3 ways to plan your content this year

There's more than one way to skin a content plan.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hello, Recovering Perfectionists. I'm Claire Riley, and you're listening to episode number 80 of the Recovering Perfectionist Podcast. You can get the show notes and any links over at clairey.co forward slash pod forward slash 80. And on today's episode, I'm just going to talk through the three different ways that you can plan and create content in your business depending on what stage you're at and what feels right for you at the moment. This is the Recovering Perfectionist Podcast, and I'm your host, Claire Riley. Alrighty, so we talk about this quite regularly on in the membership Batch It Crazy, which is my beautiful monthly membership, which helps you create consistent content, which is what phase you're at. And often we start with one when we're in startup and then we move into more established, etc. But sometimes, even if you're really established, we go back to the basics and just do step one. So I'm going to talk through these three and what they mean in a nutshell. I have got more comprehensive training on this, so please do just reach out or comment if you'd like to hear it. But I'm going to try and wrap it up in a bit of a nutshell so that you can give yourself permission to create content and create your content plan in a way that feels aligned and easy for you right now rather than in six months or last year. So let's get started. So the first one is what I like to pull very, very professionally and very, very articulately throwing some spaghetti at the wall. So as I mentioned, this is an ideal place to start when you are quite new to business. You might be new to creating blogs, you might be new to whatever message it is that you're doing. And I really love throwing spaghetti at the wall and encouraging people to throw spaghetti at the wall because it takes away that agonizing worry about is this the right thing? Is this the right first blog to do? Does this make sense? All of that sort of thing. So what I mean by throwing spaghetti at the wall is you know roughly what your business is, you know what you want people to talk about. You might be starting to explore your core message and some of those key pillars of your messaging and content, but you're not quite sure like how it's going to land and how you want to talk about it and what your stance is, and if there's even an upsell from all of this content, which is ideally what we want to work towards eventually. But it's still important to be putting things out there because if you're not putting any content out there, it's really hard for people to find you. And even if they find you, they want to know a bit about you and who you are and what you do and why you do it and what your flavor and voice is as well. So it's really hard for people to do that if there's no content for them to kind of sink their teeth into. So when I talk about throwing some spaghetti at the wall, what I mean is just testing the waters. Have a bit of a play with your messaging, have a bit of a play with um what angle you're going to take with certain things. And this could be some things as simple as defining some of the uh key areas that you um that you work in or key things that you work in. It could be some definitions. Um, something that we also talk about in Batch at Crazy a lot is because when we by the time we get to starting our own business, whether it's startup or or um or more established, we're really great at what we do. We know it inside out, and we are very advanced at what we do because that's why we've started a business, because we're shit hot at it and we want to teach other people, or we want to show other people or help other people or whatever it is. But we forget that there's people who've never even heard some of the terms that we probably use, or they've never even thought about some of the really basic things that we learned quite a while ago. Um, and so some really great places to start with blogging is to go back to those basic things and think about where were you on this journey, say two, three years ago, maybe five years ago, maybe ten years ago, and do some of those grassroots information things. Um, with in with uh keeping in mind injecting a lot of your voice, your personality, your why, your reason, a bit about your experience, your qualifications, and that sort of thing as well. So when you've thrown a bit of spaghetti at the wall, you start to see what resonates in terms of the structure of your blog as well as the content that's in your blog can be a really, really big thing. Um, but you also get a bit of a feeling for how it fits with your greater business and what you like to create as well, because it's all well and good for us to tell you what we want to hear from you, but if that bores the pants off you, you're never going to do it anyway. And it's there's a disconnect. So it's a really great way for all of us to make sure that we understand what's going on. The second way that we then start to get really clever about our content is um a bit more campaign specific. So as we go along, you'll probably find that you'll have a couple of key uh services and products, services or products, and each of those might have one or two freebies. So you have your uh broadcast level content, which would be blogs, podcasts, things that anyone can get their hands on and you don't necessarily know who they are, which then often feeds into the next part of the funnel, if you like, or the basket, which is a freebie, which reinstates or helps, or is the next um step from that content. And then that job of that thing is to then introduce the audience into the paid product, right? So you might say, well, for the next six to eight weeks, I'm just going to focus on this one product, and this is the thing I want to sell. So then all of your content for that period of time will focus fairly centrically around whatever it is that you're trying to sell. So, for example, my two main things in my business is organization and systems, which I pretty much just do in VIP sessions and uh at retreats. And this the other thing is content, which the all roads lead to Batch It Crazy. So when I'm in launch of Batch It Crazy, for example, most of the content that I put out, everything I talk about in social media, everything I'm talking about in groups, all the tips that I'm doing, most of the things I do on social media, um, everything in the newsletter is all about content, content strategy, content planning, content creation, content systems, content publishing, blah, blah, blah. Because I want people to go like, yes, I understand, I'm putting all these bits together. The next step is to come and join Batch It Crazy and actually get it done. Versus when I'm maybe doing VIP, I might focus on one area of business organization, and that's all I talk about for eight weeks and so on and so forth. So that's the second part. The second sort of stage is that you also have this campaign-centric content. The third stage is a bit of a mixture of both, which is a bit of a dance and a bit of a balance, and it can be strategically and implementation-wise a lot more challenging. And it's definitely easier if you've got some people on your team and a bit more structure about how this is going to work. Because the campaign and campaign-centric content is very important when you're in part of that launch, but there'll be other people around who aren't so interested in that part of your business, but they love the other 50% or the other whatever, and you don't want them to get bored and go elsewhere either. So there's some really beautiful ways that you can have still have your campaign-centric content over here, which is leading to whatever it is that you're focused on at the moment, but also a bit of a sprinkling of the other things so that the rest of your audience also has something to sink their teeth into. So I'd love to know, you can pop into the comments where you see yourself, whether you're throwing spaghetti or you're campaign-centric, or you're ready to start mashing the two together. It's a really interesting thing just to give yourself permission to know which one. And as I said, even if you've been in business for a long time and you've traditionally done the campaign-centric, but something's changing, or you just feel like throwing a bit of spaghetti because you can't be bothered talking about that thing anymore, that's totally cool. Um, you could have been in business for 20 years and just be a bit bored with things or be changing things up or be, you know, pivoting or anything like that. It is completely okay to go back to spaghetti throwing and then you know, all of that sort of thing. You don't have to just move into the phase and then be there forever. It's totally okay to move around. Um, so yeah, I'd love to know if you have any questions about how to create content or what um what sort of content you might create at various times throughout the year. Um, and as always, I would love to hear from you. I'll see you next episode. Bye.