Now we're going to put together all of those pieces that we just talked about in the last video and translate them over to our content calendar. I suggest you use notion for this. I personally have chosen notion over other content and task management systems like Trello or Asana just because I personally think Notions is the best and they're not paying me to say this trust me. I wish they were but notion is just truly very very customizable. I'll admit it's not quite as beginner friendly because it is so wide open and how much you can change and customize it for your own purposes, which is why I've provided you with my notion content calendar template, which you'll find link on this course page. This is something that obviously I normally sell on my website, but I wanted to include it for all of the Instagram roadmap members because it's so helpful for me personally when it comes to planning content for Instagram. So in this video, we're gonna walk through how to use the notion content calendar template and I'm going to show you how you can plan your content using this system. So we're gonna start off with just showing you a basic walkthrough of how to use this content calendar template and then we're gonna get into the specifics of scheduling your content.

So welcome to my notion content calendar, you can see I've gone ahead and changed the name in the background image, obviously. For the account that we've been working on together and you can feel free to modify yours and customize it as well the most important thing you'll notice about the content calendar. Template is that there are several different views if I click on six more right here, you'll see the full list of the all platforms calendar. I'll platforms list moving in to platform specific lists and calendars as well. I personally prefer the calendar view. So this is where I'm going to start but feel free to use the list or tables whatever you like. So I've said things up with this content calendar template that when you're ready to plan your content, you can go ahead and just press the plus button on the date that you want to schedule your content for. Once that opens up you'll see that there's several different templates that you can choose from that are going to basically automatically fill out all of these different parameters and metadata to help organize your content calendar. So for example, if you wanted to plan a real you can just select the reels template button and you'll see that it's automatically chosen that it's Going to be posted on Instagram. It's a real and it hasn't been started yet. And of course, you've got the opportunity to add in your real title here and what I love about these templates is I've set up these automatic icons.

So when you go to look at your calendar view after you've planned your item, you'll see that it's got that little icon. So, you know right away this is a reel plus you've got these other color-coded tags that kind of give you a sense of what you're spread of content is looking like another starting point for adding content to your content calendar is the new post template. So if I do the drop down you'll see that you've got templates here for YouTube podcast and tiktok as well because this content calendar was built with multiple Platforms in mind, but obviously if you're planning for Instagram, you can go ahead and click the new Instagram post template button and you'll see that it populates with all of these options as well. So we have just a generic new Instagram post at the top, but I've also got those same templates that I Touching before so if you wanted to schedule a carousel graphic for instance, all you have to do is click and drag that Carousel graphic onto the date that you want to be posted and you'll see that it automatically already has those parameters of not started and it's a carousel graphic. Now the reason why we want to add all this extra information and tags to our notion content calendar is it helps when it comes to the Views? So it just kind of organizes all of our content a little bit better. You'll see that if I go over to the Instagram chronological list, for example, you can see the Instagram posts up here here. So we've got our Carousel graphic or real a couple example posts that I put in just to show you this allows you to plan all kinds of different content all in the same calendar while keeping it organized.

Of course, if you want to create a new post that doesn't follow one of these templates, you can just go ahead and press the plus button and then manually fill out all of these parameters or of course, you can choose one of these templates and then, you know change these parameters. Was necessary as well another helpful view in the content calendar is the work in progress board. So if you pop over to here, you can see that we've got content categorized by whether you've started it if it's in progress or if it's complete. So as you're working on batching your content, if you've completed this post, for example, you can just click and drag it over to the complete category and that can be a really easy way to keep track of your batching process. Now that we've walked through the basics of how to use the notion content calendar template. Let's dive in to actually planning the content that we've been working towards throughout the course. The first step we're going to want to take here is actually translating the Instagram strategy that we developed into sort of template or structure on the content calendar. So like we discussed in a previous video. I've decided that for the Katie and Dan and a van Instagram. I'm gonna want to post three times a week and I'm gonna post one real one graphic or Meme and then one Carousel so to set up that structure in my content calendar I can actually use this template button here or I can go ahead and just click the plus button and select the template that I want to use.

So let's just say I'm gonna post my reels every Monday, so I'll click on the reels template button and for now I'm just gonna add real as like my placeholder title and we'll go back in later and actually input our content now to quickly fill out the rest of the days of the month where I'm going to be posting a real a quick hack for you is if you hold down your option key or alt on a Windows computer and then click and drag to a new box, it will automatically copy that item and then paste it over into the other date. So it's faster than going, you know to the plus button and then choosing reels over and over again. So I'm gonna fill that out for all of the Mondays in September now, I'm gonna go ahead and place my tweet graphics and meme Graphics throughout the month. So I'm going to do. two tweak graphics So again, I'll just hold option and I'll drag this down to my other day, and then I'm going to go press plus and select meme. And I'll click and drag that to the 28th as well.

Finally. We're gonna input our Carousel graphics. And again, I'm just adding in this title as a placeholder for the meantime, and I'm going to copy that over to the rest of my days. This is the first step in getting your content calendar all planned out. We've taken our Instagram strategy that we decided on and we've translated it into basically a fill in the blanks content calendar that we can now place our content ideas inside of I find that this is the stage where it really starts to come together for a lot of creators because it can be kind of ephemeral and abstract and difficult to really understand your Instagram strategy when you're just sort of listing it out like one real a week two memes a week or whatever but for some reason seeing it on a calendar you're like, okay. Yes. I can do this. I know what the plan is. So hopefully at this stage you're starting to feel a little bit more confident about what your content plan is looking like. Okay, the next step is to actually start filling in our content ideas. So in previous videos, I talked you through how I was coming up with ideas using a repurposing structure. So taking my YouTube videos from the Katie and Dan and a van YouTube channel and turning that into Instagram content ideas. And then of course, we also went through all the Stages of brainstorming fresh original Instagram content and I've written down all of the ideas that I came up with in my notebook as we went along. I just jotted them down and now I've got this for reference and I'm going to take those kind of initial ideas and translate that into actual content plans in my content calendar.

So at this stage, you might just have some ideas or concepts. Like for example, we talked about the idea of how I can serve water in the van like how we live off of 21 gallons of water and only seven days and that was kind of the initial seed of an idea or the concept. So then at this stage you want to start thinking about how could I best represent that would that work? Well as a real would that work? Well as a graphic Carousel or could I turn it into some kind of tweet or meme graphic? These are the kinds of questions that you want to ask yourself about your initial list of ideas that you've written down. And basically you're just gonna start filling in those blanks. So now that we've got these param Is determined of okay, we want to come up with four wheels. We want to come up with four graphics and four Carousel Graphics that gives you a really great structure to then start inputting these sort of more abstract ideas that you might not have pinned down yet. So I'm gonna go ahead take my ideas for my notebook and start translating them into my content calendar. Open the map. Alright now I've got all of my ideas planned out in my content calendar at this stage. I want to encourage you to just focus on taking those ideas and translating them over to a certain type of post. So a real versus a meme versus a graphic Carousel just get those format and content ideas kind of married together existing somewhere on your content calendar and don't stress too much about the exact day or time that you're going to be posting these yet once we get into our content creation and then later our scheduling there's always time to shuffle things around especially when it comes to seeing the preview of your grid seeing how things kind of look and maybe moving things around based on that. So this doesn't have to be said in stone just yet. This is really just to give us a framework to brainstorm our content ideas really get them nailed down in terms of their format. And then essentially it gives us a Clean to-do list. So you've got a sense of okay, this is everything that I actually need to create. This is also the point in time when you want to start going through each of your content ideas and really breaking down what you're going to need to create to make each of those content pieces.

And what's all going to be involved. So for example with this how we can serve water in the van real I've come up with some clip ideas like a list of the exact video clips that I'm gonna shoot when it's time for me to actually make this real so I'll have this really handy reference list once I actually go to batch my content. So this is the point in the process where you really want to get your content calendar set up make a match between the formats that you've come up with in your strategy and the content ideas that you've been brainstorming through your repurposing and through your research match them together and then really start to work out. What do I need to create in order to publish this content? So whether that's designing a graphic Gathering foot For a real or shooting photos note that down in your content calendar as a list inside the body of each piece of content and then you'll have it. Neatly organized in your notion content calendar reference as you continue this process. So speaking of continuing the process meet me over in the next video where we're going to talk about strategies for Content creation.