If you fell off the bandwagon of sticking to your New Year's Resolution to become a content creator, you’re not too late.
Fall is the best time of year to get started, so I want to walk you through my step-by-step process for planning out the next four months of content. This process is the same one I've used to grow my brand, Modern Millie — it's helped me achieve over 350K subscribers on my YouTube channel, and over 140K followers on Instagram.
Whether you‘re a content creator or enterprise marketer, I have no doubt you’ll find something in this process that will work for you. Let's jump in.
Why is the fall the best time of year to start creating?
There are two major reasons the fall (primarily September through November) is one of the best times of the year to create content:
- During the summer, the sun is out longer, people go on vacation, and kids aren’t in school so you’ll often see a dip in engagement on social media since people are outdoors more.
Going into the fall season, it starts to get darker sooner, people fall back into their routines, and they get back into consuming social media. - You’re able to use the holidays to your advantage.
Here’s Stephanie, as an example.
Last year, Stephanie was getting ready to give up on being a content creator, but instead through my coaching, she worked on this four-month content strategy. From September through December, this is what happened:
- She posted 61 Reels (one video every other day)
- 16 of them got over 100,000 views
- 7 of them hit over 1,000,000 views
- Her most watched video received 36,000,000 views and landed her on Good Morning America
- She grew from 8K to 75K followers
Now that you can see the power of increasing your content creation efforts in the fall, let’s jump into my process.
Step One: Pick Your Platform
While the example I used talked about Instagram, this strategy can work for any of the three social platforms: Instagram, YouTube and TikTok.
Pick one to start with at the beginning of your growth journey. This way you can put 100% energy into mastering the platform, as opposed to 33% energy into Instagram, 33% into YouTube, and 33% into TikTok (that would get you slower results).
Step Two: Pick Your Posting Frequency
This is going to be a schedule that you know you can realistically keep up with for the next three to four months. It has to be realistic for you, and something you can adapt into your current lifestyle. These are common frequencies that we see online:
➡️ YouTube: Once a week
➡️ Instagram: 3-5x per week
➡️ TikTok: Daily
Once you know how often you want to post, plug that into a calendar to see how many videos total you will be creating each month (see image for example). This is a number we will come back to in step 4.
Step Three: Get Clear On What Your Content Should Be
If your goal is growth or rapid growth online, it’s important to be intentional with every piece of content you create. Most businesses or creators will skip this step but it’s so critical to get clear on your vision, so that your content can be clear, as well.
To start, answer these three questions:
- What industry are you in?
- What section of that industry are you going to focus on?
- Who do you want to reach/who is your target audience?
Example:
What Industry are you in? Travel
What section of that industry are you going to focus on? San Diego Travel
Who do you want to reach/who is your target audience? San Diego Travel for Tourists
Knowing the answer to these questions will help you with our next step …
Step Four: Content Research
Before you even press record, you’ll want to do some research in your industry to see what people are currently looking for. The places I recommend to my students to do this research are these search engines:
- YouTube
- AnswerThePublic.com
- TikTok
What you’re going to do is type your industry or industry type into the search bar to see what results are suggested below.
Following our example from step three, as you can see in this screenshot from YouTube, people are searching for “San Diego Things To Do”, so I’m going to write that down as a video idea.
Same thing on TikTok. When I type in San Diego, some video ideas I can write down are “San Diego things to do”, “San Diego hidden gems”, and “San Diego food spots”:
You can repeat these steps by typing other words that have to do with your industry. For example, since my goal is to create “San Diego Travel for Tourists‘’ content, maybe I’ll type “tourists” into the search engine to see what's recommended.
Once you have a list of video ideas, you’re ready for step five.
Step Five: Plug Into Your Calendar and Start Creating
In step two, you calculated how many videos you would need to create in a month.
For our example, it was 14 videos/month.
I like to mix up my content so that there is room for spontaneity.
70% of my videos will be “search-based” video ideas (ie. the list of video ideas we created utilizing search engines).
But for the other 30%, I will leave room to adapt to trends or even make videos just for fun!
So if you post 14 videos/month maybe your breakdown will look like this:
- 10 search-based videos (these are easy to batch film ahead of time so you can plan content in advance).
- Four spontaneous videos (this leaves room for creative freedom and spontaneity).
And that's all there is to it. Now, it's time to start your content research and begin your four-month content plan. And remember: You'll want to iterate as you go. Once you begin identifying which types of content perform well (and which don't), you'll get better at choosing the specific topics best-suited for your brand over time.
