Hey there, it's Samantha Hartley of the Profitable Joyful Consulting podcast. This season is about marketing and the series that I'm doing a three part series on content marketing. Last time I talked about strategy, today I'm going to talk about planning and next time in part three, I'm going to cover creation.

So content marketing planning, how do we decide what we're going to write about? Make videos about, write articles about, what are we going to share? We're using this strategy in part to build our brand and we want to teach people over time, over all of the content that we put out there, what they need to know about us, why they should know about us. We want to build an identity for them, just like you would build a mosaic one tile at a time. So I'm going to share with you a few ways that you can come up with what that content is so that you're building a cohesive brand.

The first example that I want to share with you, I was at a training with my friend Paul Evans, and he pulled out this tool, which is basically a ten by ten grid. So it's ten boxes across, ten boxes down, and then you fill the whole thing in. So it's basically you got a hundred little boxes on your page and into it you put just a single word, which has something to do with your topic. And he's teaching speech, writing for giving keynote speeches but you can totally do this for your content as well and I use this with my clients all the time. Now, I wanted to use it with his permission, so I went to him and I said, Paul, is it ok if I use that awesome content matrix you gave us? And he said, You mean the ten by ten grid, which is basically his way of saying it's a pretty simple tool. It's not like this complicated IP and what I would say is, listen, a simple tool is super valuable for helping you to get ideas out of your head and onto paper.

What I love about this tool and why I encourage you to make one you can do it in Excel or you can just do it on paper by just drawing out, you know, ten lines across and ten lines down these little boxes. When you put one word in them like that, the conciseness that you have to come up with to put in just one word, it's really a wonderful brainstorming exercise. So, you know, and my thing, I might write down one square that's consulting, one that's profitable, one that's joyful. All of the things that I've ever discussed on this podcast, you know, originally were little words in a box, visibility, networking, marketing strategy. You know, all these today, content marketing and this will be content marketing, planning. So every single box is like a topic that you could speak on. When people come to me and they're like, well, I want to make videos, but I don't know what my videos should be about. I will give them this assignment, I will say go make a content matrix for yourself.

So the further step that Paul takes with this is that once you have your whole grid filled out, he takes like colored markers and you put circles around them. You connect the boxes that are related to one another and you'll kind of see that you have themes. So I might have a whole set of themes which are basically marketing strategies. I might have things that are all about mindset and I might have things that are about, you know, the financial aspects of running a business. So once you have brainstormed something, a word into every box, then you can kind of organize them into sections and then you kind of start to see these are, you know, the broad topics that you can be speaking on and I think that is just an amazingly simple way to create what your content can be.

I'll give you a little secret. I keep my matrix handy. I mean, I have pages and pages of matrices by this time, but I like to keep it handy so that when an idea comes into my mind, I just jot down that one word about it and it really helps me, you know, maybe two words. It helps me to retain that idea as something that I can talk about or write about later. A content matrix is a super way to get a bunch of ideas out of your head onto paper so that you can then turn that into content. So I highly recommend that as a tool.

The next tool that you can use to create your content is a manifesto. Now, I'm very lukewarm about manifestos because for most people I probably don't want to read that but if someone adores your brand and they want to just take a deep dive into it, then a manifesto is great. I'm not necessarily saying you should share the manifesto, I'm saying create a manifesto for your business. And what this would include is like all of the truths that you hold to be self-evident right? It's your unique perspective.

Now, other people's manifesto about the exact same stuff is going to be completely different because these are the things that are like your unique points of view. So one of mine, for example, would certainly be work exclusively with perfect clients, some people are going to be like, listen, work with whoever shows up, money is money, I am all about working with perfect clients exclusively, so that would be one of the items on my manifesto. And if I have, let's say, ten truths, I hold to be self-evident, 10 things that I'm super passionate about and that are critical to my brand and my beliefs, then versions of those beliefs, versions of the themes of my manifesto are going to inform what my content is.

So for a lot of people, if the brainstorm is difficult this is a thing you can sit down and be like, this is what I'm passionate about, like this is what I believe, I firmly believe this, it's really easy to get to what you believe by looking at what you disagree with in others. So if there's somebody out there who is similar to you in what they do or what their brand is and you're like, they're wrong about this, super, write down what you believe instead. So getting to those and by the way, writing about what other people are wrong about that you believe is really great content because it sets you apart, it differentiates you from others, distinguishes you from others. So if others agree with that, let them go with that person but if others agree with you, let them stay with you.

So I just gave an example of that with a perfect client idea. You know, if people believe, listen, the more clients, the better I don't have a problem with clients, I'll take them all. Then there's other consultants that they can go with who will teach them how to do that, if they want to learn more about working exclusively with perfect clients. Those are my people right? So think about that as you are putting together the manifesto and then you can turn that into all kinds of content. If your manifesto is just two pages about what you deeply and firmly believe, that can be hundreds of articles, Meems, infographics, videos, PDF, you know, reports, worksheets, courses, all of your work basically emanates from this original piece right? And so I love the idea of using a manifesto as a content development device, content planning device, this is the stuff that I'm going to write about. And it's really a lot like a brand in this way, the brand is important for you to define what it is and also to say what it is not.

And I will often when I'm working with my clients on developing a brand, I'll often make sure that we identify some things that are off brand for them. So you would do this, but you would not do this, this is the thing that aligns with you, this is out of alignment with you and so make sure you always have those kind of things in mind.

And the last content planning method that I want to share with you is one a lot of my clients really love this one, it's I call it the 12 pillars when you're thinking about doing content and a lot of us will plan like, you know, it's a marketing plan, so it's for the year for 12 months. When I do this with my clients, what I'll say to them is, well we have 12 months so we can basically have a theme for each month, so if you had a book about what you do, what would the 12 chapters be?

And so you can easily theme, you know, as we talked about the marketing planning app, so you can easily theme it around, you know, things that have to do with each month, like, you know, New Year, New You in January and something to do with love in February and you know, taxes are April so that would be something financial. You know, you can do kind of seasonally related things but what I prefer to do is to say, if you had a book, what would each of the 12 chapters be on? And when I've done this with my clients, it's really helpful because it's kind of, you know, a chapter is a major thing and so what are the 12 major components of the things that you teach? And this one's a little, I think more difficult to get to than the previous methods that I shared with you, which is partially why share them? Because you want to go with the way that's most accessible to you.

But if you're thinking like, wow, I don't know, what if I did have a book or would I have a chapter on? So again, as we've talked about a lot of, this is the way that I've done my podcast, so I've talked about marketing, I've talked about visibility, I've talked about client delivery, working with clients mindset, you know, all of those components. So I would probably be able to easily chunk out my content in, you know, into 12 pieces as you look at yours. So let's say you're doing something in finance like what are the 12 aspects of finance that your clients need to know, if you're doing leadership development what are the 12 kind of components of leadership development that you could talk about? You know, the themes of your work.

So that can be really fun and when you do basically and again this is something we've done for my clients, we've planned out the 12, here is what the 12 topics are going to be, there's one per month. They don't have to be necessarily sequential, they can just be, you know, topics, we'll do a major blog post for each one, so more of an ultimate guide style of blog post for them for the entire month. And then we take that blog post and we break it into smaller pieces for their newsletter, and then we break it into even smaller pieces than that for their social media posts. They could, if they chose, record a video that kind of speaks to the larger thing but the video exists separately, by the way, it's much easier to record videos based on blog posts or based on articles because you have all your talking points there, so that's really easy. And then that's a whole month of content just like that, so, it starts with the decision, what will the chapter be. Then it becomes a long, epic blog post, then it becomes smaller newsletters because you're not going to send up 1500 word newsletter out, you want to send smaller chunks down articles, then it becomes social posts, you can do wonderful graphics or memes or pull quotes and all kinds of things like that in addition.

And what's nice is that big piece of content, that big chunk of original content is generating all the rest of it. So that's kind of the 12 chapters, 12 pillars concept and like I said, I get a lot of feedback that, that's really helpful to some of the consultants that I've worked with so I definitely wanted to share that one with you.

When you're planning your content, make sure that what you keep in mind is what things are my communicating to my audience so that by hearing this they are moved to take action and come work with me, they should learn by experiencing your content who you are why they need you, what problems you solve and things like that. And ideally, you want to build urgency so that they contact you today and not tomorrow, not specifically is going to be something we'll talk about in our next episode, making the content creation process easier and making it work for you so that you actually are generating leads from that content. We'll look at that next week and until then, I'm wishing you a profitable and joyful consulting business.