Speaker 1: Content calendars do not belong in ugly Google Sheets or Excel documents. I'm sorry, I might be offending some people here, but today I am going to show you an alternative that is going to blow your mind. We're going to make a content calendar that is super organized, ticks all the boxes, but is also user-friendly and aesthetic and pretty, because let's be honest, I care about the aesthetics. I have been on a mission this year to really streamline the software that I am using, when it comes to running my media company and my agency, I have been using a combination of ClickUp, Trello, and Miro to do a lot of things like creating content calendars and planning out my content and planning out my to-do list and staying organized, tracking analytics. All of that should be happening in the same app, but I never found something that ticked all the boxes for me, until now. So in this video, you're going to come along with me while I build out my own content calendar, so you can actually see how intuitive and user-friendly this software is, but if you want to get there faster than me, I'm also going to link a template down below, so you don't have to do any of the work. I don't think you could call my current content calendar organized, it's, if anything, it's organized chaos and I just know that we can do better and I think it's time that I just say goodbye to Trello and the software that I've slowly been transitioning into for the past three months now is XTiles. And I'm really excited that they are sponsoring today's video, because I absolutely fell in love with this software and despite being a paid partner with XTiles, I will say that I have already signed myself up for their year-long pro plan. That is how much I back it and I believe in it. As you can see, so far I've been using this for my to-do lists to keep track of things. I've also got some of my bigger picture year plans on here to keep track of those longer-term projects. Another favorite space, if I come to my sidebar, my favorites here is my analytics tracker. I've got one for my follow account on various social platforms and then I've also got one for leads and sales. A lot of this data I had stored in ClickUp and it was so clunky to keep track of everything. I really love the neat and tidy graphs here. I've also migrated across from ClickUp all of my team tasks, so keeping track of what they're up to, keeping track of what I'm up to, all of that project management stuff. So it's really nice to be able to flick through the menus and find all of these things. And now my next challenge is to add in my content calendar. First of all, we're going to change this cover image because that's just not giving. And I'm just going to use whatever they have in their image library. Oh, perfect. There's one for Instagram. Now it is an option just to use the content calendar template that is available on xTiles. What I really love about this is there's a whole bunch of different ways to view your content, whether you want it in like a list, whether you want it in a calendar format, or you can use the classic Kanban style with your columns and keeping track of things in terms of what stage they are in the content creation process. I love that they also have this tab within the social media calendar project that goes through all of the client deliverables and key information about their company. But I kind of want to kick things up a notch and make my dream custom content calendar. And this is where I think the xTiles interface really shines. The whole concept is that we are able to click and drag and create tiles on our blank pages. Unlike other software like Notion and ClickUp, where I found myself endlessly watching tutorials for how to figure out how to add things and make the space somewhat what I wanted it to be, xTiles is really intuitive. So you can see I'll just drag and make some boxes. My vision here is I'm going to have a couple of boxes for individual posts that we can pop in there. And we're going to have a little sidebar with my strategy so that my strategy, my content pillars is always top of mind and right there where I'm creating the content instead of having it in another tab. Then I'm also going to do a nice layout so I can see visually what my Instagram page is going to look like. And you can just start building everything out so intuitively like this. A little bit of Control C, Control V if you want to just like duplicate boxes. Let's actually bring this over here. Now I already have the content that I want to plan out to go live on my Instagram over the next couple of weeks. And I think this is an important note. If you want to build your content calendar, you need the content to go on your calendar first. So if you were someone who has lots of ideas and you're always filming lots of different things but then you lose track and you forget to post things or you're not consistent even though you're making lots of videos, a content calendar is perfect for you. And obviously as a social media manager, this is something that I use for all my clients as well. Now I am a real visual person when it comes to planning out my content. So once I've edited all those reels and got all the graphics that I want to post, I'll organize it into a layout. And this is something I will then drop into my page on Xtile. So this is a Canva file. This is very basic. I'm just using the square image file on Canva and then I drag and drop pieces in. So let's drag and drop some of this stuff and my edited videos, make sure it's looking all good. So I'm simply going to upload this file of my Instagram layout that I've made in Canva super quickly. Now for the side column, I'm just going to be adding in some notes around my strategy. We're gonna make this look all cute and pretty. I really like this neutral brown color even though I know the pink is technically my brown color. No, we're gonna go pink. We're gonna go for it. Now the idea with having this here is as I build out my posts over on the other side, post one, post two, I can kind of keep track and tick off and make sure I'm covering all my content types and my content pillars to keep up that variety, which is so important to my strategy. Okay, it's been a few hours. I got totally sucked into creating this content calendar. I tried playing around with a whole bunch of fun widgets that you can have on Xtiles. And yes, that included a Taylor Swift Spotify embedded playlist. It looked really cute, but when I thought about it, I was like, I don't listen to music when I'm working on content because I need to be all focused and everything. So I've just settled with adding this cute little like date cart. And I think once I started adding the actual content to the content calendar, it did start to get a bit overwhelming and busy again. So I think taking out the playlist was probably a good move for me personally. Now, if we do a little bit of a scroll through, you can see how it's all come together. The only thing I haven't imported so far is my ideas list, which I still need to copy across from Trello. You can see there's a little bit of color coding going on with my post sections. The ones in yellow are basically ideas that I've penciled in, but they still need creating and recording. The ones that are in like the beige color have been recorded, edited, and they're good to go. The posts four to six don't have captions, but I kind of wing it sometimes with my captions. I'm not gonna lie. The strategy document, like I mentioned earlier, is really good for me to kind of tick things off. I went through the content that I had lined up and I kind of realized I'd missed my relatable slash humorous content pillar. And I also hadn't done any sort of lip syncs or trending audios in that sense. I definitely ticked off the B roll. I had my face to cam talking video. I had my voiceover, which is post number five. But this is what I really wanted out of my content calendar. I wanted to make sure that that strategy is always there reminding me, as well as everything looking aesthetic and cute and color coded and all that jazz. I've even gotten little emojis to code each post so I know what content type it is. So we've got the reels, we've got a carousel, we've got a photo carousel. And basically all you need to do if you want to view the full post is click on this little expand button. And I've got the actual video file there. And then I've got the caption that is just as simple as highlighting and copying and pasting. And of course, this all works the same on my phone. So we open up the X-Tiles app. This is really easy to use. We go to my marketing content and then we go to my social content project. And there is my content calendar on my phone. Now, the one thing with X-Tiles is it's an organizational program. So I'm not scheduling my posts through here. All of the posts that I wrote out, this is a way to store and organize and make sure that I'm covering off all my posts that they're all ready to go. And I actually am a big fan of manually posting when I can. I do often do scheduling and I have a video talking about scheduling platforms that I'll link above if you want to watch that. But most of the time I am posting manually for my own personal account. It kind of changes a little bit depending on clients and whatnot. But what I do here is I come in and I can download the image from X-Tiles. I can highlight the caption, copy, paste posts. And it's really easy. This is what makes manually posting realistic and achievable for a lot of creators. You have to have that content calendar, the organizational systems in place. I'm logging off for now and I'm heading home for my glass of wine because it is a Friday. And I'm gonna check in with you in a couple of days once I have road tested this content calendar to make sure I love it and then tweak a few things before I show you the final result. And the template that I'm gonna share with you down below, I'm actually gonna leave all of my content in there including my expanded strategy documents. So if you've ever wondered what my Instagram strategy is, it's gonna be written in there, black and white for you in this template. Well, hello everyone. Fancy seeing you here. Let's get me in focus. I have just spent the last two hours planning more content in my content calendar and it's now gotten dark because I forgot I was meant to be filming. I basically wanted to give you guys a one week update on how the content calendar has been serving me and show you a few updates that I've made. The first priority for me has been introducing my Instagram archive. And this is my own personal archive of posts that I categorize into sort of my content themes. And I do this on Trello at the moment, but it's so disorganized and kind of stressful to look at. So I really like that I can just add this in on xStyles as another tab in my project and just drag across my tiles with the post information into the archive section. And the point of this is so that I can repurpose a lot of my content. I can reuse graphics, videos, captions in particular are so helpful. I basically repurpose or use repurpose captions for all of my posts at the moment. There's also a search function on xStyles. So if you're ever writing a caption on a particular topic and you're like, I've probably done something on discovery calls before. Let me just have a quick search and see if there's a caption I can repurpose. So super helpful. Honestly, this has changed the game for me having an archive system with my content calendar. Now the posts I've been working on at the moment, you can see I'm using my color-coded system again. So I have some reels I haven't been able to edit yet, like the soundbite of my live training that's happening tomorrow, but it's nice there, clear, obvious that it needs editing. I'm also gonna do a little daily vlog this week or next week. So I've got that marked as yellow. I've got to edit another graphic client case study, but I'm waiting on my copywriter to send that through. And then I also decided I'm gonna do an Instagram live cause I'm in a bit of a launch period. But all my other pieces of content, you can see I've got the videos edited and ready to go. For post 10, I'm just gonna be adding some text to some B-roll. So I've written out the text that I want to add. I really like this feature, this expand feature that they have on xStyles where I can put all of my captions and things instead of having it fill up too much of the space on the actual content calendar. It's nice and easy to just access it there. And again, I can bring up this post in full screen and you can see I've got like multiple slides to this carousel. The other addition we have here is my ideas board. And again, I've used the same structure here with being able to expand each point. So I can actually pull up a draft script that I started writing for this idea. I love having a big running list of ideas like this. I think it's really important for creators when we have a little bit of creative block to have that ideas list just there and running. The other page that I'm working on here, but isn't quite fully fleshed out yet, is my inspiration tab. This is where I basically screenshot pieces of content on social media that I really love and that are inspiring to me. And I just love having it in a bit of like a collage or just sort of stored near my content calendar. So again, when I'm struggling with that creative block, I can come get a little bit of inspo here. So that's gonna be it for this video all about my content calendar. I'm gonna leave a link to xStyles down below. Remember, you can sign up for free. I was using the free version for two months, and it is very thorough and still allows you to do a lot of really cool things. I'm also gonna link a template for my own content calendar on xStyles down below so that you can download it. You can have a nosy around it. You can build out your own content calendar. And I'm also gonna leave it as a filled in template so you guys can actually have a look at my strategy document. And I've never posted this much about my strategy or like given people a template to my content calendar. So it's kind of a big deal. And I hope you guys like it. I hope it is helpful. Those links will be in the description box down below. And I'm really excited to continue using xStyles. You're definitely gonna see it popping up in my content and on my Instagram stories. Make sure you're subscribed to catch the next video and I'll see you there. Bye guys.