How to plan your social media content for the rest of the year

In today’s episode of the podcast, I talk about content creation. I take you through my exact process so you can get organised and start batching your content too.   KEY TAKEAWAYS COVERED IN THE PODCAST   Start with a content brainstorm – think about what you know and what would be helpful to your audience. Need content ideas? Start by googling keywords related to your service/product and look at www.answerthepublic.com. You could also ask your customers directly what they would like to see or a Facebook group with your ideal customers in – see what they are asking. My social media plan – set out week-by-week, focus area, what lead magnet can be promoted, and which podcast episode is going live. You don’t have to be on every single social media platform. If you have a podcast, try to match what you are talking about on social media with the topic that week. Your emails can also match what you are talking about on social media. How many times do you see an advert before you time to buy something? Usually, it’s not just once! It takes 15 minutes for your brain to move from one type of activity to another – this is why it is best to batch your content. Batching your content can sometimes make you feel a little disconnected from what you are doing as you have done it so far in advance. If you are batching, you need to know all your key events for the rest of the year to make sure you are including all the promo you need. Don’t compare your social media to someone else’s – you may be at a completely different stage to them.   THE ONE THING YOU NEED TO REMEMBER ABOVE ALL ELSE…   Don’t worry about posting similar content on each of your platforms – no one sees everything you post!   HIGHLIGHTS YOU SIMPLY CAN’T MISS   My content creating process 03:41 Batching your content 17:50   RESOURCES MENTIONED   My week-by-week social media plan:     Transcript:   Hello and welcome to this week's episode of the podcast. How are you doing? How's your week been? Good, I hope. Okay. So these last few weeks have been madness. Like basically I think for months now, I've been saying if I can just get to this point, if I can just finish that thing, if I can just do this, then life's going to calm down and it hasn't, it's just been crazy busy. And as you know, as you listened to the podcast, not long ago, the Academy was open. Before that we did loads of other things. We have Build My List and lots of lovely, cool things going on. But it just means that like I'm constantly on the go doing stuff. So this week has been all about kind of regrouping and taking a minute. And I think it's so, so important to do that for all of us and everyone I'm talking to in the academy, all the customers I'm talking to, they're all saying the same thing. They're all saying they're just so done in. They're so tired. They're so overwhelmed. And that just the bit done at the moment. So for me, I am taking quarter three as a reset. I am looking at my processes, looking at the team, looking at lead magnets and websites and landing pages and all the good stuff that we have out there that we just keep adding to and adding to and adding to, but we haven't stopped to look and see how it is and what we think of it. So that's where my focus is going to be on quarter three. The other thing I'm focusing on which is leading into what we're talking about today on the podcast is getting ahead. Like, I don't know about you, but how many times have you said 'I just need to get ahead. If I could just like have a week that no one else knows about where I could just like batch and do stuff for a few weeks in advance, it would all be sorted.' But basically it's come up that I really, really do need to start getting very organized. Now we're pretty good. I have to say like, you know, I batch things. I do things in advance, you know that, but we want to be really good in terms of like looking at things ahead and getting ready for it. So we're not last minute. So today I want to talk to you about content creation and how I do it and how I batch it, how I come up with ideas. Because when I sat down to think, right, I want to think about the content for the rest of the year and what I'm going to talk about every week on the podcast and all that good stuff. My mind went blank and it happens so much. Like, I don't know about you but we know our businesses inside and out. But for some unknown reason, every so often when you think you need to post something or write a blog or do a podcast, you suddenly go, 'Well, I've got nothing to talk about. Literally no subjects in the world.' And it's ridiculous because we know we've got so many. So this week in my emails. So if you're not on my email list, make sure you go and get on there. And also on the podcast, we're looking at how I go through the process of coming up with content and ideas so that I can plan the rest of the year. And it was really helpful because I was doing the process as I was writing about it and as I'm recording about it. So it was actually really, really good. So the very first thing I do is I do an old fashioned brainstorm. I literally write down every idea around everything. So for me, and there's a really cool picture that I've sent in today's email of my very messy handwriting and probably loads of spelling mistakes. So please don't judge. But basically like, I put up content ideas in the middle. And then I literally go, what do I know? So it's things like social media. Well, what do I know about social media? While we can talk about platforms? We can talk about advertising. We can talk about posts, videos, reels, stories. Uh, we could talk about getting engagement, then I could go list building. Okay. What can I talk about with list building while I can talk about landing pages and systems and onboarding emails and how to create consistent content emailing and all these amazing things. That's the very first thing I do. I literally brainstorm all the ideas and there are websites that can help. There are things that you can do. Like you can just go to Google and type in your keyword of the thing that you need help with. So I could put, you know, list building and it might come up with some suggestions of what people have searched for. Also, you could go and have a look at answerthepublic.com. I've talked about them before. They're excellent. Again, you put your keyword in and they give you ideas of what people are looking for. And basically just have a bit of a think. So that's the first thing I do. I write down all the ideas. Then I go to my Facebook group for my membership and my coaching calls. The other places you could go, if you don't have a membership or Facebook group is you could go to your customers. You could go to other people's Facebook groups that you might be in where your possible customers are in there. Or you could go and find a Facebook group that has your customers in there. And look at what people are asking. Look at the questions that they're asking you. So I literally went and scanned back a few coaching calls and when we record the coaching calls, we upload them into the Academy. And we timestamp when people have asked questions and roughly what my responses literally a few lines to give someone an idea of whether they think or when they rewatch that bit. So I literally looked down the recordings of like, what did that question? And what was that question? What was that question? What was that question? And I just wrote down all these different questions. I looked at the Facebook group wrote down a loaded questions. So like I said, you could do that in your own stuff. You can do that in other people's. Because you're not going in and answering and saying, I've got this thing over here. You're just using it as content ideas. The other thing that you can do is you can go and look in books. So if there's a book about coaching or I don't know, whatever you might do, whatever your servers and product is about social media or whatever, then go and have a look at the contents, go and have a look at the, you know, what is in each chapter. I could have said episode then, um, I couldn't think the word is taking ages to come to me. Yeah. So what's in each chapter. So go through and see how they like put together the, the different bits of content for the book. So there's loads and loads and loads of places that you can find stuff. So once I've done that brainstorm and I've got it all down. Now, the way I plan stuff, and this isn't necessarily what I would suggest for everybody else, just because it took me all these years to get to this point. So if you're not at that stage, then that's fine. Don't think, 'Oh my goodness, I can't do this. That's so much work.' I obviously have a team that helped me now. I'm just kind of saying it with a kind of like caveat of don't think, oh, this is what I'm meant to do as well. Cause that isn't necessarily the case. But what I then did next is we have a spreadsheet called social media planning and I don't know what it's called social media planning because it actually has all the plan for the emails and the themes and the podcast and everything on that. But basically week by week, we have this plan and we have each day listed out and the date on the left hand side, then we have focus area. And basically that's the, what are we going to be talking about this week? Because if you may or may not know every single week I pick a theme and I talk around that theme for the...