Now that we've got all of our content created it's time to schedule it. There are a lot of great schedulers out there that you can choose from. My personal favorite is later. I've been using it for years. I find to be the most user-friendly and intuitive with a lot of really great features. But of course, you can feel free to use whatever scheduling platform you're used to and that you like the best. I really think it's a great idea to schedule your content ahead of time because as we talked about in the last video when you batch content, you can be more efficient. It's also gonna help you with consistency because you're not relying on your memory each day to go ahead and create and post something for Instagram and it allows you to have all that foresight and planning with your strategy and batching and brainstorming and all that good stuff.

So I really really support the idea of scheduling your Instagram content ahead of time. A lot of people get concerned about this and think that the algorithms gonna punish them or that their content won't perform as well. If it's scheduled ahead of time trust me. This is not something that you need to worry about Instagram is not giving people a slap on the If they post things through schedulers later in particular is an offical Instagram partner and Instagram even has its own scheduling platform through the Instagram Creator studio. So there's nothing wrong with scheduling your content ahead of time. I would just encourage you to keep in mind when your content goes live each day so you can be available to reply to comments and engage with your audience when your content gets published.

Okay. So hopefully now that I've convinced you scheduling is a good idea for your content. Let's pop over to later. I'm gonna show you what it looks like and I'm gonna walk you through how we're gonna schedule our content using their platform. So as you can see, I've already got my account Katie and Dan in a van set up and sing with later that's really important initial step. I'm Gonna Leave a link to later's instructions for getting your account set up in their platform on the course page so you can check that out before you dive into scheduling while I'm scheduling my content in later. I always have notion open up in another window so I can quickly go back and forth between later. And notion and basically try to match these up. So as I was going through the content batching process, I wrote my captions and I added them to each item in notion. So as I finished up my checklist of content badging tasks deleted that put in my caption and also the visual content the awesome thing about uploading your visuals into notion is that I also actually have a visual like grid preview. So you can see a little bit like the cropping's obviously not the same on Instagram, but you can see a little bit of what your grid is gonna look like once your content scheduled. It's also just a great way to keep your caption and your media organized together in notion. So you remember which goes with what post in addition to storing previews of the visuals in notion. And of course the captions, I've also got all of the media stored in a folder on my computer that I've saved there from canva Premiere Pro send over from my phone all the different places where I'm creating the content I store it in one folder here so I can easily upload it to later now. All right, so we're just gonna start doing this in chronological order. So I'm gonna pop back over to my notion content calendar and open up our first post of the month.

Okay. So this is the how to conserve water in a van real. So what I'm gonna do is just go ahead and copy this caption. So I just hit command C, then I'm gonna go back over to later and with my Folder open here. I'm going to find my video clip. So here it is. So I'm just going to click and drag this to upload it into later. Once it's finished processing. I personally prefer to switch over to month view. And obviously we can double check. Okay, September 5th is the day that we wanted to publish this. So all I need to do is click and drag the video over to September 5th. And then I'll have to do is either right click and select paste or go command V and I've got my caption that I already wrote and I've added until later now you want to double check that you've selected the correct post type. So either reals or feed posts in this case. It's a real so I can go ahead and auto publish it now. I did just want to know if you have specific Wheels covers that you like to create which can be a good way to keep your feed looking consistent. Then what you're going to want to do is actually schedule this as a feed post and you'll notice that when I do that, we're gonna have to switch it over to send notification. And then basically what you'll do is once you receive the notification you can Select your specific cover or you can upload your cover from your camera roll when you're in the posting process. But if you're happy with your reels cover just simply being the first frame of your reel then of course, you can go ahead and auto publish it which is really convenient later also has these other great features like you can add the first comment.

So for example, if you want to throw some hashtags in there you could do that in the first comment rather than in the actual caption, you can add a location tag, which is great for discoverability and you can choose whether you want your reel to show up on your Instagram feed or just in the reels tab. I personally recommend always posting your reels to the feet as well because it's just gonna help with reach once you're happy with all the information that you've added for your post. You can just go ahead and click save now, I'm gonna pop back over to notion and I'm gonna change this to complete and also check off my little scheduled box, which is So satisfying now, what I'm going to do is just keep going down the list. So next I've got this graphic. I'm gonna go ahead and again copy the caption go over to later open up my folder where I'm storing everything. This is the graphic that I need. So I'll click and drag to upload it to my media library and then go through the whole process again. The reason why I like to go post by post rather than bulk uploading everything is because I find it's easier to keep track of your progress that way if I were just to upload all of the media that I created for an entire month at once it could get out of order which might make it difficult for me to find all the right slides for each of my carousels or find the real for the exact day. I was trying to schedule so that's why I recommend going through in this sort of orderly fashion and just scheduling one post at a time because even though it might sound tedious trust me. I've tried it many different ways and this is the best way to stay organized. So with that being said give me a quick minute. I'm gonna go into hyperdrive and get all this scheduled for us. All right. Now I have everything scheduled and trust me there is nothing more satisfying than looking at a fully scheduled month of later content. Like doesn't that feel good? You can see I've got everything here in the month view. Of course, you can look at it week by week if you prefer.

I find it really helpful at this stage to go into preview mode and take a look at what the grid is going to look like. So here you can see all of the posts that I just scheduled and this is what I was talking about before when we were scheduling stuff over in notion which by the way if we pop over there how satisfying is that a whole month of complete content in blue check marks. We love it. But going back over to the later preview. This is your opportunity to take a look and decide do I like how my grid looks at the end of the day it's not hugely consequential whether you're real gets posted on a Monday or Wednesday or Friday or whether you post a real before you post a meme Etc like that kind of like minuscule detail is not gonna make a big difference in the grand scheme of your Instagram strategy. So at this point you can kind of balance out, you know, we have the variety of content that we're looking. For you know, we very intentionally have decided what formats of posts that we're using because it's going to help specifically with your growth. So we know we've got a good balance of content here at this point. It doesn't matter a ton. If you know the post that you scheduled for the fifth goes up on the fifth or the eighth or the 9th or whatever. You can move them around a little bit so that you feel good about what your feed looks like and you feel good about the potential of a brand new person showing up to your profile seeing your content for the first time and then being convinced to give you a follow. So that's really the reason why you might want to optimize your grit a little bit. So at this stage, I do feel like I've got three really distinct columns going on here, which makes sense. That's how I scheduled everything but I think I'm going to shuffle things around just a little bit just so things don't feel quite so perfect and you know in this like row and column kind of structure so Just kind of doing this by looking at it doesn't have to be any sort of pattern.

Okay, I think I'm good with how that looks once you're happy with your grid layout you can go back over to month and you'll see that things have been shuffled around still in the same time frame that you had initially scheduled them. But now some have just been swapped spots. All right, congratulations, all of your content has been batched and scheduled in later and it is ready to go live for your audience over the next week or month or however long you chose to batch for. This has been a lot not only have we crafted an Instagram strategy, but we also created a ton of content wrote a lot of captions captured a lot of videos and schedule it all. So feel free to take a little break and then meet me over in module five where we're gonna talk about turning your Instagram into a business.