The Savvy Seller with Kristen Doyle

135. Content Planning That Actually Works & Attracts Your Perfect Audience

• Kristen Doyle, TPT seller, SEO coach, and web designer

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It’s time to create content and you find yourself staring at a blank screen completely stuck on what to say (again). Sound familiar? We’ve all been there, but the good news is, I’ve got tips to help you stop scrambling for ideas at the last minute.

In this episode, I’m sharing a simple, strategic content planning framework that will help you create content that not only attracts your ideal audience but also makes it easier to stay consistent. Because let’s be honest - when you don’t have a plan, content creation takes way more time and energy than it should! We’ll talk about why a lack of content planning keeps you stuck in a cycle of procrastination and how to break free from it.

I’ll also walk you through a step-by-step process to audit your existing content, identify gaps, and use AI tools to categorize your topics. Plus, I’m sharing my favorite keyword research strategies so you can make sure your content is actually being found by the right people. You’ll walk away with a clear action plan to organize your content ideas, map out your next month of content, and repurpose across multiple platforms. 

02:10 - What happens when we don’t have a content plan

04:35 - How to approach content planning strategically (and how AI can help!)

08:31 -  A simple way to do basic keyword research

09:52 - Important organizational details of content planning: where to keep your plan, what to include, etc.

12:37 - The secret to keeping content planning and creation sustainable and your action steps for getting started this week

Links & Resources:

Show Notes: https://kristendoyle.co/episode135 

Tired of constantly hustling to sell your digital products? Check out my free 19-minute training where I show you how to turn all those products you already have into a profitable, automated business. 

 

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Check out my Everything Page at https://kristendoyle.co/everything

Kristen Doyle:

Hey, there. Have you ever sat down to write a blog post or record a podcast episode and just stared at a blank screen? You know you need to create content, but you have no idea what to talk about. I see it all the time. We know we should be putting out content regularly, but we get stuck in that cycle of procrastination because we don't have a plan. Today, we're going to fix that. I am sharing a simple content planning framework that will help you create content that actually attracts your ideal buyers, and, more importantly, makes it so much easier for you to show up consistently with content that serves your audience. Are you a digital product or course creator, selling on platforms like teachers pay teachers, Etsy or your own website? Ready to grow your business, but not into the kind of constant hustle that leads straight to burnout? Then you're in the right place. Welcome to The Savvy Seller. I'm Kristen Doyle, and I'm here to give you no fluff, tools and strategies that move the needle for your business without burning you out in the process. Things like SEO, no stress marketing, email list building, automation, and so much more. Let's get started y'all. You know what I hear from clients all the time. They say, I don't have time to plan content. I barely have time to create it. And believe me, I get it. Adding one more thing to my to do list feels impossible, too. But here's the thing, not having a plan is exactly why content creation takes you so much time. When you sit down to create and you're also trying to figure out what to create, it's like trying to plan a road trip when you're already in the car. You're gonna end up wasting a lot of time, taking some wrong turns, getting lost, maybe you never end up where you wanted to go. So let's talk about what happens when we don't have a content plan. I've definitely been guilty of this myself, so don't feel bad if this picture I'm painting feels a little too You know you need to get a blog post out. So you sit down at familiar. your computer and try to come up with an idea, and crickets. Your mind is blank. You spend the next hour trying to come up with something to talk about, maybe scrolling social media for inspiration, and before you know it, your content creation time is gone, and you actually haven't created anything at all. I have been there. I promise. In fact, I would say 95% of the times that I am recording this podcast at the very last second before it's due to my editor, it's because I had run out of episodes on my content plan, so I didn't know what to record, and I kept putting it off. It's one of those repeating cycles that leads to a couple of big problems. First of all, it takes forever to actually create anything, because you're starting from scratch every time, and you also end up creating random content that might not really serve your business goals. Here's another thing that happens when we don't plan we get stuck talking about the same thing over and over. Take this podcast, for example. If you look at my recent episodes, we have covered everything from taking leave from your business to email marketing to website trends and security. It might look random, but it's not. It's actually strategically planned to serve different listeners who are in different parts of your business journey. When you're only focused on one topic, you miss out on opportunities to attract new ideal customers, new audiences who have different needs. Your audience really needs different types of content at different stages and in different seasons of their lives. And here's where a whole lot of people get stuck. A lot of people create content just for the people who are already following them. It's kind of like fishing in the same little bitty pond over and over, instead of casting a wider net in different places. The problem is, your business can't grow if you're only talking to people who already bought from you. So let's talk about how to fix this. Content planning doesn't have to be complicated, but it does need to be strategic. First, I want you to take a look at what you have already created. Now this is a spot where technology can make our lives a whole lot easier. I love using AI tools to help analyze content, brainstorm and find gaps. So what I want you to do is open up your favorite AI. Tool I use Claude personally, but chat GPT works great for this too. Start by feeding it some background information on your business. If this is for a YouTube or a podcast, then tell it about your show, who is your target audience and what do you sell? And if you don't have that information handy, then you can usually share your homepage or your podcast page or YouTube channel and ask your AI tool to find that information for itself. Once it does, save it in a Google Doc or somewhere else that you'll be able to access it quickly when you need it in the future. Then ask your AI tool to categorize your existing content into a handful of main topics. I would give it a limit, something like three to six. Now, in order to do this, you will probably need to copy paste your content into the AI tool, because usually they can't crawl multiple pages. They might be able to crawl a single page, but if your content goes across multiple pages in your archives, they may not be able to do that. So feed it your host or podcast titles and ask it to categorize them. For me, when I did this with my podcast, I went to the Apple podcast page because I knew I could expand it out and get it to show all of my episodes on one screen. And then I highlighted the episode titles. It may have picked up the published date as well, but it also picked up the first part of the episode description, which gave Claude a little more information about what that episode was about. You can do something similar by highlighting your blog post titles, maybe the beginnings excerpts of those in your blog archives as well, but you'll have to do it one page at a time. So feed that content into your AI tool and ask it to put them into categories. Then ask your AI tool to identify where you have gaps in your content and any other main topics or categories that you should be creating content for to build your ideal audience for your products and services that you sell. A lot of times, what you'll find when you're doing this is that you have a ton of content around one topic, but maybe you have some other topics that aren't as fleshed out, or some gaps, some spaces where you really should talk about a certain category, but you haven't done that yet. When I did this with my podcast, I found six main content hubs that I decided to use as my primary podcast categories. Here's how you can tell if you pick the right categories. Ask yourself three questions. First, do they lead to your products or your services? For example, I have a website wizardry category that just naturally leads into my web design and maintenance services. Are they topics your ideal audience is interested in? Are they relevant to your audience and helpful? And then third, are these topics that you want to be known for? Because sometimes there might be things our audience is interested in that aren't what we want to be known for, and it is okay to reject those ideas and use the ones that you do want to talk about. At the end of the day, you're going to have to create a lot of content about these topics. So if it's not something you're interested in or passionate about, don't do it. Once you know those main topics, now it's time to go and do some keyword research. Before you create anything, you need to know what your target audience is actually looking for so that you're creating the right content to attract them. Now, I know keyword research might sound daunting or intimidating, let me show you just a simple way to do some basic keyword research. I would recommend that you use Uber Suggest, type in one of your topics and see what comes up. As you find things that are interesting, click on those results to get more details and more results like them. Now, Uber Suggest is my favorite one to recommend, because they have a lifetime plan. In fact, if you reject the first lifetime plan, you can usually get an offer for a $97 lifetime plan that I really recommend you go ahead and get. But if you need a free keyword research option, you can also use Google Keyword Planner. What's important here is that you are not just looking for the highest search volume numbers. It really is about finding the terms that fit your content well and you have potential to rank for. It's a whole lot more important that you optimize for a term you have potential to rank for than just a term with tons of search traffic that maybe you're never going to rank for. So pay attention to the search volume, but also the search difficulty. All right, let's get into the actual nuts and bolts of where to keep your content plan. Now, personally, I use notion for my content planning. I love Notion. I love creating things there, especially when it comes to planning out content, having to do lists, adding in my podcast outlines, but honestly, a simple spreadsheet can work just as well if that's all that you need. The main things you want to include in your content plan are your published date for that piece of content, a working title, what you think you might call it. Sometimes, my working title is not even remotely the same as the actual episode or blog post title that I'm going to create, but it's enough to give me the right direction when I get started. So for example, the working title for this episode in my content plan in Notion is just Creating Content That Attracts Your Ideal Buyers. I don't know what the title of this episode is going to be yet, but I guarantee you that's not what it is. But it gave me enough information to be able to plan out this episode and then I figure out the title for it afterward. So make sure you put in a working title, and then give yourself space to make content notes. might talk about in this episode or what you might write about in your podcast. Leave yourself a space to write those notes out, and it's okay if not every piece of content in your plan has notes, but as things come to mind, you want to drop it in there so you don't forget later. Make sure you also give yourself a spot to list out keywords, especially if you did your keyword research while you created your content plan. That way, you don't have to redo the keyword research once you start writing the content. And most importantly, make sure you've got a column for status tracking. This can be as simple as to do, in progress, done. Or you can do something more specific to your content and your process. My podcast, content plan statuses, for example, are needs outline, because that's the first thing I need to do. So if they are in to do status, it needs an outline then ready to record and then submitted. The key really is picking a platform and a layout that you're actually going to use and setting it up to work with your own systems and processes. So while I use notion you might like Google Sheets or Air Table, or maybe you have a different project management tool that you use, like ClickUp or Monday. Wherever you create it is fine, as long as you have those main things included in a way that you can track them and plan them out ahead of time. Now let's talk a little bit about keeping this sustainable. Keep in mind the goal here is to have something that actually helps you create content consistently. So let's talk about how often you really need to publish content. I know you've probably heard you need to publish blog posts once a week, or twice a week. My podcast goes out every Tuesday, so I am publishing once a week. But I would argue that quality is always more important than quantity. So if you are not able to maintain whatever schedule you have in mind, then you might need to back off a little bit. Here's what I've learned about staying sustainable when it comes to creating content. If I try to push myself to create content more often than I can do comfortably, what will eventually end up happening is I will start putting out content I'm not proud of. I will start feeling burnt out from working too much, stressed out because I'm not meeting deadlines, and I maybe even give up for a little while or decide I have to take a break from putting out any content at all because I have overdone it. So keep in mind that quality is what is most important, and whatever schedule you set for yourself, just try to stay consistent with that schedule, whether it's once a week, twice a week, or maybe even just once a month. Another important piece of that sustainability is that you remember you can always repurpose content. Your podcast episodes can become videos or blog posts or vice versa. I would recommend that you start by creating the type of content you enjoy making the most and then repurpose that content for other platforms later. You can even use AI tools to help you with that repurposing. For me, I would absolutely start with podcast episodes and then go from there, but maybe you want to start by writing the blog post and then turning it into a podcast episode or a video. You can also pull quotes from that long content, like podcast videos, blog posts, you can pull quotes from those to use in social media posts, whether it is a text quote or maybe even a video or audio clip you're going to use. When it comes to your email marketing, you should be emailing your list when you have new content out, so probably at least one of your weekly emails that goes out should let people know about your new content and direct them to it. That takes one content idea for your weekly emails off your to do list, because it's created for you based on your content plan. The key really is making all the different types of content you create work together without having to create totally new stuff for every platform that you're on. All right, let's talk action steps. Here is what I want you to work on this week. First., let's do a quick content audit so you can see what you are working with. Use your favorite AI tool to analyze the content you already have, find the content categories you've been creating for and where you might need to create some new ones. Try not to overthink this part. Just let it be a guide as you're getting started. None of this is set in stone, not even your content plan. You can always change things down the road. Next, figure out where you're going to keep your content plan. My recommendation is you use a tool that you are already using on a regular basis. Like I shared, for me, that's Notion. But if you've never touched Notion, don't set up a brand new account just to do a content plan. Use whatever tools you already have that allow you to do something that resembles a spreadsheet. Keep in mind that that content plan does not need to be fancy. You just need to have the basics in there, the title, the topic, the date it's supposed to be published, and your keywords. Remember that simple but usable beats complex and overwhelming every single time. And then after you've set up a content plan, I want you to try to plan your next month's worth of content. Now, personally, I like to plan my content a quarter at a time. But if you're just getting started, aim for that first month. Choose a few topics to focus on, research your keywords and add them to your content planner. Remember, like I said at the very beginning of this episode, content planning is not just another task to check off, another thing for you to have to do. It actually makes it easier for you to show up consistently for your audience with really great content that they are going to love. So start with just one month's worth of content this week. Plan it out using what I talked about today, and I promise it will be so much easier for you to create that content than it would be if you were starting from scratch with no ideas and no plan. If you're working on your content plan, I would love to hear about it. Take a screenshot while you're listening. Share it in your Instagram stories, and tag me at @kristendoyle.co let me know what type of content you're planning out first. And don't forget to grab the show notes at Kristendoyle.co/episode135 where I have included links toall the tools and the resources that we talked about today. Talk to you soon.