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So when I talk about content scramble, I'm talking about when you don't have any content planned for the week or the month or when it's the day before, you realize you're supposed to have something go live, but you don't have anything ready or you're scrambling to figure out what it is you're going to post, or maybe you can't even decide because there is no plan for the month anyway. If that sounds familiar, grab your favorite beverage and tune in, because we're going to chat about how I attract my content workflow and what steps you should take to get yours done.

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Welcome to Coffee Powered Systems, equipping women with actionable steps to overcome, overwhelm and streamline business and life. So grab your favorite drink and come hang out with me. I'm your host, Miranda Merten. Welcome back to Coffee Powered Systems, I'm Miranda, and today we're going to talk about your content creation workflow. I'm really familiar with that content scramble. Raise your hand if you know what I'm talking about. Of course, I can't see you, but raise your hand anyway.

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I'm by no means perfect. I don't have content coming out all the time and I'm working at getting better at that. But I do know what my problem is. It's that I'm too busy working on everybody else's stuff. I'm really good at planning the content. But by the time it's time to create the content, I'm tired and then I go ahead and push it out. It can wait till next week. It'll wait again a few more days.

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But if you have the time and the means to plan, here is the process that I use. So feel free to pull bits and pieces of what works for you and create your own personalized system, because when it's personal to you, that's when it's going to work best. So I'm going to break down the five Ts and at the end I'll quickly walk through all of the T's and how they relate to my business. Before you start any of this, I want you to make sure you have a call to action at the end of your funnel.

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Basically, what do you want people to do? Do you want them to sign up for your list so you can promote them later after their warm lead? Do you want them to sign up for your free challenge? Whatever you have, think about your end game, because that's going to affect how you promote and it'll help coax people in a certain direction. If you don't have that figured out yet, go ahead and lay out all of your offers, whether they're free, paid or otherwise that you currently have, and then decide what your promotional focus is going to be.

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OK, so let's talk about the five Ts team, theme, things, time and tools. Your team know who you'll be working with and know what parts of your content workflow that they will be working on. If you work alone, then all the content parts are going to fall on you. But if you have a few contractors like a graphic designer or video editor, then they will do those parts and then you're going to handle the rest. If you have a full team, then each person will have their own part.

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But make sure that the roles are defined before you get started and refer to job descriptions. If you need help figuring out who's going to do what once you have all of the players defined, then determine which tasks will be delegated to each person. You can also create an S.O.P that defines everyone's roles so that there's no confusion. And that's also going to help when you hire new people, new team members, you can basically just hand over your SOPs, hand over the job descriptions, and they can pretty much slot themselves in to exactly which part that that you have laid out for them.

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So within your content workflow, if it says content manager does this, then your content manager can come in and say, hey, that's me, and they can know exactly where they are. Your theme is the next team to keep it simple. I plan by the month and I have a general theme. Sometimes things come up during the month that might not fit with the theme that I'm working with, and that's totally OK. Life happens. So there might be some current events you want to include or swap out into your content.

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Like if something big is going on in the news and you don't want to seem insensitive by skipping over it. If it's something you definitely think you want to talk about, you can go ahead and pull that into your content, either add it as another element or swap something out that was already planned. And when I talk about themes, what I mean is just having a big overall arching content for the month. So, for example, if it was springtime in my business, I might talk about organizing and purging your systems.

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So most of the content I put out that month will be around that specific topic. So what I want you to do for this section is brainstorm themes for your industry and come up with about six to twelve of them. If you come up with twelve or more, then you won't have to repeat your themes over the course of the year. But it's OK if you only end up having about six of them and you end up repeating a theme during the year.

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So for my industry, I would be OK using a theme of like goals or planning twice, because we always do it at the beginning of the year and then I could even slot it into midyear as a revisit your goals theme. The next is your things. Once you have your theme, decide what types of content you want to put out, how often and on what platforms. Content could include podcasts, video, blog, emails, infographics, ebook, anything that basically is how you want to get information to your people.

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My content, for example, is in the form of this podcast and blog posts, and then I break those up and send those out to my email list and social media. Now, when it comes to the platforms that you want to post on don't start with more than one platform or you're going to get overwhelmed and you won't keep your pace up. Yes, trust me on this. I am talking from experience. So if you are adamant about using more than one platform, you feel like you need to be in more places.

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You feel like you need to be Gary Vee. OK, first of all, I don't expect anyone to be Gary Vee right out the gate. You shouldn't be Gary. He's on every single platform. His team tries everything. He's got like 40 people on his team. So of course they can slice and dice all his content and blast it everywhere. If it's just you if you're a small team or if you're just starting out with a new content workflow, dip your toes in the water.

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Start with one. If you want to go up to a second one, I would recommend doing having your second one. Just be more about getting the information out there and just being available. So if you want to use Pinterest and have someone create graphics and you put all of your graphics out to promote your content each week, that's one that's a really good one because you don't actually have to touch that and be social, quote unquote, and following up with people on that platform.

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Or, for instance, if you're on Twitter, but you're not really active, Twitter's a good place to, you know, link, share. You can put some graphics on there with the links that go back to your content and maybe check in a couple times during the week just in case anyone comments on your stuff and you want to respond to the comments. So it keeps you top of mind, but it's not really a whole nother platform that you have to be in there like Facebook or Instagram.

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You really have to be active on certain platforms to make it worth your while. The next is your time. Create a weekly timeline for when everything will be done. So since you're creating a weekly workflow, you're going to want to systematize this and make it consistent. For example, you write your post on if you're doing blog posts, you're going to write your blog post on X Day and then everything is going to be uploaded and repurposed within three days of your writing that ideally you're going to break these down and make it a little more specific than that than just saying, OK, three days from now we're going to have this done.

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But be realistic. If you know that you typically need two to three days to sit down with your draft and edit, don't put in your timeline that your final draft needs to be uploaded by the next day. Make sure to include when you will create your graphics or audio clips. Be really specific here. And lastly, your tools. How are you going to keep track of everything? I track my workflows with Coda. If you want to know more about Coda, you can visit Mirandamerten.com/coda.

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But there are many more things that you can use. You can keep it as simple as Google Docs or you can use the content manager like Monday Dotcom. I've reviewed a number of project management tools on this podcast, so if you want to just scroll through the tip Tuesday episodes and find specific tools that you might be interested in, you can go to Mirandamerten.com/tips. And that will take you to just the tip Tuesday playlist. So that's everything that comes on Tuesdays.

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And it's just like the five or ten minute episodes that I put out on tools that you can use in your business. Once you've chosen your tool based on how you work, you want to build your content strategy within that tool. So everything that we just talked about, this includes adding your team members. You can use your themes as categories, add your due dates. Basically everything would be dropped into your project management tool. So I told you that I would quickly walk you through what I do.

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Like I said, I use Coda to keep my pages, spreadsheets and editorial calendar in there, which breaks down each of my themes. Each podcast, episode, blog, post and email has its own page and I'm still pretty much a one person show. So outside of a few things that I outsource, like some graphics and some editing, I do most of the roles myself. So the first piece of content I create is the Friday podcast episode, which would be this one.

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I have to prep and research it. So I do the outline before I record and that goes on the single episode page inside of Coda. I have a huge checklist that's duplicated on each of those pages and I just basically go through the checklist to make sure that I don't forget anything and I'm not going. Oh yeah, I need to upload it here. Oh, I close out the graphic already, but I needed to download it and put it here.

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If you have a checklist you can quickly just boom, boom, boom, go through each one so you know what's coming and you don't forget anything. If you are interested in my checklist or my Coda pages, DM me and I'll send you my Coda templates, so. If I've already done the research for the upcoming Tuesday episode, I'll go ahead and do that one as well and record them at the same time. Ideally, I want to start batching these more so that I'll have more episodes in the can.

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But for now, I'm only about a week to a week and a half out. Hopefully I'll get on more of a rhythm and get more time to set aside and patch these a little bit longer so that I can have a full on match day right now outside of the weekends. There's not really a day that I can set aside to have a recording day. So then I turn the Friday episode into a blog post using the transcript and the blog post will be published the following week.

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This is a new step, so I'm playing around with it. I don't just do the transcript verbatim, though. I'll take the transcript, put it on the blog post, and then I'll go through it and fine tune and add more pieces to it. So the transcript is really just the bones and it gives me a starting point and it gives me ideas to add to it. And then I don't have to start writing just from scratch. So using that system, I can make a long form blog post and then I can add headings, I can add more topics, I can do more step by step into that blog post.

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If I have a CTA or a call to action that works well with the topic for the week, I make sure to include that in the show notes and in the blog post. So we always want our people to do something right. We want them to follow us. We want them to go back to something. We want to give them something to download so they can stick with us and ultimately, hopefully end up on our list so that we can talk to them later.

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I also just started recording video with some of my podcasts. So if I choose to use the video, I'll post that video on YouTube and in TV. Then I will pull a snippet or two while I'm editing for a headliner clip and headliner is creates those little audio clips that you'll see on on social media. So I'll use those inside stories. And of course, then I will create graphics to go along with everything. So lastly, I will save everything that I've created into folders that I have labeled in my Amazon s three account.

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And I may or may not use everything for that week, but I'll have it. I can repurpose it later if I don't use it. And I always know exactly where everything is. The folders are labeled. I have a top level folder for the podcast, then I have twenty twenty one. I had twenty twenty four last year and then I have the episode number and title, just a short title. I don't put the entire title because sometimes the titles change throughout my editing process.

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So like for last week I did an episode on to do list so I would just put fifty nine to do list and I know by looking at it exactly what that episode is going to be. So I drop everything into that folder, all of my audio clips, video clips, those will go in there and then I make a sub folder of that called graphics and I'll throw any graphic that I've created will go in there as well. So that is a bird's eye.

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Look at my workflow. It's a lot of work. So once I analyze how this new workflow is going and what's working well, what's taking me too much time, then I'll look at expanding my team, deciding what to keep, what to let go of. And I'll start with an assistant that sounds so good. And that's it. Those are your five Ts of content creation workflow. So your action this week is to sit down and take a look at your current workflow.

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Do you have one? Go ahead and evaluate it, tweak it, make sure that you have all of the parts and use the five t plan to formulate your own plan. You can take bits and pieces of it or use the whole thing and then tag me on Instagram at Miranda Merten and show me what you're working on. That's all I have for you today. I'll see you next time. Thanks for listening to Coffee Powered Systems. You can find links to everything mentioned in the episode.

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Down in the show. Notes are on the website at mirandamerten.com. If you enjoyed this episode right and review it in iTunes or where you enjoy listening so others can find it too. And join me here next time.