Reality check: Content creation doesn’t have to feel overwhelming. There are 720 hours in a month, and you only need six quality hours to plan, create, and schedule an entire month’s worth of content.
In this episode of Called to Both, guest host Carli LeBlanc walks us through her exact six-hour content creation plan. Not only does this plan save you time and energy, but it’s effective. Her strategy will position you as an expert in your field and make social media work for you.
Ready to get off the content creation hamster wheel? Listen in to learn how to take the stress out of content creation with a simple yet powerful plan.
Listen to this episode now:
Search for episode 144 of Called to Both on your favorite podcast player!
Meet Our Guest Host: Carli LeBland
Carli is the CEO of CD Creative Co., a Houston-based content creation agency that helps busy women entrepreneurs create content in one day for a whole month. She’s also the host of The Side Hustler podcast, a corporate professional, and a mom. She knows a thing or two about balancing a full-time job with a business and motherhood!
How to Plan a Month of Content in Just 6 Hours
Balancing business and life leaves little time for content creation. Carly’s strategy helps entrepreneurs plan intentional content that supports business goals without causing burnout.
Step One: Brainstorm Your Content
Time commitment: one hour
Set aside one hour to brainstorm without distraction. It shouldn’t take long, but the goal is to do deep work so you can be intentional about your content plan and create the most impact.
Choose the time of day when your focus is at its peak. For instance, if you’re a morning person, schedule your brainstorming session first thing. If you feel more creative and focused at night, do it after your kids go to bed.
Start with a brain dump. Think about the recent questions your audience has asked you, their common struggles, and what’s been inspiring you on social media lately. Write all of your ideas down without filtering yourself.
When you’re done, look at everything you wrote down and come up with four key concepts or themes that you can talk about for a month. The key is to make sure your concepts align with your business goals. If you’re promoting a course this month, pushing a product, or trying to grow your email list, your concepts should move you closer to those goals.
Next, choose how many times per week you can commit to posting content. A great goal is three times per week, which is twelve total pieces of content for the month. Once you narrow that down, it’s time to get creative and choose how you want to create your content. Are you going to create static posts, carousels, or videos?
Before you decide, keep in mind that experimentation is highly beneficial for your business. Instead of sticking to one type of content, create a variety so that you can see which one performs best with your audience.
After your content planning brainstorming sesh, it’s time to move on to the next step: creating your content!
Step Two: Create Your Content
Time commitment: three hours or less
Now that you’re armed with your plan, you can batch create your content for the whole month in three hours or less. The first step of this process is to capture B-roll and photo content.
B-roll is candid video footage of you doing what you do for your business. For example, a five-second clip of you working at your computer or writing in a notebook. The great thing about B-roll footage is that you can repurpose it for months to come!
Need help with a shot list? A simple hack is to ask ChatGPT to make one for you. Tell it what you do for your business and ask for B-roll and photo ideas. It’ll even give you tips for how to shoot your content by yourself.
Once you have your photo and video content, log into Canva to create your graphics for the month. If you want to post twelve total pieces of content, aim for four B-roll videos, four photos, and four graphics.
Step Three: Edit Your Content
Time commitment: one hour
Editing doesn’t have to be complicated. You can get it done quickly when you keep it simple with minimal editing.
For your videos, you have two options. You can edit multiple videos together into a compilation or take one video and add a text overlay. Both are effective strategies, but compilations take longer to edit.
Need ideas for text overlays? Check out Carli’s guide, 30 Days of Done-for-You Content Prompts for Personal Brands, on her website.
The best place to edit your videos is in the app CapCut or directly in the Instagram app. Either way, once you have them edited, upload them into your Instagram drafts. This helps us with our next step.
Step Four: Write Captions, Hashtags, and Schedule Your Content
Time Commitment: one hour
This plan uses Instagram to schedule content, but if you post on a different platform, you can use a third-party app that cross-posts.
Here’s what you need to have in your captions:
- CTA that tells your audience what to do next
- 5-7 hashtags
- Relevant keywords for SEO
A time-saving hack is to use ChatGPT to write your captions. You can use the talk-to-text feature to tell it what the content is about, what hashtags you want to use, and what keywords to include. Go back and forth with ChatGPT until the caption sounds like you and meets your objectives.
Once you have your captions drafted, it’s time for the final step: scheduling your content. When it comes to posting times, a good rule of thumb is to post at the time that your audience is most likely to do what you’re asking them to do. If they wouldn’t click a link and purchase something at 6 am, don’t post at that time.
After you schedule your posts, you can cross content creation off your to-do list for the whole month! Feels good, right?
One final tip: you can blast through this entire content creation plan in one day, or you can break up the six hours over multiple days. Find a rhythm that works for you, and remember that posting fewer pieces of strategic content is better than burning yourself out with mass posting.
Find it quickly:
1:35 – Meet Carli
3:53 – Start with your brainstorming session
6:25 – Choosing what type of content to create
7:34 – Create your content in three hours or less
10:15 – Hacking the editing process
12:12 – Captions, hashtags, and scheduling
Connect with Carli LeBlanc:
30 Days of Done-For-You Social Media Prompts: cdcreativecoagency.com/content
Website: cdcreativecoagency.com
Instagram: instagram.com/cd.creativeco
Podcast:.cdcreativecoagency.com/podcast
If you decide to use any of the links above and buy through them, I’ll receive a small commission back. All of those affiliate income commissions really add up over time and help generate revenue to help support this podcast.
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