Have you ever wondered how you can create a content calendar? Today I’m going to share with you a few simple tips on how you can create a content calendar.
Tip number one, brainstorm. So a great content calendar really starts with a brainstorm session. Now, I don’t know about you, but I love a pen and paper. You might like brainstorming with your computer or laptop, or maybe you use a tool like Evernote or Google Documents, but however you do it, take time to really brainstorm. When you’re brainstorming content, you want to start to think about questions that you get asked all the time. What are questions that your clients and your potential clients are asking you? And you know those questions where you think to yourself, “Oh, my gosh. If I get asked that one more time …”
That’s a great piece of content! So spend a little bit of time brainstorming. Now, remember, a great brainstorm session means that you’re not editing, so don’t backspace yourself. My good friend Mike Ganino always says that, don’t backspace yourself when you are brainstorming. So take the time, really brainstorm your ideas. I’ll give you a quick hint. You can also look in your sent email and see any of your emails that you’ve sent out that might be some inspiration. You can even poll your audience. So you might post something on social media, on Facebook or Instagram, and say, “Hey, what are your biggest questions when it comes to,” dot, dot, dot. When it comes to moving to my area, or when it comes to real estate, or whatever it might be. Putting out questions and really asking your audience can make a big difference. So tip number one is brainstorm.
Tip number two is assemble and organize. So once you have your brainstorm list, and you want to have a good meaty list of maybe 30, 40, 50 topics. Really get lots of ideas out there. Now what you’re going to do is you’re going to assemble and organize those topics. So if you’ve been taking notes on a notepad, or maybe you’ve got them in a spreadsheet, however you’ve been organizing them, now is the time to put them in to one central location and organize those ideas. I like to organize them in terms of themes.
So as you start to brainstorm, you’ll probably notice that some of your topics, especially for those of you in real estate, are going to have certain themes. You might have questions related to buying. Those are going to go in one theme. You might have questions related to selling. You might have topics related to lending or your local community, or first time home buyer questions. You’ll start to kind of notice commonalities with your content.
So once you have your list, your brainstorm list, now it’s time to organize and to assemble and organize that content. I like to do this in Google Documents. Typically what I’ll do is I will put in all of my topics, and then I’ll start to copy and paste them, and bundle them together and see what type of content we have. This is actually one of the ways that we’ve created our content grid. If you’ve ever downloaded our content grid, our content grid is assembled by looking at different themes and ideas. Click here to download your free copy of the Content Grid. That’s a great way to get started when it comes to creating a content plan.
So you’ve assembled, you’ve organized your list. Now it’s time to do step number three, assign dates to when you’re going to publish your content. So you’ve brainstormed your list. You’ve assembled it into different themes, into different topics. Now it’s a matter of really getting organized and assigning the dates for when that content is going to get published.
So one of the things that we like to do is we will organize all of our content, and personally for me, I like to kind of spread out the themes of our content. So for us, our content has to do with social media, so we might have one tip a month on Facebook and one tip a month on social media strategy and one tip a month on Instagram. And for you, you might do the same thing. Maybe you’re going to spread out your content, so maybe you have one video a month that has to do with buying and one that has to do with selling and one that has to do with your community. Or you might decide, hey, January is going to be the month where it’s going to be all about how to buy a home if I’m a first time home buyer, or maybe February is going to be all about why you love your community.
And so you want to think about when you’re theme-ing and organizing your content, what makes the most sense for you? For some people, they like to do themed months, and that’s fine. Other people like to kind of spread out their content and their themes. So now you’re going through this process of organizing it and you’re setting dates for when you’re going to actually publish that content. We like to use a project management tool called Asana to do this. Asana is a great free tool. Many of you also use Trello. Those are two really fantastic project management tools that will help you get really, really organized.
Now here’s a bonus tip when it comes to creating your content schedule. You’ve got to pick a day and time you’re going to publish that content each and every week. Now here’s the good news, there is no perfect day and time. For us, we publish new videos each and every Wednesday, and for us that works for our schedule, but for you it might be Saturday morning. It might be Tuesday afternoon. It might be Wednesday evening. Whatever it might be, when you’ve got your content, and then you can look at that and say, “Okay, I’m going to publish a new piece of content every week or every other week or once a month,” whatever that might be. That consistency really, really makes a big difference, and then guess what? Everything else can fall into place once you pick that day. It’s a lot like getting married. Once you pick the wedding date, everything else is going to fall into place from there.
So those are a few tips when it comes to creating your content plan. I would love to hear from you! What questions do you have when it comes to creating your content plan? Leave me your questions in the comments below, and as always, if you’re watching over on YouTube, make sure you hit that subscribe button, because if you’re not active YouTube but you like what you hear and you like the videos that we’ve got, by hitting that subscribe button, you’ll be the first to know, and you’ll get a notification when we have new content.
