1. Introduction: hi there and welcome to create a content planning calendar. My name is Tamara Buds Anoma, marketing professional With over 15 years of experience at companies of every size, I've worked with everyone from small startups, toe large Fortune 50 retailers and international corporations. I now focus on brand management in digital marketing for small businesses where you help people like you create marketing and content strategies. I'm glad you've made this investment in your brand and in your business I'm here to help. So if you have any questions along the way, please be sure to let me know either here within the course or via email at info at Silver Shade group dot com. In this course, we will cover the importance of planning your content, choosing platforms that work for you and you'll create a content planning worksheet that you'll uses your calendar. At the end of this course, you'll have a content planning calendar that's uniquely suited to your business. In the next lecture, I'll discuss why you need to plan your content 2. Why Plan Your Content?: so why plan your content? Well, you may have read articles that stress the importance of planning the information out that you share on your social media accounts, but it's just a Zim porton to consider all of your content when you create your plant, including website updates, blawg posts, email newsletters and any other customer outreach that you might do to reach your potential customers and your audience. This will help you create that consistent branded presence online that your customers will come to expect from you. If you plan your content ahead of time for your site, your posts and social shares, you can also better leverage the content you do create. For example, you can pull a single image or a group of images from your YouTube videos to share on your instagram and take a short clip to share on your website and on your Facebook page. From a single piece of video, you can create content to use across all of your customer touch points for several days or weeks. In this way, you can reach different customers across different channels or reach the same customer in multiple ways that will allow them to connect with your brand build trust, and that could ultimately inspire them to make a purchase. Now that you understand the importance of planning your content and how executing that plan can help your business grow, you're ready to choose the platforms that are right for your business. 3. Choose the Right Platforms: How do you choose the right platforms for your business or brand? Without a doubt, one of the most important decisions you'll make regarding your content is what kind of content you want to create. You can choose to create whatever you're comfortable with and make that fit your branding. If you want to record a weekly or daily video or audio and post that to your site instead of writing a blawg, that is totally fine. If you're a great writer, put that effort into your email newsletter your block posts and use Instagram as a microblogging platform. Choosing the right platforms is about knowing what content you want to create and selecting the best fitting platforms for that content type. If you hate Facebook and do not want to write Facebook posts for your business, that's totally fine, and you should not do so. In fact, if you dislike a platform, it's best to avoid it altogether anyway. If you try to use a platform that's not a good fit, your posts, tweets, pins, whatever you use will appear justice forced as they really are, and the message will not resonate with your customers. Anyway, let's pick the platforms that do work for you and for your brand right your list. As you follow along, you can pause the video if you need extra time to research a particular platform or to make some notes. Your 1st 2 platforms are non negotiable. Your website and your email newsletter Thes air your most direct forms of communication and the platforms most under your own control. If twitter and blab shut down tomorrow, you'll still have a presumably amazing website in a list of people who have shared their email with you and therefore want to receive your messages. If you're just starting out, I recommend that you pick three social platforms in the beginning. If your brand is very visual, you might choose Instagram, Pinterest and Facebook. If you have that visual brand and you want to create demo videos or other video content, try Instagram, Pinterest and YouTube. If your brand is as much about you as your business, consider Twitter, Facebook and Black. You get the idea. Choose the social platforms that align with your business, your company brand, your professional brand and where you share your content that you want to develop and put out to your audience. Now that you have your platform preferences ready, you're ready to create your content planning toe. We'll cover the process to create the calendar in detail in the next lecture. 4. Create Your Content Planning Calendar: Now that you've had a chance to think about content planning in general and the platforms where you want your clients to find you, you can design your custom content planning calendar. You'll use this calendar as a worksheet toe. Execute your content strategy so it really helps if you create the calendar in a format that you'll actually use. I like X seller pages for analytical people or a handwritten chart for people who are intimidated by excel. Either way, the concept is the same. You'll be accounting for the weeks, your topics and your posts, all on the same worksheet. To begin open your spreadsheet her notebook and write the weeks in the first column. You could just enter week one week to etcetera, or you can write the actual dates. If you start your week on a Monday, go ahead and write all of the Monday dates in that column. You want this calendar to mirror your actual work habits as closely as possible. Even if you do not want to write a blood post every week or email your list every week, you should list each week on your calendar to keep you on track. OKay, topic is the title of the second column. This column will keep you on task each week. Next, you can title the third column. Website updates or BLAWG title. The fourth column should be email title, followed by as many social and other outreach columns as you need for your business. Create a separate column for each Social Post guest blogged post etcetera. For example, if you plan to post on instagram four times each week and on Pinterest and Facebook three times each and write a gust block post each week for someone else's site, you'll need 11 total columns for that. Four columns for Instagram. Three columns for Pinterest, three columns for Facebook and one com for your guest block post. So altogether you'll have 15 columns on your content planning calendar. You can check my sample worksheet to be sure you follow the same format that I did in the next lecture. I'll show you how to fill out your calendar and use it as a worksheet that you can execute your content strategy 5. Use Your Content Planning Calendar: you can fill out your content planning spreadsheet one week at a time, one month at a time, or for 1/4 or even the entire year. The important thing to consider is that you look at each week as an opportunity to reach your customers about the individual topic you select and at the entire calendar as a brand driven planning tool that can help you communicate consistently and effectively. When you fill out your calendar, you'll start with the topics. When you choose your weekly topics, they should each be related to your business. Don't talk about your new healthy eating plan unless your business is about healthy eating . That might seem like common sense, but you'd be surprised how often I see those missteps. Keep your topics on brand create commonalities from week to week. This consistency will build trust with your customers when they know what to expect. For you, it's easier for them to enter relationship where money might change hands. If you can think of your topics as the plan and the other columns as your tactics that might make it easier, you can market X in any of the boxes that you don't use each week, and we'll go through this column by column. If you do not plan to block every week, you can either use the off weeks to make site updates, refresher assortment or even take a little break. You can use the website or block calm toe list what you'll write or publish that's related to your weekly topic. For this example, the topic is kitchen organization, and the blawg is about organizing basics. The next column. The email newsletter, digs a bit deeper into that organization with pantry. In this example, it's still within the kitchen, but here we're guessing that the email list probably read the basics, and they want a bit more. Next up are your own individual columns. Here. You'll need to consider your own strategy a bit more again. You can use the sample to get some ideas and remember some basic rules of some. First, your social sharing should drive your potential customers to some further action. Click on your site. Ask or answer questions. Comment. Join your email list whatever it is that you want those customers to dio, The call to action should not always be the same, necessarily, but there should be a call to action. Second, remember that if you plan to use a platform, be available to your customers on that platform. If they see you tweet out articles, they might tweet back at you with questions. When you do not respond, they will become frustrated. Frustrated customers are not repeat customers. So in general, when you're using social media, make sure you're available on the platforms you select. Finally, in general, don't annoy your customers on social media or anywhere else. We all have those MLM friends that post so much that I become spammy and we eventually hide them. Do you want to be hidden from your customers? Know? Ask yourself very seriously. If you need to post three times a day or three times a week, three times a day may truly be needed for your business. But if it's not, don't be a spammer. That goes for your social media and your guest blocks. Don't jumble all of your guests. Blawg posts together so that your client see a whole lot from you all at once and then nothing for months and months. Use this calendar consistently over time so that you've got something in maybe week, 1358 12. So that spread out over time instead of something in week. 1234 and then nothing until week 23. This is the way that the calendar will help you. Because if you can put the dates in there that you know, something's going live that will allow you to kind of see where you're at and where there might be a gap that you need to fill it. Okay, go ahead and take this time to fill out the rest of your calendar, and I'll talk to you again in the wrap up. 6. Wrap Up: Congratulations. You've created a custom constant planning calendar just for your business. The real value is in using your content calendar, so I hope you'll use your calendar to develop consistent branded content to share with your audience and customers. You can use this process any time you need to adjust your contact strategy or to add or eliminate channels and platforms that you use to share your messages. If you have a question about any of the course content, please contact me here or via email at info at silver Shade group dot com. I'm happy to walk you through any particular part of the course or talk through your specific social media and other media outreach. Thank you for joining me, and I hope you enjoyed this course.