Hey Boss! Now, I get it, when you are running your own business creating content can sometimes feel like the very last thing you want to do on your to-do list, and it can feel like such a time suck, and an energy suck, and a mental suck really. But creating consistent content across your social platforms is a great way to constantly be driving targeted, free traffic to your website and to your conversion site, to make even more sales and get even more brand awareness. So today is all about how to create consistent content. I will be sharing my top three tips with you.
So tip number one is vital, you need to plan ahead, and pre-produce. So this is a two parter. The first part is planning your content ahead of time, so really just writing it down and getting it out of your head and onto a calendar, onto a piece of paper. So there’s two things you can do here. Here’s a free download for my content calendar, that you can use for your business, so click on that link and it will show you exactly how to set up your content calendar for your business. I also have an amazing student, and possibly one of the most organized entrepreneurs I know, Megan Minns, and she has a great video on how to set up your content calendar in Asana. And Asana is a great tool for organizing your team, and just organizing all of your to-do’s across everything that you have to do in your business. My team uses it, and we love it, and we’ve taken Megan’s advice on how to use Asana for your content calendar, in conjunction with the content calendar that we also have bellow this video. So make sure you check that out.
So content calendars are vital to your success. If you’re trying to do your content every day on the fly, you’re not gonna do it. Spoiler alert. So you need to make sure that you are planning it well in advance. So you wanna plan for things like, any events that your business has coming up, any campaigns that you’re gonna be working on, because if you’re doing a launch, or you have a campaign, or you have a product or service that you want to be selling and you have a specific time you’re gonna be releasing it, all of your content on your social platforms should be directly related and building up to the launch of that product or service, because it’s going to build a huge audience of warm traffic that’s going to be interested in purchasing and buying that product or service. So plan ahead. Events, speaking engagements, campaigns, launches, all of those things need to be in your content calendar, so make sure you have all those in there.
Now, I’ve mentioned these tools before, but in case you’ve missed it, there’s three tools that you definitely wanna check out and use to schedule your content way in advance. So we use Hootsuite to schedule our tweets, and use it to schedule all of our content on Twitter that we know needs to go out ahead of time. And there’s two ways to schedule in Hootsuite. You can bulk schedule as many tweets as you want in one spreadsheet, for up to six months ahead of time. So I’m gonna put a tutorial bellow this video on how to bulk schedule your tweets in Hootsuite. And you can also schedule tweets just one by one. So that’s two ways to do it there, to save yourself some time on Twitter. On Facebook, we use the native Facebook scheduler on my Facebook page to schedule our content at least a week in advance. And then we use Later to schedule our Instagram posts, and actually write our captions and include the right hashtags, well in advance as well. So those are three tools that will help you out in scheduling your content, and planning and pre-producing your content in advance of when it actually has to go out, so you don’t have to think about it.
And finally, part of this whole pre-production process is, just film and take photos of as much as possible in your business. Even if you’re just out and about, just take as many photos and film different things, and you can use that as content later on. You will never know how a different picture that you take, or a selfie somewhere, could be used for your business later on. And you can also plan photo shoots, which is something that we do in our business to have a bunch of photos that we can use for branding and for business and promotions coming up. So, get as much content as possible stored, and we keep it and organize it in Google Drive so that we always have access to it, my entire team can have access to it, and we can use a graphic designer to customize it for different events, and campaigns, and things we have going on. So, really just collect as much content, and shoot and take photos of as much content as you can, cause it will come in handy.
Tip number two is, your content tiers. So there’s really three tiers that I recommend every business focus on. So the first tier is educational. If you feel like you are racking your brain and trying to figure out what to post online, and what kind of content to create, start with educational content. So you’re probably sitting there thinking, “Okay, well what do I teach people?” Best way to figure out what you wanna teach people is, there’s two methods. One, keep a list of your frequently asked questions. What do people ask you and your business all the time? And you can create an Instagram post educating people on that topic, or a YouTube video and get found in search. So keep those frequently asked questions, and they will turn into content topics for you that will resonate with your target audience. The other method, survey your audience. I survey my audience all the time. I listen to my audience, and it’s the best way to create content that I know they’re actually going to like and care about. So that’s the first step to creating really great content on a consistent basis, just bank as many topics as you can through survey questions and through frequently asked questions from your customers.
The next tier is the inspiration tier. So the inspiration tier is really any kind of content that is going to resonate with your audience and inspire them into action, or make them feel something, because you have to remember that you’re not selling a product, you’re not selling a service, you’re really selling a sentiment. If people like you, and they trust you, and you make them feel something, they will want to be involved with your business. Whether they’re a customer now or a customer later. So make them feel something, inspire them in some way, shape, or form. So you can do this through creating a bank of quotes for your business, that resonate with your business and are aligned with your business. So just sit down for an hour this week and create a bank of quotes that you can use as tweets or a line with a photo on Instagram, or a post on Facebook. You can also create your own quotes. If there is a thought leader in your business, or you’re the founder of your business, what are some of the things that you often talk about that resonate with people in real life and make them go, “Oh, that was a light bulb moment.” You can turn that into graphics or quotes as well. So, inspirational content is the second content tier.
And then the third content tier is great, because it allows you to actually use content created by other people. So, this is the community tier. So you have education, inspirational, and then you wanna work with your community to create the rest of the content for your business. So I like to call this the user generated content. For example, we have the Be Your Own Boss Store, and we have a bunch of customers who have bought items from us and they post them online. So that provides us with free content that we can use, and content that they’ve created for us. So you wanna pay attention to your community, pay attention to niche hashtags in your community, because you can also pull content from there. Screenshot images that you can use, obviously always give credit to the photographers. But pay attention to pieces of content that are performing really well, in your community, in your space, and share those as content on your platforms as well. And then, if you have customers, pay attention to what they’re sharing, and share it if it involves you brand and your business, as well as user generated content.
A great example of user generated content is Herschel, which is a great bag company that actually was founded in Vancouver, and they had a hashtag, and it’s called well traveled. And they have over a million posts with that hashtag, and that’s not their content, that’s actually their users and their customers posting content for them, that they can then use on their own social platforms. This is a perfect example of user generated content, and not having to create your own content for your social platforms, and just using what your customers are creating for you.
And the third tip is, curate, curate, curate. So there’s a difference between creating content and curating content. So on Instagram there’s a feature where if you go to the bottom right of a photo that you like, you hit the little, sort of flag, sign, and that saves it. So it will save it to my saved section here. But the best part about this, is that I can hold a little bit longer and I can save it to a collection, so you can actually organize the photos you like with themes. So I have funny, or inspirational. Say I wanna add this to inspiration, then it’s added to my inspirational collection. So let’s take a look at this. So these are all of the photos I’ve saved. These are the collections I’ve created. So this is a really great way to organize content that you’re saving for easy access, and you can use these graphics, or content that you save, on any platform, so you’re constantly curating content that you can use, giving you a bank of content moving forward. And the best part is, nobody actually sees these. You are the only person who can see your collection, so don’t worry about the things that you’re saving. Save whatever you want, add them to your collection, and nobody else will see them.
So this is a great way to bank content that you can use for your business on your profile at a later date. So curate content literally all day, every day. If you see something that you think could work for your business online, and could be a great piece of content for you, save it. Also, as I said in tip number one, store your content, film as much as possible, take as many photos as possible, and store them. And then also, as mentioned in tip number two, pay close attention to niche hashtags. For me, hashtags like social media, or video marketing, are great places to start finding content that’s gonna work for my business. So I look on Twitter, I look on Facebook, in those niche hashtags, and I look at the articles that come up, any images, as well as the videos that come up, and those are potential ideas for content that I can use, and I can just put them into my content calender for a later date, which brings us back to tip number one, of pre-producing content and planning ahead. So, it all kind of works together, but really pay attention to the content that you’re consuming and what resonates with you, because most likely that will resonate with your audience too, and you can save it to create content for a later date and plan ahead.
All right, now you understand how to create content on a consistent basis, and the tools that you need. But, you probably want to actually get started today. So instead of creating your own content calendar, here’s a link to the content calendar that my team uses, as well as link to Megan Minns’ video on how to use Asana to create a content calendar for your business. So check out both of those resources to get started on planning ahead for you content and your business today, so you can be consistent and constantly drive traffic to your website, and to your conversion site, for more brand awareness and more sales for your business.
And don’t forget to join the Be Your Own Boss mastermind group on Facebook, where we’re constantly supporting each other and growing our businesses.
– S
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