Now that you understand the process for coming up with fresh content ideas for Instagram. Let's take this brainstorming process and put it into action for the account that I've been using as an example throughout this course Katie and Dan in a van. You're welcome. Of course to open up your workbook in a second Tab and go through this process together with me, maybe some of what I'm saying will spur some new ideas for you that you might want to jot down but the idea with this video is really just to give you an example of how this planning process can look in action. Okay.

So let's start with our first step which is checking for audience feedback one reason. I wanted to use my Katie and Dan in a van account for this example is that it is relatively new it might be in the same kind of stage of growth as your account at the moment. And I know one of the big struggles when it comes to looking for audience feedback when you are a newer account as you might feel like I don't get any. So I'm hoping I can demonstrate for you how creators even with smaller audiences can still use this step in the process to come up with content ideas? Okay, so I'm gonna start out by checking out my YouTube comments. I look through the last five videos on Katie and Dan in a van Channel and there was really nothing for me to draw from in terms of content ideas. So as part of this initial step, I'm going to cheat a little bit and look back on some older videos that I posted on my main Channel like over a year ago where I talked about van life and these did not necessarily get a lot of traction. There wasn't a lot of views there, but I did get a few comments that I might be able to use as content inspiration.

So I did this video called how I run my business from my van as a digital Nomad and someone did comment on that video asking me where I got myself signal booster, which is like really essential for us having internet when we're working from the van. So it got me thinking that this might actually be a good idea. Up for a potential Instagram post I could maybe do a real rounding up some of the most essential van life-related products on the Katie and Dan in a Van Instagram. So it could even be just like me in front of the camera holding up different items or I could take a video of that item in its position in the van and just kind of do a little bit of a listicle about like stuff we couldn't live without in the van. So that's the potential content idea based on somebody asking about our weeboost. Okay. So checking for YouTube comments was kind of helpful. Now, let's go ahead and look at my Instagram comments. So again, I look through all the posts that I made over on the Katie and Dan in a van Instagram and there wasn't a ton of comments there that I can actually pull from for Content ideas. I think we all know the struggle of random spam and bought comments on our small pages. But again, I did post a little bit of a content on my personal account a little while back specifically. I made like a van life morning routine real. So I went through the comments over on there. Someone said were you always super organized or did you learn how to be I feel like I would constantly be cleaning my van. So maybe I could do a real about how to stay organized or the routines that I've put in place to keep the van really tidy and organized. I could be a good potential concept. Someone else asked in the comments. Do you stop places to go pee so we actually have a Nature's head composting toilet in the van and I think that that's something a little bit unusual or interesting that people might be intrigued by so I could potentially do a real that's like a little tour of our van bathroom or I could also talk about generally hygiene self-care routines in the van. I could mention how we go shower at Planet Fitness that kind of thing. So there's maybe even two potential real ideas in there now, I just want to say I do understand the struggle when you don't have a lot of comments to go on and obviously not everybody has a main channel that they can go and look for where there's more engagement, which I was able to do for these examples.

So if you want To gather some audience feedback without actually really having a lot of comments to go from here are a few suggestions that you can start with you could reach out to some of your followers via DM and just start a very personal one-on-one conversation with them asking them if they have any questions or topic ideas for you just having that personal conversation is not only a great way to build relationships in your community. But I think it also will give you some content ideas. Another thing you can do is go to bigger accounts in your Niche or industry and take a look at what some of the common questions in their comments section are because presumably their followers are probably a part of your ideal audience. So if they're asking another person in your Niche a certain question chances are you might be able to answer it with a piece of your content and probably the person that they're asking is gonna be too busy to reply so that can be another great place to go just to get a sense of like what are the people that I'm trying to Target asking questions about right now or what kind of content do they want to See from creators in my Niche or finally you could go to a website like answer the public or even Google Trends just to get a sense of generally what your you know, like hypothetical audience might be interested in like what's trending what are people searching for? This can be a good place to give you some content ideas as well. I think it's all about getting creative here as well. And just seeing what are the comments saying what is answer the public saying and what can my unique spin on answering that question look like okay with a few ideas in mind from checking our audience feedback. Let's move on to number two in our process which is checking for news and Trends. This is gonna look totally different for everyone because you're gonna need to go ahead and research media Outlets news websites blogs creators in your Niche that are sharing the latest news and updates.

I recommend taking a moment now, maybe pause this video open up your workbook and just jot down a few ideas of places that you can go to check for this news. This process is also Look different depending on the type of Creator you are so for example for me with my personal brand and the realm of social media marketing Tech content creation. There's always new updates new products new features. There's always news in that world. So it's easy to kind of look at these typical Tech news sites and get updates to then turn into content, but on the other hand with the example, we're using now Katie and Dan in a van. It's not really like there's like a van life news outlet and because it's lifestyle content. There's not exactly like news or updates that you're gonna pull from in the same way. So what I recommend for this step in the process, if you are a lifestyle Creator, if you're in a niche that doesn't necessarily have news then think about this more from the trends perspective. And so instead of looking to news outlets to see what the latest updates or new features are instead. You're gonna go to the bigger creators in your Niche and get a sense of what's trending in terms of like What is your audience kind of interested in at the moment? So that's just kind of like a general thing to keep a pulse on like what are the current trends and formats that people are really liking in your space. For example in the van life world a few years ago.

The biggest videos that you saw on YouTube of Van life were kind of like Day in the Life van chores routine van tours, of course are always popular. And now I think we're seeing a lot more of a sort of challenge format. So people saying like 72 hours in a van in Mexico or something like that. So we do see those like kind of larger Trends changing over time. So that's the kind of thing that you can look into if you're in a more like a lifestyle Niche, but in addition to that every so often there is kind of news in these specific niches that you can keep an eye out for and these might be your opportunity to go viral a little bit or break more into the mainstream and these might be moments where like the culture at Large. Talking about your particular kind of Lifestyle content whether that's van life or like cottagecore or like building a cabin in the woods or vegan lifestyle or whatever. Like there's sometimes moments where those subcultures are in the general cultural conversation. And those are moments that you can take advantage of to increase your reach a little bit. It's also very important when these potential viral moments come up that you have some discretion. You're very intentional about what kind of news items you're going to speak to particularly if they're sensitive because it's not always worth like the viral attention if you're taking advantage of a bad situation in order to get more reach. It's just not a good look for example, since we're talking about the van life niche in the summer of 2021 the tragic story of a van life her name Gabby petito hit the news. It was all over the Internet. Everybody was talking about her initially going missing and then eventually being murdered by her. Say Brian Landry. Now this started to raise a ton of questions in the van life world about the safety of Van life what relationships look like on the road this ended up being a hugely viral conversation and pretty much everybody in my feed that was in the van life space was talking about it.

I bring up this example specifically because you can see how this counts as like van life news and it especially counts as a moment where the van life Niche kind of broke into the mainstream went a little bit viral, but I think it's also a good example of a moment where it's super important to have some discretion and decide like is this really what I want to use for my own gain in order to get more reach like maybe not as creators. We really don't want to be taking advantage of somebody else's tragedy in order to get us more views. So I think it's a really important ethical consideration to make as a content creator when it comes to incorporating news timely events into your content. Of course, though. The news isn't always so heavy another example of Of the target Niche that we're talking about kind of breaking into the mainstream and going viral a little bit would be when YouTuber Janelle Eliana broke every single YouTube record in the books and gained over a million subscribers after only posting two videos. This is another moment where the conversation around Van life really broke out of just the van life bubble and into the rest of the world. Everybody was talking about Janelle and how did she hit it big? Is she an industry plant? Did she somehow figure out the YouTube algorithm. So again, this would have been a great opportunity and one that isn't so, you know, Tragic obviously for Van life content creators to kind of join that conversation and use that larger conversation as a moment to reach more people because if you can talk about something that's timely that everybody else is talking about that is gonna help your content to get more engagement and more reach. It's just important to be intentional about when you use those situations and when you don't, okay, so now's your moment depending on the type of Niche you're in to go ahead and go and research some of these big news outlets that might have updates or news in your space or if you're in kind of a more lifestyle Niche or something that doesn't lend itself towards news. Go ahead and look at other creators in your space and see what some of those larger Trends are indicating in terms of what types of formats or what types of concepts for Content people are connecting with and then just keep a lookout for potential larger cultural conversations that you could take part in if your Niche or kind of breaks into the mainstream so to speak.

Okay. So let's look at an example for this obviously. We're still Talking about Katie and Dan in advance. So in my case, there's no real action item right now to go just look out for the news. So I'm gonna look on a few main platforms and see what the general Trends are with the biggest creators there. And if there's any ideas that I could come up with for my own content based on that. So let's head over to YouTube and of course, you know, we've got to check out Kara and Nate I would say some of the biggest creators in the van life space on YouTube are Cara and Nate, of course Eamon and Beck who I love and King in it. So let's just use Kara and Nate as an example because they're truly iconic. They're videos are like getting on the trending list on YouTube almost every time I'm sure there's an idea that we can come up with from analyzing their content. Okay, so I'm gonna head over to their Channel and I'm gonna check out their most recent videos and I can just kind of scroll through take a look at the view counts and see if I can see any big standouts. Another option is to organize the videos by most popular and get a sense of what their top viral hits. What the themes of those videos are now looking at some of their most successful content obviously, I can't necessarily imitate it because it's based in specific locations and most likely at this point with Katie and Dan in a van. I'm not gonna like fly myself somewhere in order to just to try to make a viral video. So that's kind of off the table, but I think we can draw inspiration from the formats. For example, one of their kind of more recent big viral hits was 72 hours survival. No food. No water on an island. This is a huge hit surpassing 3 million views. Now. This is obviously partially because the content is so interesting and intense and unique like who does that but I think the format also gives us potential inspiration here.

So maybe my van life version of this could be seven days in a van with only 20 gallons of water. I think this could be fun but also partially educational it could be a real where I show us at first filling up the tank getting our water monitor up. You full and then kind of showing throughout the week how we truly hard to conserve water only using a little bit to wash dishes getting the smallest amount to wash my face with taking really fast outdoor showers all of that kind of thing and it kind of poses it as a challenge which makes it more fun, but then again it has that educational aspect of showing like here's how you can serve water when you live in a van but instead of making the intro of the video say here's how we can serve water while living in a van that might sound a little bit boring right you might swipe past that but if I say, here's how we survive in a van for seven days with only 20 gallons of water that kind of grabs the attention a little bit more okay, so I think that's a really strong idea coming out of our YouTube Inspirations. And now let's pop over to tiktok and check out some of my favorite tiktok van life creators and I would say they're probably some of the most popular van life creators on tiktok Court and Nate one recent tiktok that they posted that happened to perform really well was all about what's the hardest Part about van life this could definitely turn into an Instagram post in some way. Like I could put my own spin on it and create a piece of content around. What I think is the hardest part about living van life. This could maybe be like a meme or a tweet graphic even and then maybe I would like make a caption that goes into more detail. Like I could definitely see Finding maybe some kind of GIF or like screen grab from maybe like the office or something if I could find one where like two characters are like smashed right up next to each other and then I would be like me and my partner both working from our van. I don't know make a joke about how like it's close quarters for two people to be in all the time or I could maybe try to cope with a funny tweet that also encapsulates that struggle another type of post that really has performed. Well for court and Nate is just like really beautiful aesthetic footage of their van and just kind of them hanging out around their fans set to trending music. So that is also something that I could try obviously it's gonna be my own spin. It because my footage looks different my van life looks different but I think that kind of just like aesthetic visuals performs really well on reels too. So hopefully you can see from those few examples how you can go and take a look at larger accounts in your Niche and you are not gonna copy the content that you're making but you're gonna take inspiration from it and put your own unique spin on it and the purpose of this is that you know that your target audience is probably gonna connect well with that type of content, let's move into the third step of our process reviewing your analytics.

Now, let's be real if you're just starting out. You're probably not gonna have a whole ton of data to work with here, but it's definitely still something to take a look at and start to get your bearings around what all of these different terms mean because someday once you start to grow a larger audience, it's gonna be super super helpful you determining what kind of content works best. So let's take a look at the Canadian day in a van Instagram as an example. I'll be honest. I haven't posted. Are super frequently maybe you relate to that as well. I'm gonna take a look at my analytics over the past six months and try to figure out what posts have performed the best and maybe that might be a clue to what I would want to post again. So my top performing post over on that account was also the first post that I had published after a long stretch of being away so that could also contribute to it. But I also think it's partially just because it's a really striking image. It's a photo of me and Dan sitting next to our van with kind of the city lights in the background. We wrote in the desert this post actually received an engagement rate of 26% which is really great. That's like unheard of over on my bigger personal account, but for smaller accounts, you know, it's the kind of thing that might happen. So to me what this says is sometimes slightly more like staged or creative photos might perform a little bit better compared to the more like casual just vacation photo style of a lot of the other posts on my page another post that performed recently. Well was a photo of me. On the beach in Jacksonville with my cute little Old Navy matching set outfit that got an engagement rate of 14% which is also really good. Now, of course, I'm not going to necessarily just drive my van to the beach for the sake of taking a beach photo but it is something for me to take note of and consider that in the future if I ever happen to find myself at a beach. I'll say okay, let's take a photo for Instagram. So sometimes when you're investigating your analytics or really any of the other areas of brainstorming it's good to just add stuff to your mental list for the future as well because you might not necessarily be in a position to act on the trends that you're finding or recreate some of the posts that have done really well in the past, but it all helps you to build up a picture of what your strategy should look like and what's gonna be most effective with your audience. So take a look through your analytics and jot down what your top three performing posts look like and maybe write some notes about why you think they Form so well and based on that you might start having some ideas about what you could create next and the fourth step in our brainstorming process is finding new real ideas.

Now, of course, you can go ahead and just start scrolling through the reels feed or the tiktok for you page. But before you do that, I would also recommend going and checking out a few other sources. So one source for trending reels ideas is actually My Weekly Newsletter. It's called The Creator letter and we like to include some of the top Wheels audios and Trends from the past week in the newsletter. So if you're subscribed then each week, you'll get links to a couple of reals that you could potentially recreate so that can be a really good starting point. And it kind of Skips over the process of having to do a lot of scrolling the second place that you can look for for great ideas is actually over on later's blog. So, you know, I love later. It's my favorite scheduling tool and they release fairly frequent blog posts that are wrap ups of the most recent real Trends. So those two sources Can be a great shortcut to figuring out what the latest trending audios are and how you can Implement them before you fall down the scroll hole of like the four you page. Okay. So once you've started with that if you're still looking for further ideas, it's okay to do some scrolling for research as you're looking through your page. I recommend looking out for audios that you maybe notice that you're hearing more often. That's a good indicator that it's trending and Instagram also gives us a nice little clue with a arrow pointing up into the right next to the audio title that also indicates that a real audio is trending so you might want to use it because using that audio might give you more exposure more reach. So what I like to do is I save these reels as I come across them. And then once I save it a little bar pops up that gives me the opportunity to manage my Collections and I have a collection specifically for reals inspiration so I can very easily just go there and scroll through the reels that I've saved. When it's time for me to create some new content, and of course once you've created it, you can unsave it if you want. So then you kind of keep your reels collection as like a to-do list in a way and it helps keep you more organized. Now, we all know that short form video content can really draw you in and it's hard to get away from it. So I would recommend maybe setting like a 15 to 30 minute timer to go off so that you remember like this is for research and it kind of gives you an out to stop after a little while and chances are you'll have more than enough inspiration after that amount of time.

Okay. So after all of this various research, I feel like we have a lot to work with here in less than four of this module. I've included some really basic beginner tutorials on how to create all the various forms of content that I've been talking about throughout this module. So feel free to check that out. But over in module four, we're gonna start talking about how to actually implement this content that we've been planning put it into a organized Content Calendar create it and then of course get it scheduled so I will catch you over there.