Today I’m going to be sharing with you how I created a year’s worth of content in less than a month.
This is the number one thing that most bloggers and entrepreneurs or anyone who wants to create online content has the most trouble with. I had struggled with this my entire blogging career except for this year. Because I decided to get organised!
The thing about content creation and blogging and doing weekly posts is that you really can’t wing it. You actually have to plan it! I’m a bit concerned that it took me two years working in my business to figure that out! But hey!
Anyway, I decided that this year I was going to get super bloody organized with my blog and plan a year’s worth of content. Why? Because the year before I still wasn’t as consistent as I wanted to be. I wanted to be weekly with my content and I think I wound up creating about 35 posts so, you know, that’s still not a year’s worth of content!
This year I wanted to get really super organised and planned well ahead so that no matter what came up; no matter if it was a personal thing or if I just wanted to take some time off or I was unmotivated, or I was travelling.
I didn’t have to worry about content because it had already been created. So that’s why I decided to play in so far in advance. And honestly, I am going to be doing it this way from now on because it is just a lifesaver and it gives you so much peace of mind because you know that no matter what you have content that’s going live, every single week.
So how did I do it? Well the first thing I did was..
I started brainstorming different topics different ideas in Trello.
I used the content over create exercise that I talk about in my video how to create consistent content every week and I literally went back through the year prior and I thought about all the different things that I did, that I learned, that I believed would be helpful for my audience for the year to come.
It took me about an hour to two hours to get everything that I could think of in my mind down onto Trello and from there I had I think over 60 or 70 different ideas.
I weeded out different ones that didn’t feel right or weren’t as interesting as I thought initially.
After that I organized them into a schedule on a Asana.
Asana is what I use to manage my team and I have my editorial calendar on there as well so that my assistant can keep an eye on deadlines and know which posts are going up and which ones to transcribe.
For each post in my editorial calendar there’s more information about everything that needs to be included in the post; from the image to the video to be uploaded, to the publish date, the category, the permalink, description for the post, everything! Everything that needs to be there is entered in there for my Assistant to collect and then format to a blog post.
The next task was the job of filming everything!
When I brainstormed the ideas, I also added sub-notes of points to talk about in each topic. They were just little points, but it jolted my memory so that I knew what to talk about in the videos. The next task was filming 50 videos. It sounds pretty daunting, but I was able to get it done in two weeks. Now for these videos I didn’t script them. I actually just went off on each point that I brainstormed and kept talking that way. Like I’m doing right now.
To be honest it’s a preferred style because I feel like I’m more natural that way. When I’m scripted I feel a bit more stiff but there’s pros and cons to each one. I chose, for the sake of this task, to get this content done faster so that I focused on it being “done” over “perfect”. I can do perfect another time, but right now, I just need to get it done.
So, it took me two weeks to film the videos. I would get up in the morning, I would have a shower, I’d do my makeup and my hair, and I’d have a little bit of breakfast, I’d have coffee and then I would get straight into filming. And I would film as much as I could in the morning before I lost the light. The light where I’m filming right now is only really good in the mornings, so I had to sort of work against the clock here.
Once I finished filming, I spent the next two weeks editing all of the videos.
I was going to have a Video Editor to do it for me, but I decided last minute that I was going to do it myself because I wanted all of them to look consistent. Even though I wasn’t the best at it and I kind of like editing my videos. But next time I will definitely be outsourcing my video editing because it takes forever!
Once I’d finished filming and editing all my videos, I would upload all the information to Asana for my Assistant to transcribe the post. I would also upload the videos to YouTube and then scheduled the date that the video is due.
Now you might be thinking, “What if you don’t do videos for your blog and you literally still write them?” How the heck do you write a year’s worth of content?
Well to that I would say you can still brainstorm a year’s worth of content, right? Because knowing ahead of time what you’re going to be doing is like half the battle and if you’ve already planned it, then you’re half way there.
And then I’d recommend you note down points of what you want in each post. You can also go to the extent of recording your voice based on what you want to talk about in the post. There are Apps (and I think iPhone has their own version of this) where you can speak into the phone and the app writes the words for you. That’s an easy way to do it. You’ve just got to make sure you pronounce your words properly.
So, that’s how I brainstormed, filmed edited and created a year’s worth of content in a month! Now I’d love to hear from you.
What is your current content creation process? Do you plan ahead, or do you just wing it? What tips are you going to take from this video and implement immediately into your content creation process?
