project management tools for you. So you can look up, literally go to Google, hire an integrator. You have people that specialize in setting up content calendars or systems for your business in ClickUp, in Asana, in monday.com, or they help you transfer Trello to ClickUp, all the things. Hire somebody to do it for you. If you're overwhelmed, period. If you've made it this far and you're not already subscribed to my channel, be sure to hug that subscribe button and turn on the bell notification. So you don't miss when I post my next video and I'll see you in the next one. Thanks so much for watching. Follow your joy. Bye.