Podcast

On the last episode, we talked about why planning your content matters.

On this one, we’re talking about the tools that I find to work best for helping to plan out content.

Quick disclaimer, by no means do you need any of these things to plan your content. It’s just some things that make it easier and/or more fun.

My first few things depend on if you like manual planning, like with pen and paper, or if you like to use a computer.

If you like using a computer, my go to is just simply Google docs.

It’s free, easy, and saves as you go, so you can’t ever lose the precious content you’ve created.

In my heart, I’m actually a pen and paper girl, and that’s how I started out, but I’ve quickly learned that it’s so much faster for me to use my computer.

Not just that, but I can even copy and paste if I need to, and that saves even more time.

I also love Trello for creating content, and the free version of it is probably all you would need for a long time. I combine Google Docs with Trello, and a couple of other tools that I’ll get to in a minute. Trello is kind of like digital post its, you can drag and drop content around as much as you want.

If you like starting with pen and paper, I still have some recommendations for you, even though it just seems so super basic and simple.

Using index cards or post its, where you put one piece of content on each car or post it, then move them around into the order that makes the most sense after you’ve written them out, is a highly effective way of creating and organizing your content.

I mentioned on the last episode that my friend Chelly and I have been creating content together for the past 5 years.

We started with index cards.

We sat down together and put pieces of content and content ideas on index cards.

We then traded cards and sorted them by what content would be free and what would be inside our paid programs.

We even used stickers to help identify, and let’s be real, make it more fun.

We even set them up so that we could use them over and over every year, making tweaks for what’s working at the time.

Here’s another little story for you. We put our index cards in cute little bags, kind of like a makeup bag.

We also added lots of stickers and fun pens to our bag.

When I was ready to plan my content for the next year, I got everything out and ready the day before I was going to do my planning.

The next day when I sat down to do my planning, I couldn’t find my precious cute bag of content anywhere. I searched the house from top to bottom and it was no where.

Chelly and I use the Marco Polo app all the time, and I was crying and fussing around on Marco Polo with her.

I took a break from the frustration to do a load of laundry, which I had also done the day before after I had gotten everything set up.

And there it was. My precious bag of content was in the dryer.

I opened it up and the index cards were little balls of basically dust. Completely unusable and unreadable.

Apparently I had dropped my bag into the laundry basket the day before, and put it in the washing machine.

As much as I love office supplies, post its, index cards, fun pens, and stickers, this is something that I have conceded that it belongs on Google Docs and/or Trello.

While we’re on pens, the Frixion pens are my absolute fave.

I don’t 100% know how to say it, I say Frixion and Chelly says Frixion. However you want to say it, they come in a million and one colors, and are completely eraseable. They erase using friction, they don’t even use up an eraser or make an eraser mess!

My next favorite tool is the planner that Chelly actually created and publishes every single year, it’s called the Marketing Planner for Entrepreneurs.

It’s amazing. It even has places in it for weekly content planning!

Plus, and we haven’t even really talked about this publicly, but I contributed one of the tools that’s new to the planner this year.

It’s a sheet in the planner that guides you in listing out part of my content planning process. It’s one sheet that lists out 52 weeks of content all in literally one sheet, at a glance.

The whole planner is just so so good.

The next tools are useful for the actual publishing of the content that you planned.

I use and love Canva. I use the pro version, but you can definitely use the free version for a long time before you decide you want to upgrade to the paid version, which they call the pro version. Even it is super affordable.

You can even schedule onto your social media straight from Canva now!

The other tool I use for publishing is Ivory Mix. Kayla, the creator of Ivory Mix, is even a guest on one of the podcast episodes here on Let’s Book Clients, the podcast. (as has Chelly by the way)

It is also amazing and super high value but also affordable.

She has all kinds of beautiful stock photography, stock video, templates, captions, it’s just an endless resource.

I also recommend using Meta’s native scheduler, Creator Studio. It becomes more and more robust all the time, and you can schedule to both Facebook and Instagram, and it’s totally free, and actually the preferred method of Facebook and Instagram.

We’re not really talking about scheduling content in this episode, I want to stay focused on content planning but also give you those little bonuses about the actually content creation and planning.

If you would like to go deeper and join me to plan out your content together, the workshop is Monday, November 7, at Noon CST.

We’ll sit down and do it together (virtually) for a couple of hours, and will walk away with it done.

So by November 8, you’ll have a year of content planned out, content for all of 2023, and will even know how you can repurpose that content you created again, every year after!

Go to the website to sign up, it’s at www.letsbookclients.com/contentplanningworkshop

If you’re listening to this after those dates, still go to the same url and we’ll direct you there for what’s going on now. We may have decided to do another one!

We’ll see you there, and until then, thank you for being here with me where we learn, grow, and connect together!