People often think that the end of the the journey is when they purchase, but that's almost the beginning because you want them to be your cheerleaders. You want them to refer you.
Intro:Bigger doesn't always mean better. Welcome to the 1 Person Business podcast where people who are flying solo in business come for specific tips and advice to find success as a company of 1. Here are your hosts, Joe Rando and Carly Ries.
Carly Ries:Welcome to the 1 Person Business podcast. I'm one of your hosts, Carly Ries.
Joe Rando:And I'm Joe Rando.
Carly Ries:And we're continuing with another topic within the planning phase of the Solopreneur Success Cycle series. And that is the planning phase of marketing. Marketing is a huge beast. So we're going to dedicate different episodes to individual types of marketing, beginning with content marketing today. Now, I'm specifically going to talk about planning and organizing your content marketing efforts and how to provide a framework to get it done.
Carly Ries:I'm not going to dive into the benefits of content marketing, types of content, etcetera, because we already have an awesome episode that talks about that with content expert JP Medved, which I'll link to in the show notes. Instead, we're going to walk through content mapping, content promotion calendars, helpful tools to stay organized, and all that jazz. As a solopreneur, your schedule can get pretty overwhelming. And even though this planning part of your content takes a little bit of time up front, it saves you tons of time in the long run and provides a lot of additional benefits. Planning, scheduling, and organizing your content marketing efforts gives you direction, helps you prevent panic mode of what content to work on next, helps you monitor your efforts and channels, and keeps track of the type of content your audience responds to, and what they don't.
Carly Ries:It also helps you figure out the sweet spot of your posting frequency and times. It allows you to identify inefficiencies you can't afford to have as a company of 1. Most importantly, it truly helps you stay focused, productive, and avoid distractions. Before you dive into the planning, I highly recommend that you listen to the content marketing episode I just referenced earlier with JP Medved. It'll take you through the things you need to do first when you dive into content marketing, including establishing goals and having a really good understanding of your audience, like their pain points, questions they have that you can answer, their intent when they go online, where they hang out online, and so on.
Carly Ries:You also want to make sure that you do research on your competition to see what type of content works for them, their posting schedule and all that. Now, don't plagiarize or copy what they're doing exactly. But you can learn from their wins and mistakes and apply them to your own content marketing efforts and make the content even better. Before we dive into the content calendar itself, I want to discuss content mapping with you. I'm just going to give you HubSpot's description because they can explain it so much more eloquently than I can.
Carly Ries:Content mapping is the process of creating the content plan that addresses buyers at different stages of the customer lifecycle. Each piece within a content map is designed to meet the needs of the buyer at a certain point in their journey.
Joe Rando:Quick question. When we talk about customer life cycle, can you just explain a little bit about what that means in terms of I mean, I know it's not complicated, but just like what it means?
Carly Ries:Yeah. Basically, when they first discover they have a problem or a symptom that you can solve, all the way to when they decide to buy from you, and then even beyond that, people often think that the end of the journey is when they purchase, but that's almost the beginning because you want them to be your cheerleaders. You want them to refer you. So then after they buy from you, you still have to nurture them and take care of them as your customers now,
Carly Ries:and then it turns into just a cycle. Does that does that make it more clear?
Joe Rando:Definitely. Thanks.
Carly Ries:Yeah, keep asking questions. I'm going to tell the audience to do the same. So even if you have one persona, content can be different based off the different phases they are in, if if that makes sense. Mapping the content will help you identify the gaps you have and which content needs to be created first.
Carly Ries:And like I just said, if you have any questions about content mapping or the customer journey, join our community of solopreneurs at community.lifestarr.com and send me a message directly. I'm happy to walk you through it.
Joe Rando:Carly's got a space in the ask an expert section, and she can answer any questions you have. So take advantage.
Carly Ries:Yep. Do it. And once you have the content you plan to develop, it's time to plan out the creation and publishing of it. And this is kind of the meat and potatoes of this episode. To do this, you need to create a content calendar.
Carly Ries:With this, there are a few things to keep in mind. As a solopreneur, start small. Until you have a feel for how long it takes you to develop content, don't bite off more than you can chew. Start with 1 piece of content per week, if that. You're managing all areas of your business, so pace yourself with the content if you are developing it yourself.
Carly Ries:Also, play to your strengths. If you're super savvy with social media, create social videos for your content. If you're good at writing, start with blog posts. Dab on content you're comfortable creating before expanding. If you want to create more content than 1 piece per week, consider developing content that can easily be repurposed.
Carly Ries:For example, you can record a long video, post on your website on YouTube, then take snippets of it and use it in social media promotions. Then you can also transcribe the video and turn it into a blog post, all without reinventing the wheel. It's really nice when you can pull that off.
Joe Rando:Hey, Carly. Quick question on that. This concept of doing 1 piece a week or whatever it is, 2 pieces a week. I was looking at a podcast the other day, and they I couldn't find any pattern to the release schedule. It was you know, there were a couple in February and then one in March and none in April and then one in May actually, 2 in May.
Joe Rando:Can you just talk a little bit about, you know, that versus kind of having a regular release time at this particular day and time?
Carly Ries:Yes. I'm so glad you asked that because consistency is key. And that's why I'm saying don't bite off more than you can chew. Figure out, like, what you're capable of and then go from there from a timing standpoint because you wanna be dependable to your audience. If you do a newsletter every Thursday, they know it's coming.
Carly Ries:But if you do one once every 6 weeks and then a month and then whatever, you're just not dependable. Same goes for social media, blogging, you just need to stay relevant, and it also helps with search engine optimization. Or getting found I mean, for people who are I always talk in marketing jargon. But for search engine optimization, it helps you get found in Google when people search for a related key term.
Joe Rando:Or Bing.
Carly Ries:Or Bing. Thanks, Joe, for throwing them a bone. So with all that in mind, you can develop your calendar. You can do this using Excel, software. Joe, I'm gonna make you cringe when I say this.
Carly Ries:Even sticky notes on a whiteboard. But I'm going to speak for a tone myself when I say we do not recommend that route. I'll link to a bunch of templates you can choose from in our show notes, so so no need to do it from scratch. Just go to our show notes, and you can click one there. For me, I like to create a 90 day plan.
Carly Ries:This is a manageable timeline and is far enough out that you have a plan in place, but not too far out that you can't react to industry trends or pivot if you need to. At the end of the month, assess what you are able to accomplish as well as you like, the initial results you got in, if you got any at that point. And then add a new month to the plan so you always have a rolling 90 day plan of attack. I also break down each month into 4 weeks to show what's due each week during the month. And at the end of each week, I color code, and maybe that's just me, but to show what I could actually do, what's in progress, what's canceled, and so on.
Carly Ries:I'll have a link to a similar template in the show notes so that you don't you still have a good reference along with the templates I I referenced earlier. Again, this is how you can tell if you're in over your head or can add more to your plate, so it's super important for solopreneurs. So what should you include in the calendar? This really can be specific to whatever helps keep you organized. But typically, what you'll see are the following columns, topic and title, what you're going to call it, like, for the public, not just you, type of content, whether that's a blog, video, infographic, webinar, you name it, due date, when you wanna have a draft done, publish date, when you wanna release it to the public, and who's responsible.
Carly Ries:You may find that you wanna hire out a contractor to help you with all this content, so just make sure you know who's doing what.
Joe Rando:Yeah. Carly, that's a great topic, though. There are contractors that do writing. I think there's some that do videos and podcast production and that kind of thing. Is there any place in particular people could look for those that you know off the top of your head, or can we put something in the show notes?
Carly Ries:We had definitely put something in the show notes. There are lots of places. You can hire a virtual assistant. We we actually work with a company that helps us out. We could recommend there's places like Elance.
Carly Ries:We just have to really be careful and vet who you're using. LinkedIn. I mean, there are so many places, but I'll include more in the show notes. But that's a great question.
Joe Rando:I did have a experience some years ago with a company that did wrote blog posts, and I they they asked if they could try you know, do a test run for free. And I gave him a great kind of seed, and I got back a regurgitation of our website. And it was the weirdest thing. So, yeah, definitely be careful because these guys did not get a second chance. It was so bad.
Carly Ries:Well, it's so funny. I think I because the last time I used one of those sites, it was Elance, and it's actually Upwork now. That's how long it's been. So yeah. But Upwork can be good.
Carly Ries:It's just you have to really make sure you know what you're looking for.
Joe Rando:Yeah. It's all about who you find. That's the thing.
Carly Ries:yeah. So once your content calendar is done, you need to create your promotion calendar. The way I set it up is I have the content calendar as the first half of the spreadsheet. And for the second tab, I include the promotion calendar, which is basically your plan to get the content you create in front of your audience. To save time, I highly recommend batching the promotional content, and just taking the time to plan it out for the month all at once.
Carly Ries:And then that way, you can schedule everything in advance. There are tons of platforms you can use to do this such as Buffer, HubSpot, Hootsuite, the list goes on. By doing this, you can post your case the rest of your time during the month on other things because as a solopreneur, you have lots of those.
Joe Rando:So you're saying, like, you set up all your tweets and LinkedIn posts and Facebook posts in advance and just say, send them out on this date at this time?
Carly Ries:Yep. Just batch it because then you can get it out of the way. The one thing I will say is you still wanna once they're live, you still wanna keep tabs on your social so you can interact with your audience. But from the initial post, it just takes so much off of your plate.
Joe Rando:That's so cool. Because you get in that mode, right, of kinda creating posts and and not be doing that every every day or something.
Carly Ries:Yeah. Absolutely. And in the promotion calendar, you can include things like newsletter content, and what most people use it for is social media promotion planning. Like with the content, start small. I'd recommend only focusing on one channel that your audience visits regularly to get started.
Carly Ries:And then once you've got that down and have time, expand other platforms if it makes sense. A promotional calendar will allow you to see what messaging resonates with your audience. It shows you the publishing days and times of work and so on. As you can see, these calendars are multipurpose. Types of columns in the promotional calendar may include the platform you're using, if you have more than 1, the copy you want to include, the type of content, whether it's video, just messaging, etcetera, the link.
Carly Ries:Now this may not be ready right away, but you'll want that link in there for reference later on, so it could be a quick reference. And then you also want character count because some of the social platforms have a cap, So you want to make sure that you're fitting it within the the parameters of that medium. And really, that's all it entails in a nutshell. The guidelines we provided today are simply that, guidelines. Figure out the columns, formatting, and information that will help you to best plan ahead, stay organized, and assess your efforts.
Carly Ries:As mentioned before, I'm happy to elaborate on any of this further if you simply join the community at community.lifestarr.com and send me a message. Joe, was all that pretty clear today?
Joe Rando:It's definitely clear, but I think having some material in the show notes is gonna help the spreadsheet and things. there's a lot to this and it's not the kind of thing that you're gonna listen to once and just have a complete understanding of, but going through it and using it, I mean, you know, I'm not a marketing person. I didn't miss my calling, but I see what you do, Carly, and it's like, oh, this is such a good idea to do this this way instead of waking up and going, I'm gonna send out a tweet today about whatever. You know? So, yeah, I think it's great.
Joe Rando:I think you've pointed people in the right direction and then use the materials in the show notes and contact us if you want on the community and, you're gonna be a lot better off than than just, kinda winging it as I would have done, you know, in in my approach to this stuff.
Carly Ries:Absolutely. But with that, I think that's it for now. We'll be back next week with another interview and another focus on the Solopreneur Success Cycle. And as always, be sure to listen to past episodes and subscribe to the show by visiting lifestarr.com/podcast, or you can find us anywhere you listen to your shows. We'll see you next time.
Carly Ries:You may be going solo in business, but that doesn't mean you're alone. In fact, millions of people are in your shoes, running a one person business and figuring it out as they go. So why not connect with them and learn from each other's successes and failures? At Lifestarr, we're creating a one person business community where you can go to meet and get advice from other solopreneurs. Be sure to join in on the conversations at community.lifestarr.com