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Content Batching

Episode 207: Content Planning + Disneyland from the Business First Creatives Podcast

April 9, 2024

Chasing Simple Marketing

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I'm  Amanda — simplicity-focused content marketing strategist.  I'm here to help you fit your marketing into your business.

Meet Amanda

The Chasing Simple Content Planner

Replay of my content planning + Disneyland episode from the Business First Creative podcast with my friend Colie James.

Content Planning From The Business First Creatives Podcast

Is the content creation process overwhelming to you? Do you get through creating one piece of content and feel drained? Today I’m going to share a guest interview I did for Colie James’ podcast – Business First Creatives – where I share the proper way to create your content through batching! Listen in as we explore the how to find inspiration, create content your audience will resonate with, and set up your own plan for batching—plus we’re even diving into our mutual love for Disney!

Be sure to search for the Business First Creatives Podcast with Colie James and give it a follow so you don’t miss out on the greatness she has to share.


Links and Resources Mentioned in This Episode:

  • If you want your business to grow, effective marketing is crucial. But that doesn’t mean you have to spend a ton of time on your marketing – even if you’re a solopreneur. Do you dream of business growth, but aren’t gaining traction? Does the thought of tackling your marketing feel daunting? Or, do you understand the importance of effective marketing, but simply don’t have the time to get it done? There’s good news! Marketing doesn’t have to be so overwhelming, confusing, and complicated. Say goodbye to the confusion and complexity that has held you back, and say hello to a clear, actionable roadmap for business growth. In my book, Chasing Simple Marketing, I’ll take you on a journey to demystify marketing with simplicity as your guiding principle. You’ll walk away with a clear, concise, and personalized marketing strategy designed specifically for your entrepreneurial journey. You don’t need a Masters of Business Administration (MBA) or a background in business to tackle your marketing head-on thanks to the strategies and techniques in this book that deliver real results. No longer will marketing feel like an insurmountable mountain; instead, it will become an easily manageable and integral part of your business. Take your content from non-existent or inconsistent, to a true tool to grow your business by Chasing Simple Marketing. You can grab your own copy by heading to Amazon and searching for Chasing Simple Marketing, or you can hop over to amandawarfield.com/book to learn more about buying it for yourself.
  • Find me on Instagram and tell me you completed this week’s action step: @mrsamandawarfield

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Have a comment about today’s episode, or a topic you’d like to suggest for a future episode? Shoot me an email over at hello@amandawarfield.com!


Rather Read? – Here’s the Transcript!

*Just a heads up – the provided transcript is likely to not be 100% accurate

Is the content creation process overwhelming to you? Do you get through creating one piece of content and feel drained? Well, today I’m going to share a guest interview I did for Colie James’ podcast, Business First Creatives, where I share the proper way to create your content through batching. Listen in as we explore how to find inspiration, create content your audience will resonate with, and set up your own plan for batching.

Plus, we’re even diving into our mutual love for Disney. Be sure to search for the Business First Creatives podcast with Colie James and give it a follow so that you don’t miss out on any of the greatness she has to share. You’re listening to episode 207 of the Chasing Simple Podcast, and I’m your host, Amanda Warfield.

This episode was brought to you by my book, Chasing Simple Marketing, and you can grab your own at amandawarfield. com / book.

How do I find time to create content without overwhelming myself? Where should I even be showing up in my marketing? How do I come up with fresh content ideas? Where should I be focusing my marketing efforts? What is lead generation anyways, and how do I do it? Are launches still a thing? How do I put it all together to market my business strategically?

Can I really grow my business without spending all of my time marketing? These are some of the questions that float around in your head. When you think of marketing welcome friend, this is chasing simple or practical marketing strategy meets simplicity. I’m your host, Amanda Warfield, simplicity focused content marketing and launch strategist.

Speaker, educator, and author of Chasing Simple Marketing. I traded in my classroom lesson plans for helping creative entrepreneurs sustainably fit marketing into their business without it taking over their business. So that they have time to grow their business, take time off, and live the life they dreamed about when they first decided to go out on their own.

When I’m working, you can find me working with one on one clients, such as The Contract Shop and Rebecca Rice Photography on their marketing strategy and copywriting, or helping my students simplify their marketing and launches. And when I’m not, you can find me spending time outside with my husband, Russell, Reading in our hammock, watching GameCock Sports, traveling, or forcing our cats to snuggle me.

If you feel overwhelmed by marketing, you aren’t alone. Many entrepreneurs find marketing frustrating, overwhelming, and simply an obligation. They know they need it, but they don’t enjoy how easily it can suck up their time when what they really want to be doing Is the thing that they started their business to do, which is why I’m here to help make marketing simple and less time consuming so that you can spend less time on your marketing and more time growing your business and doing what you love each week.

I’ll bring you transparent conversations. Actionable steps and judgment free community to encourage and equip you. So grab yourself a cup of coffee or whatever your drink of choice is and meet me here each week for love, support, practical tips, and advice on uncomplicating your marketing and business.

Let’s do this entrepreneurship thing together, shall we? If you want your business to grow, effective marketing is crucial. But that doesn’t mean that you have to spend a ton of time on your marketing, even if you’re a solopreneur. Do you dream of business growth but aren’t gaining traction? Does the thought of tackling your marketing feel daunting?

Or do you understand the importance of effective marketing but simply don’t have the time to get it done? There’s good news. Marketing doesn’t have to be so overwhelming, confusing, and complicated. Say goodbye to the confusion and complexity that has held you back and say hello to a clear, actionable roadmap for business growth.

In my book, Chasing Simple Marketing, I’ll take you on a journey to demystify marketing with simplicity as your guiding principle. You’ll walk away with a clear, concise, and personalized marketing strategy designed specifically for your entrepreneurial journey. You don’t need an MBA or a background in business to tackle your marketing head on thanks to the strategies and techniques inside of this book that deliver real results.

No longer will marketing feel like an insurmountable mountain, instead it will become an easily manageable and integral part of your business. Take your content from non existent or inconsistent to a true tool to grow your business by chasing simple marketing. You can grab your own copy by heading to Amazon and searching for chasing simple marketing, or you can hop over to amandawarfield. com / book to learn more about how you can grab a copy for yourself. Hello. Hello. And welcome back to the business first creatives podcast. 

Today. I have Amanda Warfield, a fellow Disneyland lover. Well, actually not Disneyland. She loves world, but I still talk to her anyways. I love all of it. I love all of it.

There’s no, I don’t think one’s better than the other. Oh, but I do definitely better. Let’s just start the conversation out like that. Amanda, welcome to my podcast. How are you this morning? I am so great. Thank you for having me on today. I’m really excited about this. I mean, I feel like you solve a problem that I have struggled with forever.

So we’re just going to, you know, dive right in. Let’s talk about content planning. Everyone knows. That I have a love hate relationship with planning my content. I have tried to be better. I have had people that helps me organize it. And I finally hired a VA who is actually now basically running my Instagram account, which is amazing.

But then I still have to make the content. So Amanda, what you talk about most is batching content. So why don’t you tell the listening audience what that is and why you think everyone should content plan and perhaps consider batching. Yeah. So batching is simply setting aside time on your calendar each and every month to sit down and create the entire month of content for the next month.

And so a lot of times when we think of batching, we think, Oh, I’m going to sit down and I’m going to write, let’s take blog posts. For instance, I’m going to write. The first blog post of the month and I’m going to write it and I’m going to edit it and then I’m going to get it all scheduled. And then I’m going to do the second one and the third one, the fourth one.

What ends up happening is that you write that first blog post and you get to having it scheduled. You’re like, I just spent three hours on this thing and I’m mentally exhausted. And there’s three more. No, I’m done and it’s exhausting and it doesn’t work well. And so no one ever ends up batching their content, but we actually want to think of batching as if we’re making a batch of cookies, right?

So when you’re making a batch of cookies, you’re not mixing all the ingredients for one cookie and then forming the one cookie and cooking the one cookie, right? No, that’s, that’s like a huge waste of time. That’s 15 minutes in the oven per cookie versus 15 minutes in the oven for 12 cookies. You’re taking it step by step.

And so you want to do the same thing with your content. You want to plan the entire month of content, then you want to outline each of those blog posts. Then you want to rough draft and I mean rough draft, don’t edit yourself at all. Rough draft each of those blog posts and then you go and edit and then schedule each of them.

And so you’re doing all of the outlining. 4. All of the writing. 1, 2, 3, 4. All of the editing. So on and so forth. And you’re not doing them all in the same day either, which I think a lot of people think, Oh, I’m going to batch four blog posts in one day and have them totally written and scheduled.

Absolutely not. Your brain is going to hate you and you’re going to hate yourself. Yeah. So, and I think that’s where people, you know, get tripped up. And in a previous episode of the podcast, I had Ashley Kang on and she was talking about the value of having weekly CEO days. And I think that, you know, doing your content planning is an important part of your business.

And if you do what you said, plan one week. Outline one week, rough draft one week, actually edit and publish on the fourth week. That is something that instead of it taking you three hours or four hours to write a single blog post, if you use those chunks of time every week, by the end of the month, you have all of next month’s content done, which I think is where I was kind of.

You know, in the weeds on what batching was, because I incorrectly thought that you had to like sit down and that that meant that, okay, so for Instagram, I’m going to plan out three posts per week. I’m going to make the graphics. I’m going to write the captions. I’m going to choose hashtags. I’m going to choose the visuals, and I’m going to put it all together inside of metrical, which is where I’m currently planning all of my social media content.

But like doing all of that in a single day, guys, it’s not realistic doing all of that in a single day, even for one week is just really not realistic. Well, and if you think about the way our brains work, right? I’m getting deep into the psychology of the brain here, but each of those pieces, each of those steps of creating content takes a vastly different part of your brain.

So the strategic, the planning that takes one side of your brain, right? The actual creation process takes another part of the brain. The just administrative work takes another part of the brain, always take different parts of the brain. And if you’re like going max all in on every single part of your brain in one day.

Your brain is, it’s not going to continue to function. You’re going to get to the creative part and be like, I’m zapped. I used all of my mental energy in the planning portion, in the strategic portion. I don’t have the capability to continue on like this. And then you just don’t create content. And all of a sudden you’re stuck on the hamster wheel where, Oh, I need to put something out today.

I’ve got a million other things to handle. How am I supposed to do this? So let me ask you, where does repurposing come in in terms of setting yourself up for success in content? Um, and content planning related to batching, like, is there a place for you to do the repurposing? Where should that happen in like your schedule of events?

If you are doing what you’re supposed to do and actually scheduling time on your calendar each and every week to do a portion of the batching. This is such a good question because this is one of those things that everyone says, yes, I should repurpose. And then they sit down to plan and they don’t ever, they repurpose nothing and they just create all new content.

And I am just as guilty as anyone else of this, but the time to. Plan to repurpose is during the planning phase so much so that in the content planner that I created, there is a whole section in the planning phase for each month where I’m like, what can you repurpose this month? Tell me the specific dates and what it is.

And so it forces you to go back and look at content you created this time last year or a few months ago and say, okay, this is a similar theme that’s happening. You know, it’s January, new year, new year, whatever. This is going to have a similar theme that we’re going to talk about. That seems to not be the case at all this year.

Um, I think we’re all, as we’re recording this in January, I don’t know when it’s going to air, but we’re all like, man, this year’s rough already, we’re a month in and things are not moving like we want it to. But you look back, there’s sometimes no way to predict those things. So you look back when you’re planning January and you say, okay, this is probably going to be a similar theme.

What content did I create last year? How can I tweak it and repurpose it? How can I take that long form content and break it into newer pieces of short form content so that I’m not creating my Instagram captions from scratch. So that all happens really during the planning phase. Can we talk about organization?

So you just mentioned your content planner, which we are totally going to talk about, but outside of the planner, like I just realized the other part of the conversation that I don’t hear being discussed nearly enough. When it comes to content planning, is that repurposing phase and how organization sets you up for success in order to do that in a timely manner and it not take twice as much effort to do that.

So recently I was going through, like you said, all my posts from last year and I actually had someone that was creating the content for me last year. And the one thing that I did that they didn’t tell me to do, but I did by myself, I organized everything in Airtable. And then I went to every single post and I tagged it with like an idea.

Now, if you know of content pillars, guys, I mean, maybe you tag it with your content pillars, but maybe it’s just much simpler than that. Like I’m going to tag this with Dubsado. I’m going to tag this with email communication, something really basic for myself. So that if I know in February, I’m going to be talking all about email.

Consistent email communication. If I go to where all of my content is organized and I’m filtering it by email communication, I can look at all the things that I posted previously and decide what could be repurposed quickly. Do you have an organization? Like system that you use for yourself, you know, that’s on my list of things to create this year actually is some kind of spreadsheet where I categorize like you’re saying and go, okay, this is all about content batching.

This is all about content strategy. This is all about launch strategy. And that way when I’m repurposing, I can go back and go, Oh yeah, this is us right now. All of my. Big, my long form content lives inside of Trello and I just have every single episode listed out, but now that I’m 150 plus episodes into my podcast, that is not efficient, but yeah, what you’re saying about the organization side of things, I think so often we, as.

Creative entrepreneurs in this sphere, we get wrapped up in the fact that, Oh, I’m creating content. It’s a creative process. I like to be in my flow. I can’t, I hear all the time. Oh, I can’t post. I can’t schedule out my content because I need to post in the moment so that it feels inspired. I’m like, listen, you’re going to not get, you’re going to be on that content creation wheel forever because.

It takes so much time to create a single piece of content. It’s not a quick 15 minute thing. I don’t care what you think it is. Even an Instagram caption is going to take you longer than that. And then, Oh, where could that 15 minutes have gone today? Whereas if you batched it, it’s going to take less time because you’re in the flow.

Anyways, the organizational side of things, creating content is a system, which I know you love content. Creation is just a. A system with a bunch of mini systems inside of it. And that I think is the key piece that’s missing so often is that it’s not just this creative endeavor. It’s a system inside of your business.

And it’s one of many systems and it cannot take up all of your time. Because I think until recently, I don’t know how anybody else. Organizes just their ideas like I’ll be driving in my car and I’ll have an idea for a podcast episode and I literally pull over and write it down, guys, because at my age in 10 minutes, I have forgotten it.

So I do a lot of pulling over and Chloe’s like, mom, why are we stopping? But one thing that I realized recently was that. I’m putting them all down in notes, and while you can search in notes again, you can’t categorize in notes. You can’t tag in notes. So I think what I have to be more diligent about in 2023 in terms of content planning and organization is making sure that at least weekly.

I’m going into those notes where I just put down just random thoughts, random word phrases. And if I put that into my air table where I am currently categorizing all of my content, it makes content creation even faster when I sit down and I’m like, Oh yeah. I’m going to plan out all of Q3 podcast episodes, because I’m cool, Amanda, and I’m currently editing and scheduling for Q3.

I’m so excited. But like, you know, when I get ideas, I’m just popping an air table and just listing everything. I mean, it doesn’t have to be concrete. And I think that’s where other people get, you know, Lost in the weeds to is that sometimes with the planning, it doesn’t mean that you have to get everything like a to Z written down.

I mean, if you have good ideas, get them down. If they’re not fleshed out now, there’s always time for you to flesh those out. In another month or, you know, later in the year. Well, and so often we’ll get these fragments of thoughts and then with a few sleeps, we’re like, Oh, I’ve got all kinds of ideas for this that I didn’t have before.

And so, yeah, get them down. And it’s as simple as, Oh, here’s a pain point I have, right? I have all these notes of ideas and then I never use them. Okay. How can I add a step to my content planning routine on my content planning day? Okay. Make a little in your workflow, a little checkmark of go look at your notes and make sure you move everything over to your content bank, wherever you keep that.

And it’s just, it’s just a matter of keeping that content bank, which I think a lot of people don’t do. I think they’ll write things down and then they never actually transfer it over to a place where they can refer back to, to actually playing your content. But it makes a Planning content so easy because you’re like, man, Amanda of a week ago had a lot of great ideas.

This is really helpful now because I feel not inspired at all. I mean, and inspiration comes and goes guys. And I’m one of those people that I have realized now at my age with my forgetfulness that no, when I am feeling inspired, if I have to shift what I’m doing that day to just give myself 15 minutes to get all of it down on paper or to get it into my computer, that is what I have to do.

And so let’s talk about the content bank. Because I think that when people are really struggling to find ideas from their content, it’s because number one, they do not have a content bank. And number two, they don’t really know where to get the ideas for the content bank if they themselves are feeling depleted of inspiration.

So Amanda, where are some of the places That everyone can find good content for their business, regardless of what their service or their offer is inspiration, like you said, but if you’re not feeling that one of the other questions, one of the other places inside of the content planner is actually what questions have I been asked lately when people send you a random dm.

Write down that question when someone sends you an email and ask you a question, anything like that. But that also is very dependent on someone coming to you or inspiration coming to you. So not always super helpful. The most important thing you can do if you are needing ideas for your content is to send out an annual survey.

I do this every single year and it is just a plethora of ideas. And the best part is that it’s from people who actually listen to my podcast and I know, okay. They. These are the people that are already tuning in here, so I can serve them really, really well. Amanda attached to this podcast episode will be an annual survey.

I am going to put that on my list. I’m definitely going to do it. It’s been one of my things that I’ve been wanting to do. And the funny thing is, until I heard you say that, I don’t think I would have considered asking my podcast listeners to do it. I would have naturally gone to let me send it to my email list.

Let me put it on Instagram, but podcast listeners, I really do want to hear from you too. So no, that’s amazing and brilliant. And then just writing down the questions that people send you. I get inspired by what people ask me personally in the DMS. I also get inspired by being in like Facebook groups and seeing what someone’s asking about.

Like, for example, for my services, if someone’s asking about. Dubsado or choosing a CRM or how to automate this in a workflow or, you know, what you should include in a proposal. Like all of those kinds of things. When I see a question that I’m like, Oh, I could answer that. I have a little notebook sitting on my desk guys.

I scribble that question down and yes, I’m old school. Sometimes I write it and then I type it. I feel like if I do both, it sticks in my head a little better, but there’s inspiration guys for content everywhere. So don’t just aimlessly scroll on Instagram. Make it purposeful. If you see something that sparks inspiration for something that you could create content for, please take the time to write it down.

Make your Instagram scrolls, scrolls have purpose. Yeah. And I, the Facebook idea is so great, especially for those that are listening and are like, I don’t even have an audience. I don’t have anyone I can send a survey to go on to Facebook. What is it that you talk about? Is it Dove Sato? Just be honest. Go into a Facebook group that has your ideal client, whether it’s other business owners or moms or photographers, whatever it may be, go into a Facebook group that you’re already a part of and search in the search bar, Dubsado.

It’s that simple. And then you’ll get all these questions of, Oh, this person wants to know this thing about Dubsado. This person wants to know this thing about Dubsado. And that’ll give you content ideas for it. You can talk about until you really find your place and you start bringing in your people. So coming back to the, the entire, what I would call your, your content planning circle, like, cause we’ve already said there’s different bits.

There’s also the organization bit. If someone has never planned their content. What is the first thing that you recommend that they do? Amanda, if you’ve never planned content before, the first thing is to find those inspirations, those ideas, and just have a random list of here’s some things I could talk about.

Once you’ve got that done, then you want to sit down and you want to say, okay, what is my content Plan and the plan is simply where am I creating content for where am I posting and how often am I posting for each of those? You don’t need to know what your topics are yet. You don’t even know your call to actions.

Just when are you posting and where? Then you map all of that out in a big overview. I like to just use a simple, you know, month overview and say, okay, podcast, podcast, podcast, emails are going to go out these days, so on and so forth. Once you have that down, then you’ll say, okay, what is my goal? For this month.

What, where am I trying to lead people to? Is there a specific freebie that you’re really wanting to push people to? So you build that email list. Is there a certain topic you mentioned earlier? Some months you’re talking about Dubsado, some months you’re talking about email marketing. Is there a specific topic that you’re really talking about?

Once you know what you’re leading people to, then you’re going to put in your calls to actions. And that’s where you start. Every single piece of content, where are you leading them to? Don’t start with the topic, start with where you want them to go and then find topics that will help lead them to that place.

Because when you just talk about things all the time on Instagram and in your email and you never give them somewhere to go next, you are definitely missing an opportunity. Whether that’s to join your email list. To download this freebie to think about scheduling a call with you to discuss your services.

And I will admit, guys, I am 100 percent not the person to really chastise other people for not doing this because I will write entire emails. And then after I’ve sent it, I’m like, you know what? I probably should put a link to my course in that. And I totally didn’t do it. I’m much podcast because my podcast template.

Has the buttons already in there that say, you know, listen to the podcast on Apple, leave me a review. Here are the show notes. So there’s way more call to actions in my podcast emails than there are anything else. But on Instagram, I am definitely guilty of writing a fabulous piece of content. Like I thought about the, the information, the hashtags, the graphic is great.

And there is no damn call to action. So guys, when you guys see me doing that, please chastise me. Please be like, Hey, Coley, what’s your call to action? But even outside of that, even if you have calls to action, maybe you’re like, Oh, I know that that’s no brainer cause to action and everything. Is it a cohesive call to action?

Are you just like throwing spaghetti at the wall and saying, Oh, go to my freebie over here. That’s on this one subject. And then go to this. Podcast episode over here. And that’s not to say that everything has to be, you know, every single thing needs about the exact same thing, but you do want to have some sort of cohesive flow.

If you’re leading up to a launch of an offer, or you’re leading up to filling spots in your VIP days, you want to be leading people into your funnel. So that they’re ready to purchase the VIP day. When you’re actually talking about it, if you’re just randomly throwing out calls to action with no strategy in mind, it’s not going to do a whole lot for you.

No, you’re going to give your listeners and your readers whiplash. They’re not going to know what is more important. And I was actually listening to someone talking about auditing your website recently. And one of the things, one of the big tips that she gave was make sure that your call to actions make sense.

Make sure that your call to actions are leading somewhere, someone somewhere, and also make sure that you’ve kind of highlighted what is most important, because if you’re giving every single one of your call to actions, equal weight, people are going to have decision fatigue. They are not going to know where to go next.

And so, you know, really great content is going to lead them where you think it is most important for them to go. In the scheme of where your business goals are. Yes. We’re going to flip the script, Amanda, because when you were talking, I had to stop myself from interrupting you to be like, and how does this relate to Disney planning girl?

Cause like, like, I don’t think that I’ve ever heard you talk about your content planning services, like in relation to Disneyland. Disney world land, whichever one, but planning your Disney vacation, because I was thinking about it and like, think of your content pieces as like how to get on rides, how to plan your meals.

Like, if we think about it, this is going to be a blog post girl. If we think about how these things are related, planning your content is a lot like planning your Disney vacation. And so if you think about all the different pieces, you got to plan your transportation, your lodging, where you’re going to go for your rides.

I mean, all of this is how you should be planning the content for your business. Absolutely. And it’s really as simple as starting with the end in mind. Again, that’s the first thing I ask all of my clients for those that don’t know. I also second business as a Disney travel agent, Disney specialized travel agent.

Thank you. But the first thing I ask all of those clients is. What are your hopes for this vacation? So that I know when I’m planning how to make sure I’m putting all of the different pieces together, because there’s a lot of pieces, just like there’s a lot of content pieces, making sure I’m putting them all together so that we’re creating the best possible vacation for them, for their strategic vacation.

You could say, and a lot of times I’ll create a proposal of, you should go to this park on this day and this park on this day. And I’ll have clients come back and say, well, we really want to do this park on the 1st day, because it’s our favorite. And I have to go back and say, that’s fine. We can do that.

But remember what you told me that your ideal vacation was, and this is going to help make sure we’ve got that ideal vacation. It’s up to you to choose whichever you want to do, whichever means more to you. But we, we started with the end in mind so that we could put these pieces together in this way.

And now we need to gut check which one matters more. Let’s talk about that content planner. Tell me about your content planning services and tell me about your content planner. Yeah, so right now, as of recording, my one to one ongoing content planning services are actually full, but I do have a VIP day.

Thank you, thank you. I have a VIP day where if you’re looking for launch specific content strategy, I am your girl. I will help you plan out every single piece of content that you need in the 12 weeks. Of that launch runway. And we’ll map out exactly what you need and need to do for all of the different launch pieces, your visibility booster, which would be your, your big challenge that you’re putting on, or you’re right now, the limited time podcasts are the big thing, whatever it is that you’re going to do to really get visible beforehand, the freebie that you’re going to make sure you have that connects directly to that offer, all that stuff, we’ll make sure we map out all the pieces of the launch strategy in addition to the content as well.

So that’s that service, the content planner really got created last year because I needed something. I was at that point where it was like, okay, I’ve been printing out random, just monthly calendars for the last five years in business. And I have just, Written out, okay, this is what I’m talking about this day.

This is what I’m talking about this day. And I really wanted something that was going to go deeper because again, we’ve got to start with the end in mind. And I wanted something that was going to help me make sure that I was aligning my content, my strategy, my messaging to my actual goals. And so I created this planner that.

Every single month, it asks you all these questions related to what are your goals? Let’s let’s check in. What are your goals right now? How are we going to make sure we’re aligning our content with that messaging? There’s all these questions about things to think about for messaging because that’s always a struggle for me.

I can put basic content down, but then the, the cutesy little references like pop culture and things like that. It’s just a space for me to. Pause and think, okay, what’s happening right now? The spare book, the Megan and Harry documentary. How can I put those things into my content right now? Because it’s everywhere.

Miley Cyrus flowers, you know, like little things like that in pop culture. Okay. How can I put that in? What does my audience need to hear this month? What is an ongoing theme that happened? You know, just messaging things. And then there’s also the repurposing piece. And then you’ve got all the planning pages for the actual month itself.

And then there’s also reflection pages. So you can actually pause and say, did that work? This is what I did. Did it, did, did it actually do anything? Should I maybe so that you’re not just blindly putting out a new plan each month, which is the path that I had fallen into personally. And I’m probably still on.

Yeah. Well, yeah, it’s definitely. A work in progress where it’s like, okay, I created a plan and I executed it and now it’s gone. And I’m going to create the next one without even thinking about the last one that I created. So the whole planner is just full of things like that, where it’s how do I make sure that I’m being strategic with my content?

And aligning it with those goals and moving people towards those goals. And it really was just created because I needed it. And then I was like, well, We’ll put it out here and see if anyone else wants it. And I mean, you know, I never think of my podcast as like, come on here and just sell your products.

But I really did want Amanda to talk about it because guys, she just gave you like all the pieces that you should be thinking about, regardless if you’re doing it inside of a planner like that, or if you’re planning it in your project management, task management tools, like Asana, Trello, ClickUp. Wherever you are doing it, I think that the message that we’re getting from Amanda is that you have to be strategic and you have to be organized.

And that is what is going to lead to the most success in your content planning. I will say I have gotten really good at setting a goal, or at least. Centralizing my messaging for the month as a result of this podcast. So for example, Amanda is here and she’s talking about content planning. I already know two or three other guests that are going to talk about very similar topics that I am going to group together for one month of this podcast.

This podcast, this podcast is recording in January and I just did a month of like money episodes. Somebody talked about the recession. Somebody talked about money mindset. Someone talked about bookkeeping. As a result of putting this podcast together, I was like, okay, if I take the expertise of all of my guests, cause you guys know, I love having guest episodes and I group them together.

How can I give you guys maximum ability to take actions on what is airing on this podcast? Because I’m a guest. In the end, I want you guys to listen to the podcast. I want you guys to get all of the great tips that my, my guests are giving you, but I also want you to take action. And so if you take nothing else from Amanda today, it is that before you sit down to plan this content, you should have a goal in mind for your business.

And anytime you think and get inspiration, you should organize that somewhere that you can go back and reference for yourself. It will make your content planning just so much easier. And because Amanda’s here, I’m going to ask her, let’s talk about Disney. When are you going? I’m so excited. I go next week.

Oh my gosh. I’m so jealous. You know, I don’t think my next trip is until. July actually, which was, I know we were going to be going to Tokyo in March. And so that was going to be the next trip. We’re going to Tokyo Disney for two days while we were there. And we had to move that trip because of some work stuff for my husband.

So kind of a bummer. I don’t know if I’ll get down to Disney world again. I don’t know when I’m going to Disney world again, which is terrible because I really need to use my annual pass, but we’re going to Disneyland in July for my wife. So that’s my next trip. I’m so excited. So guys. Amanda is number one, an amazing content planner.

Number two, she is a Disney vacation planner. And number three, she is just an awesome human. So if they want to find you on the internet, Amanda, where should they go? Yeah, I’m Mrs. Amanda Warfield on Instagram and TikTok. And then the Disney business is magical escape vacations. Also both of those on Instagram and TikTok, probably the best way to connect with me.

I’m very active in my DM. Yeah. Amanda, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast. This was so inspirational for myself. I hope that all my listening audience feels the same and guys, that’s it for this episode. See you next time. Bye. Thank you so much.

Thank you so much for joining me here today, friend. You can find this episode show notes as well as all the resources you need to simplify your marketing over at amandawarfield. com. If you liked what you heard here today, be sure to subscribe to the podcast so that you never miss an episode. And if you could take a moment to leave a rating and review, it would truly mean the world to me.

Ratings and reviews are the number one way that you can support a podcast and ensure that it sticks around for many more episodes to come. I’ll see you next time. Now go out and uncomplicate your marketing and business.


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