Scheduling your online content – tips & tricks

This week I thought we talk a little bit about how to kind of schedule your online content, keep it kind of small so you don’t need to think about your content all the time.

 I feel like so many of us are busy running our business and trying to grow our business and that kind of just takes over and we can end up feeling like it’s running us.

 I don’t know about you but recently, I’ve definitely felt overwhelmed with the amount of work that I’ve had ahead of me. So yeah, I want to do an episode this week all about that.

Plan your content pillars in advance. Now this is not new information, I talk about this all the time. If you’ve read any of my blogs read any of my Instagram captions or listened to any of my other podcasts you know that, I’m a big believer in chunking your business up into pillars or sections or some call it content bucket. Making it really streamlined and easy.

Taking four key items of your business that you can talk about on a regular basis, these inform your different types of content, so your podcast your YouTube videos your blog posts, any of those bigger forms of content.

It’s very easy to think of four ideas for each content pillar which will lead you to 12 weeks worth of content rather than trying to think of what every single week. So that’s the rationale for having your content in pillars.

This also then leads into a micro macro content strategy. Which means that you can take those macro content and use them to plan your micro content. Sounds quite simple right, so if I’m doing a podcast on Pinterest that week my grid posts for my Instagram will more likely be mostly about Pinterest and there will be partly to do with the things I’ve spoken about too.

So I will record the podcast first, then I go and write the blog posts that goes with it and then they go on and do the IG captions and the grid posts so that it’s all fresh my mind. Not having to continually rewrite things and think on the spot all the time. It just makes it super easy and streamlined.

You can do this with your Twitter posts if you do that. You can do with LinkedIn advertising the content that you’ve created, you can do it on Facebook. You can do it with Pinterest, Pinterest especially, as you want to be advertising those blog posts podcast episodes and videos that you’re making.

Plan your online content a month at a time. So, If you are looking for a monthly calendar I have one that you can download from the website. It’s very plain, so you can add three different types of things per day and it’s just in a grid format so that you can very quickly and easily put together a strategy for the month.

 I created this because I felt like there wasn’t really anything out there that I could use and I just needed that kind of joined up approach so I could see a whole month in one go.

I would highly recommend plotting in your macro content and then for everyday you can plan your micro content and it just makes it super easy to see. You can also plan things like your stories and anything like a launch.

If you’ve got something coming up that you want to launch then it’s really handy to plan your content and see the bigger picture.

Then you want to bulk create your content.

I often sit down once a month and write all the podcasts notes or write all the blog posts or come up with my pins, usually on two weekly basis, but come up with my pins.

I do that in a bulk content strategy because it’s saves so much time in the long run. I cannot tell you how much time it save. I used to be writing blog posts every week or you know create pins ad hoc as I finished the blog posts and it just was taking me so much time. so I just sit down and I just write these things or do these things in one go and it does take so much less time. The good thing about this is if you plan it carefully you can have one week where you do your podcasts, the following week you can do blog posts, you can have another week where you do your Pinterest pins for the month and so on.

It becomes something that is part of your routine. The first Monday of the month let’s say you might write the ideas down for your podcast the second one day the month you might then turn all those ideas into blog posts and edit them as they want to go live or schedule them in bulk which we’re going to come to in a moment. Then the third one you might create all the pins for those blog posts and podcasts and the 4th one you might go ahead and schedule a months worth of Facebook content or Twitter content or whatever it might be and you will find as you get into this flow but it really does save you so much time.

 Schedule your content in advance so as I just said go through and do that on a monthly basis I would really recommend doing most things in advance. I think it’s really easy to do a months-worth of grid posts for instance and I tend to bulk create the graphics or the pictures and use a scheduler that I can see them in a grid format. Then I’ll go through and write captions on a weekly basis, because I like to think about what’s going on in the world, I like to think about what’s going on with me, I like to make it current and fresh. I think sometimes if you do those too far in advance they can look a bit full stale, so see what works for you. My tip would be allow your IG scheduler to notify you and then make the post live yourself. This way you can check for mistakes, you can add the Geo tag, because apparently, we all know we don’t really know what’s going on with the Instagram algorithm, but apparently if you update your post within 24 hours it can really harm its success, so you might want to think about that.

So I’m just go through some of the best schedulers ones I’ve used and ones I like, ones I think are really functional and easy for small businesses to manage.

 So I tend to use Planoly and Later for Instagram. I’ve just moved everything over to Planoly because the paid options analytics are really good. I was on later for my business account and it was on a free option and I liked it but I do think Planoly just has a nicer look about it.

I would recommend Planoly but Later’s really good too and they both have really great free options.

Tailwind is the best for Pinterest allot of schedulers are available for Pinterest and they are all good. I’ve tried them all but Tailwind is the best I can tell you that for a fact. Pinterest does also let you schedule up to 10 days in advance too, so if you want a free option then that’s really good. Also scheduling on the platform is usually better for you compared to off platform. Even though lots of the schedulers you can use the Pinterest with have got affiliation so they’ve been approved by Pinterest. Still sometimes I think scheduling on platform will always do better for you.

Schedule your blog posts on the platform you post it for instance with WordPress you can do them and make them to go live in the settings. You can do that on many of the other hosted website platforms, like Square Space and wix etc.  So think about how you might do that if you’re doing bulk creation strategy you can also schedule them in bulk too.

Facebook has scheduling capacity on the platform. Facebook creator studio can be useful. It is really good for doing great posts on Instagram as well as on Facebook so it might be worth looking into, I think it looks good and its functionality is quite smart.

LinkedIn and Twitter I tend to use hootsuite. They’ve recently launched an update in the last couple of weeks actually and the platform looks so much better and the functionality just seems so much easier, so much better and obviously they do all of the platforms, so you can actually use it for Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter and Pinterest. Their Pinterest scheduler is quite good but you would be on a paid option for many accounts. It might be worth it if you want to streamline and choose one platform, again you have to decide what’s right for your business.

You might not be using all of those platforms, I hope you’re not because if you are, you are going to be really, really, really, really busy so just think about what’s right for your business. I always say that don’t look what someone else is doing, think about how it works for you and that it really is important.

So the takeaway this week…

1. Make sure you plan your content in pillars, it really helps you to save time
2. Use a macro and micro content strategy
3. Plan your online content a month at a time
4. Bulk create your content
5. Schedule your content in advance and
6. Have a good look at what schedulers are available and which ones will work for you. Just because I have said they are good, they might not work for you. So have a really good look and go with what works.

 I hope you found that useful if you want to chat some more get in touch my details are in the show notes, I’m here to help.