393: Here’s Your Content Plan for the Entire Year

[00:00:00] I've learned that I'm really good at taking an idea and turning it into a system. I love organizing things. I have so much fun doing it. I really enjoy taking a big project and breaking it down into actionable steps, and that's one of the reasons why I love coaching so much. I know there can be so much overwhelm when it comes to making a plan to hit a big goal, and that's not great.

[00:00:25] So we are going to break it down. I'm going to make it super simple, super easy for you to brainstorm content for the entire year. And by the end of this episode, have a really solid plan for what your year is going to look like. You're not going to have every single piece of content figured out. No, but you're not going to feel like you're walking into the year the next month, the next week blind.

[00:00:55] That's what we're wanting to fix. We want you to have an idea of what is coming up. That way, your creativity can come through and can really shine. So when we are talking about a content plan for an entire year that looks like 12 months, 52 weeks, 365 days. I know how to make this easier and I'm going to teach you how to do it.

[00:01:21] We've got a few steps that we're gonna go through, okay? Maybe seven, but each step is super doable. So let's dive right in. Hey there, I'm brief Hair content creator, coach, and your host of the Thrive Podcast. And I'm here to help you build a brand you're proud of with clear strategy and real support.

[00:01:42] Let's dive in.

[00:01:47] So before we actually dive into all of these steps, and step one is gonna be super, super simple. But before we do that. I need you to understand just how important it is to plan, because if we don't have a vision for where we're going, we're not going to make strategic moves that are going to help us get there.

[00:02:12] One analogy that I love to share that really works for my brain and has helped me make really big changes in my life is just fully acknowledging that a year of time is going to pass regardless of anything that we do. We could not post at all and a year is going to pass. We could post a million times and a year is going to pass.

[00:02:36] We could sit on our couch and a year of time is going to pass, right? No matter what we're doing, a year of time is going to pass. And I'm saying this over and over and over again because it is what helped me change certain things in my life, knowing that at this point in time. You're going to hit this place again, whether you're listening to this at the beginning of January or not, January is going to come around again and you're going to look back and wonder, what did I accomplish over the last year?

[00:03:13] Did I make progress towards my goals? I hit this point where I didn't want to have regrets. That's a big thing for me is regrets. Like I know we always hear those stories about like people when they're on their death beds and they're elderly and they're like, oh, I regret doing this when I was younger.

[00:03:33] Whatever. I have that feeling 24 7 in my brain. It's, it's great. So. That is something though that I can lean on when I need a push, when I am procrastinating on something, when I am stuck on something and not strategizing something. That is the push, the kick in the pants that I can lean on and can pull from, and I want you to do the same.

[00:03:59] Not that I want you to constantly be thinking of regrets that you're going to have, but I need you to understand a year of time is going to pass. What are you going to do this year so that by the time January rolls around again. You are feeling proud of the actions that you took, and at the end of the day, that is what we have.

[00:04:21] We have the actions that we are able to take. We have our movement, and that is what we can control. We can't necessarily control the outcome of something. We can't control how people are going to respond, how they're going to react, what they're going to say, what they're going to do. But we can control our actions.

[00:04:41] And when it comes to growing a business, that is what we need. We need to be able to control our actions. And so that is why I. Truly love taking on big projects and organizing them and making systems and doing something like brainstorming content for an entire year. Because it is an action that I'm able to take that will make a difference.

[00:05:07] So if you've felt in the past like, I just don't know how to hit my goal. I don't even know what my goal should be, I don't know X, Y, and Z, you have to first take. An action step. You have to make a move, and if you are procrastinating on or pushing off, really thinking about your entire year as an entrepreneur, I want you to come back to this and I want you to take this action with me.

[00:05:41] Alright, let's dive in. Step one, open your calendar with me. That's it. I told you it'd be super simple. Open your calendar with me. Okay. Now, step two, I want you to mark through every week that you're going to take off and not post. Yes, you need time off. You need vacations. This is truly a place where I can say.

[00:06:06] Everyone else is doing it. You should be too. You, everyone is either taking scheduled time off or they're having a burnout moment and they're being forced to take time off. Okay? I would rather you be on the forefront of planning your time off rather than having to, because you're so burnt out. So Mark, through your calendar time off that you're going to take.

[00:06:33] I hope that you are marking off at least four weeks. Okay. And I'm gonna talk to you as if we're doing this workshop style. So if you need to pause the podcast and like restart it as we're going do that. Okay. So. Everybody's marked off four weeks, right? Yes. If you didn't go back and do it, I just did mine.

[00:06:54] As I was writing all of the notes for this episode, I pulled out my planner and I did all of these steps as I was writing the notes. So I have done this work and I am teaching it to you right after it is fully fresh in my brain. So when I did mine, it wasn't for solid weeks. Okay? So it wasn't like, oh yeah, I'm taking one week off here, one week off here, one week off here.

[00:07:18] I have a solid week off for the week of Thanksgiving and Christmas, but otherwise my days are spread out. So it is a culmination of four weeks. So do whatever you need to do. Maybe even you've got more than four weeks. I love that so much for you, but I want you to have at least four weeks spread out throughout the year that you are taking time off.

[00:07:43] Okay? You got it. Great. Now guess what? You only have to plan 11 months, 48 weeks, and 337 days. I promise to stop saying those numbers for a bit in case it's making you stressy. Um, okay. Before we dive in, I want to let you know I have a opt-in for you that is going to help with this next step. It is a holiday calendar where we've gone through the entire year and have marked off all of the major holidays and.

[00:08:17] Minor holidays, fun holidays, I don't know, but fun things that are on the calendar that maybe you're wanting to create content around. We've put that all together in a lovely calendar for you. You can go and download it right now at Thrive Together blog slash holiday. It's also gonna be linked in our show notes for you.

[00:08:38] So now step three is I want you to go in and highlight all of the holidays or special days in the year that you want to create content around. So for me, I went to like the calendar view in my planner, and my planner had most of the holidays that I want to create content around. And I just went in with a certain color of highlighter and highlighted all of the ones that I know I wanna create content around.

[00:09:04] So. Some fun days. I'm excited to create content around that aren't major Holidays is Gallatins in February. Love Gines. Oh my gosh. Favorite holiday, truly. Thank you. Leslie Knope. I love Valentine's so much. International Women's Day in March, world Book Day in April. I have been a book girly since I came out of the womb.

[00:09:29] I swear. So. I'm just leaning in with the rise of book talk and I freaking love it for all of you that you are joining me in my book journey. So I wanna create content world around World Book Day in April. Grandparents Day in September. That's when I always think of, and then it passes and I'm like, oh, I should have done something cute.

[00:09:50] I'm gonna try this year. So I'm marking it so that way it's going into the planner. And then World Mental Health Day in October. So for me, there are fun days every month except for July and August. But with that, let's say we assign one week of content to each minor holiday and three to five weeks of content to each major holiday.

[00:10:12] So I personally am not going to be creating Gallant Times's content for more than a week, but I could be creating content for three to up to five weeks. Around Christmas time, I could start Christmas content in November, right? So if you are like me, you have 11 minor holidays and three major holidays.

[00:10:37] That is 20 to 26 weeks out of the year already planned out. So now if I go on the conservative side of four weeks off for rest and saying 20 weeks planned for holidays rather than the 26. Okay, so that would be you doing three weeks for a major holiday rather than five. Now I only have to come up with regular.

[00:11:04] Content for 28 weeks. So see how we took that big number of like looking at this entire year and we just cut it in half. Amazing. Right. That is what planning is able to do for us. We think that, oh my gosh, it's gonna be this huge thing. It's so daunting, and it can be right, like looking at a whole calendar of like, oh my God, okay, what am I gonna post this week?

[00:11:30] Okay, figured it out. All right, next week, what am I gonna post? Really? We always wonder like, oh my gosh, why is this time of the year flying by? Oh my gosh, I'm, I'm feeling behind, or I don't have all the content planned that I wanted to for this time of the year. It's because we're not pausing at the beginning of the year.

[00:11:45] And looking at the entire calendar and be like, okay, realistically, let me go ahead and mark some of these things off. Okay, so. Step four, we're already through three steps. You guys, you're crushing it. Step four is to decide how many pieces of core content you want to create a week. So whether that is blog posts, YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, whatever those core pieces of content are.

[00:12:13] So this week for myself personally, I am focusing on Instagram as my platform, and I want to create two to three pieces of content every week. Over here at Thrive, we are creating a a few pieces of core content every week, but it stems from our podcast or from the content that we are talking about inside of Bold Fluence, our coaching program.

[00:12:40] I'm really excited because we are going to start bringing the podcast over to YouTube. YouTube. I'm not sure if I talked about this in our goal setting podcast or not, but YouTube is one that we're going to start reviving, especially in quarter two of this year. So be on the lookout for some more YouTube videos from us.

[00:12:59] So think about what are those core pieces of content for you. That's step four. I just want you to decide now how many pieces of core content you want to create a week. Then step five, we're gonna go quarter by quarter. So this first quarter is January through March, and if you're like quarters, what is Bree talking about?

[00:13:22] This was not something that I understood until like way later in the game. So if you're new and you're like, what the heck is she talking about? The year is 12 months and we break it into four quarters, so three months. Is a quarter, so January through March is quarter one, so that really just helps kind of break it down instead of it being like 12 months outta the year.

[00:13:44] Okay. Let's just focus on one quarter of time, which would be three months. We're gonna go quarter by quarter and mark things off. Okay? So January through March. I want you to use a certain color to mark off posting days that are around a holiday and another color that's regular content. So what this looks like in real life, in real time, um, you're probably hearing my planner right now.

[00:14:10] Um, I'm flipping to let me go to February. So what I've done, and I will totally take a picture of this right now before it's all filled in. Click and I will ask our lovely Hailey to add this to our show notes for you guys. But what I've done, you can see on the right hand side, kind of like in the notes section next to the calendar, is how my planner works out.

[00:14:38] So next to like the end of the week, or you could do it at the beginning of the week, I just put um, a little color mark. I did like three little stars in a certain color to note whether or not it was a content week. That is around a holiday or whether it is regular content that week. So I used Blue for regular content and pink for holiday related content.

[00:15:03] So I know that the week of Gallant Times's Day, I am gonna wanna post Instagram content around that holiday. And I did three stars because I wanna post three times. If you have multiple core content on multiple different platforms, you could use different icons or something like that. Really, whatever makes the most sense for you.

[00:15:26] So if you're like, okay, well I'm posting one blog post every other week and I am posting twice a week on Instagram, that could be your core content and you could note it. That way. But what I'm wanting you to do month by month for the each quarter is just to go through and be like, alright, this week is holiday content.

[00:15:47] This week is regular content. That way when it comes down to like, okay, you actually, it's time to start planning February's content and actually plugging in your ideas for what you wanna post each week. You already have a framework in place for you. With all of this, that's what I'm saying, is like you are not gonna have every single piece of content written out for the entire year.

[00:16:13] That's not what this is about, but it's about giving yourself a framework for success. So we're in January right now. Now is when you want to be able to start planning your February content. So ideally, I would be sitting down right now after I listen to this podcast and I would be writing out, okay, I'm gonna post.

[00:16:33] This many times each week in February. And here's my ideas. I'm gonna do a reel about this. I'm gonna do a blog post about this. I'm gonna do this over here. Right? That's when you can start plugging it in. And this has already given you that framework 'cause you've noted, all right, holidays that I'm paying attention to, go here.

[00:16:51] Now, if you are creating blog posts and you want to be even further ahead. That's probably another conversation that we can have that I don't wanna fully get into in this one. But ideally for blog posts, you need them coming out around three months ahead of a holiday. I know. Crazy, right? That's why, I don't know if that's why Christmas in July started to become a thing, but.

[00:17:20] It's, it's why stores release holiday content ahead of time is because they're trying to get it to us so that way we can use different things to create content. At the end of the day, it's all marketing and we are at the forefront of marketing, so you need to have your content out there in advance. That way it can start to populate on Google, on Pinterest, and be able to get you those clicks for that year.

[00:17:46] If you are not in a place to do so right now, what you can do is go back and repurpose old content or make sure that you have fresh pens going to those holidays three months ahead of time. If you have more questions about that specifically. Uh. Ping me in the Facebook group, or if you're inside bold fluence, that is something we can dive in super deep over there.

[00:18:07] So I have gone through, I went ahead and went through the entire year, so that's what I encourage you to do. It didn't take me very long at all to just go ahead and mark with my colors, like, okay, this week is pink because I'm doing holiday content this week. I'm off. I did a little X if I'm off for that week.

[00:18:26] This week is blue Stars because it is regular content, and I just went and did that in the sidebar of my calendar for all 12 months of the year. Now step six. We've only got two little steps left. Okay? Step six is I want you to look at all of your holiday ideas. So I want you to think through, especially now, especially after we're coming off such a busy holiday season, what ideas around holidays did you not get to do last year?

[00:18:53] I want you to take those ideas from. Wherever your notes are, and I want you to write that in the margins of that month. So most planners have like a note section. I want you to just write in those ideas there. That way when it comes time to like, okay, let me plan the content for this month, you already have those ideas be like, oh yeah, I really did wanna do that thing for Halloween and I totally ran outta time to do it last year.

[00:19:20] Let me make sure I get it done this year. That's what I mean like, so when I always talk about your ideas are wonderful and amazing, write them down somewhere. Just because you're writing them down and saying future doesn't mean never. This is one of those times where you get to pull from the archives and be like, oh yes, so this is an idea I ran outta time to do, but I want to make sure I prioritize it this year.

[00:19:42] And that right there is going to help start to pencil things in step seven. The last one, I want you to look at all your other ideas that you've had. Okay, so go back, look at those notes again, not just with holidays, but any ideas that you have had throughout the year that you're like ran outta time to do, or you're like, this is a not yet project.

[00:20:01] Go ahead and start penciling those content ideas in now. Those content ideas that have been put on the back burner over and over again. Now have a place to go. And I think that is what is so exciting and why I have so much fun putting this together is because we are constantly having ideas. Or maybe we're in a slump and we're like, Ugh.

[00:20:24] Where were those ideas? Hopefully you wrote them down somewhere. Look in your notes app on your phone, text a friend, ask like, Hey, do you remember what you were brainstorming the other day? Look back in your dms. Anywhere you might have stashed those ideas. Write them down because it really is, at least for me, it is hard to be like, alright, sit down and plan.

[00:20:44] And I'm like, Ooh, I have no ideas. Everything is garbage. All these ideas are terrible. But if I can pull from those ideas and then now I have a place in the margins to put ideas that I have while I'm out and about doing random things, you can quickly flip to that month and just throw it in the margins.

[00:21:01] Be like, oh yeah, that would be a really cute idea to do in the summertime. Go ahead and write it down so you don't forget. And now you have a really concrete place to do it. And then when it comes time to plan, let's say the month of June and it's April or May, and you're planning that month, you can be like, Ooh, yeah, I have time to pencil that in now, and I have time to make sure I'm able to do that.

[00:21:23] You don't have to have every date filled in. That's what the margins are for, but you should have a good idea of what content is happening for at least the next one to two months, and that is going to give you so much space for creativity. There's always room for creativity. I think when we talk about planning, a lot of people think, oh, I'm gonna be kind of put into this box, or I'm gonna have to do something that I don't wanna do.

[00:21:50] And I think sometimes when we plan too far out, that can happen or we feel like, oh, I have to do this because I wrote it down. That's what the margins are good for. And I think it is important to lean into where your creativity is pulling you as long as it is in alignment with your brand and with your audience.

[00:22:09] I think it's always going to land better. So if you needed permission to go buy a new paper planner, this is your permission, go and buy one. Make a mess. Like this planner was not that expensive. Like in the grand scheme of things, like go buy a cheap one from the store, right? Like it doesn't have to be this major grand thing.

[00:22:31] Just use it, write in it, scribble in it, mark things out, make a mess. That is what it is there for. I'm a hundred percent talking to myself there because I'm like, Ooh, it has to be perfect. Nope, it can be ugly. Nobody else has to see it. All right, friends, like I said. If you wanna dive in deeper into any of these or ask me questions, please hop into our Facebook group.

[00:22:55] We'll link that in the description below, or join us over in bold Fluence where we dive in super deep on all of these different things. Ask us questions over in the lounge over there, and I'll see you guys back here next week.

[00:23:14] If this episode helped you, help us grow, leave a review, share it with a friend, and tag us on social media. We can't wait to cheer you on.