A lot of people ask how we’re using allthings to manage content, and I think I’ve got a good example to show you exactly how it works, or how we use it, and I’ll take you through that step by step.
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- How do you manage your content schedule and plan?
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Full Video Transcription
Hi there, this is just a quick video where I want to show you how you use allthings. A lot of people ask how we’re using allthings to manage content, and I think I’ve got a good example to show you exactly how it works, or how we use it, and I’ll take you through that step by step.
I’ll try and keep this to five minutes at the very most and show you exactly how I do it.
Within Learning Everyday we’ve got a lot of things happening in the background around our content and how we manage it, and a lot of it is recurring tasks, so I want to show you how we keep a tab on that.
At the moment, this list here is called Content Scheduling Tasks, and that’s shared with Hannah and myself, so Hannah does a lot of the research and planning behind the content and I’m involved in the publishing and getting the final say on some of the content as well. There are a lot of other things involved in this as well. So this is a single list within allthings, shared with two people.
I’m not going to show you a client list because some of the client stuff we’re doing is a little bit more complicated and has a bit more process behind it, but this is basically how we’re keeping a tab on it at the moment. Hannah and I use this one list and we can communicate in using this list as well. If you’re not familiar with allthings, I’ll try and explain everything as I’m going along, but if you’ve already got an idea of how allthings works, then that will probably be helpful at this time.
What we’ve done here is you can see we’ve got it stacked horizontally by different type of contact, so we’ve got Masterclass, the Content Marketing Academy Facebook group, email, Content Marketing Academy article, Learning Everyday article, social media, video, podcast, content strategy, website, and that’s called a list. In allthings what you can do is click on this ‘i’ here which takes you round to the back and you go into custom fields. What you can do is create a custom list, which we’ve called content type. In here we’ve got all these custom lists.
What we can then do is stack that by content type, and that gives me all different types of content stacked horizontally, which is handy.
I’m going to take you through piece by piece what we do and break it down for you. Every week I post a Masterclass Facebook group post into that group page and put a new video onto the Masterclass TV episode as well. On the more public Facebook group we have our Wednesday Welcome and Pay it Forward Friday, and Hannah’s going to look after that, but every time she ticks off these blue recurrent tasks, another one will appear to remind us to do it next week. If I’ve got something I want to do specifically in here I can leave comments for Hannah e.g. check who has joined the group since last week.
We’ve got our content marketing companion which is one of our more lead content pieces, so it’s a weekly email. Hannah prepares that before the end of the week, sends me her notes and I help to put that into MailChimp. That’s a two man job, the preparation and then publication, and you’ll see that a lot, so that I can be reminded that things need to be published.
We’ve got a weekly blog article that goes out on a Sunday, and that’s usually me that does that, but we also have our Chris Marr’s Business Toolbox, so every Friday we publish an article about an app or a piece of software that we’re using that helps us in our business and we want to show people what it can do. The preparation is done by Hannah then the publication is done by me.
Through the week Hannah will Buffer lots of different articles for our social media and then on a Friday it reminds me to go in there and check Buffer to make sure that all our contributions are submitted, and I’ve double checked that the content we’re putting out on our social channels in the next week is okay. It’s a small thing, but again it just reminds us it needs to be done.
We’ve got the podcast that needs to be recorded and published and I do all of that, recording midweek, sending it away to get edited, it comes back, I publish it and do the shownotes, but if I was delegating that task out I would perhaps want to have lots of sub things in here, similar to the preparation for Chris Marr’s Business Toolbox. You’ll see there’s research, draft content, Chris to proof draft. What you’ll see is Hannah ticking off these and then me jumping in and ticking off the things that I’ve done as well, until that task is complete.
I’ve got an article for Ali Booth that I do every other month, I’ve got an allthings article I want to do this week and I’ve probably got some ideas for other articles as well that I drop in here every now and again when a thought comes to mind, and that’s it, really, that’s how we do it, so it’s custom lists stacked horizontally, using recurring tasks with a shared list. It’s as simple as that. What happens is that every time we come up with a new idea or a piece of content that we want to do, we build it into our process to make sure that it happens. As we delegate, as we grow, we’ve got a system and a process of communication, and making sure that we stay on top of our content.
I hope that helps you and gives you some insight into how you can use allthings to plan your content. It’s much better than a spreadsheet.
Don’t forget to be awesome.
Chris.
