Have you ever heard the saying, if you fail to plan, you plan to fail? Social media can be powerful for any brand, but social media with a plan can be even more powerful. In an ideal world, your content strategy should align with your current business schools at any given time. So if you've ever struggled with what to post on Instagram or maybe you've gotten into the habit of that frazzled last minute posting, you're in the right place.
Because in today's video I'm going to walk you through how I'm building out an Instagram content calendar for my very own personal brand and stay till the end where I'm going to share with you how you can get an entire year's worth of your Instagram Stories planned and done and checked off your plate just with one product. I'm Elise Darma and I've taught thousands of entrepreneurs like yourself, how to use Instagram so that it actually becomes a real revenue stream in your business. And today I'm going to walk you through how to create a content calendar for your Instagram. So the very first thing you need to do, it's a must, but you must tie your content plan to your overall goals for your business for let's say the next quarter.
I like to plan about 90 days in advance at most. So on a calendar, whatever you use, maybe it's your Google calendar or physical calendar, but I want you to plan out your upcoming launches, your upcoming milestone goals, whatever is coming up for you in this quarter, put it down in a calendar. Now you're going to work backwards. Now that you know exactly what's coming up for the next 90 days, you're going to work backwards and make sure that your Instagram content is synced up with what you've got coming up. Now in terms of what content you can actually share on Instagram, I've done a whole video on this. It's right here. How to plan content for Instagram. Go ahead and check it out. I cover how you choose a theme and how you batch create your content. Now it's time to move into a tool so you can move right to a scheduling tool like Later.
But I'm actually gonna walk you through a demo of how I plan my Instagram content in Asana. I use Asana as the first place because it allows my team to check in, maybe help write captions so that they see exactly what I've got planned and coming up. So let's jump into Asana and I'll show you exactly how I plan out my content. Here we are inside of my Asana account.
So if you don't have one, highly recommend you sign up for one. It is free. And what I'm going to do is walk you through how to create a project, which is where you can organize your Instagram's content calendar and involve your team members too if you'd like. So right on the left hand side here, you're just going to hit the plus symbol and then "create project".
So you can choose a template or a blank project. You have options here. For the sake of this demo, let's go with blank project. So let's call it Elise's Instagram content calendar. And here you're going to want to choose your view. So the default is a list. The second option, which I prefer is the board view and I'll show you what that looks like, but if you're familiar with Trello, that's the default view of the Trello tool. So this is where I'm going to choose board. And then down here you can choose whether to keep it private to yourself or public. In this case I'm going to keep it public. Then I'm going to hit create project. Okay, so here we are in my new project so you can see in board view we get columns. This is what list view looks like, so it's more like a traditional to do list. Here's why I like columns because of the way we're going to set up our content calendar. So I'm going to rename this one. It is right now "to do", just click on it once and I'm actually going to give it the name of March, 2020 that's the month that I'm filming this.
So this is how I'm building out my calendar. Then we're going to do April, 2020 and then we'll do May, 2020 so basically I am planning out my next three months of content. Now of course I can keep going and make one for June, 2020 by hitting that button, right, right here. So now that we've got our months divided by columns, I'm going to rename this card, which is defaulted to task one. I'm actually going to give it a date. So let's say March 15th, 2020 because this is the date that I want to post to Instagram.
So now when I click out of this view, I can see it. Now let's also do a post on March 18th let's do a post on March 21st let's do a post for March 25th and March 28th, 2020 okay, so I'm going to move the March 15th to the top, so it's in order, so you can probably see where I'm going with this. But each one of these cards is where I'm going to predetermine the image and the caption. So let's click into March 15th and let's open up my image folder and let's choose an image like this one and we're just going to drag it in. So this would be an image that I've already determined to be one that I want to post to my feed.
So we'll let that load. And as that's loading, I'm going to fill up these cards with the other images. [upbeat music] Alright, so now that all the images have loaded, I can start to get a preview of what this is going to look like. So maybe I actually don't want these two to be next to each other. I'm gonna move this one in between. So I simply drag my card up and then I'm going to change this date to say March 18th and then this one will be March 21st so this is where I'm starting to plan out the look of my feed.
And what I also recommend is once you know what order you want your images go in, you can click into each card and in the description start writing out the caption. So this is a great place for you to involve your team members, especially if you have a VA or anyone who helps you with your marketing. You can maybe put in some bullet point notes here and then let them know that they can flush it out a little bit more. They can even do like your hashtag research for you. So I like to use a tool called Flick, which I'll link right below this video, but you know they can do that research for you and then just paste them all in, you know, directly into your description right here. So if you want to divide it like that, this is a great way to get your team member involved so they can help you write this out and your hashtag research. So some great things about why I like using Asana is there's something you can do in terms of adding a tag.
So with tags you can color code your content by theme. So let's say Monday is your day to post something motivational. So you can actually create a tag and let's call it Monday motivation, create the tag and you can give it a color. So let's do pink. Now the 15th is actually a Sunday because I can actually make the due date like right here in Asana. So let's actually make it the 16th and then I'll update this. So now I know it's going to be due March 16th and I know it's going to be in the theme of being motivational. My team member and I are going to write the caption. We're going to do our hashtag research right here and now I can start to get a sense of, you know the pink tag is referring to a motivational post. Let's go onto the next one. Let me just copy this. So again, you're going to work on your caption and your hashtags together as a team. So you're going to fill them in in the description. And one thing I really love is let's say my team member, Kaeli, actually this one was the due date.
Let's see, my team member Kaeli's going to help me write this description. I can actually tag it to her and give her a due date so I can actually make it the date of publishing or the day before. It depends on how you want to work together as a team. But then I can even down here, tag her in a comment and say, Kaeli, could you please help me out with writing this caption for this post? Right? So I can give her a task to help me out with this caption. Then when she is done, she can remove herself and she can assign it to me and then she can reply back and say, you know, this will be from her account to say, ready for your review, right? So this is a great way to again, work with your team member, especially if you're feeling like it's overwhelming to create a content calendar. This tool is really, really handy. So moving on to tagging it. Again, you can add a tag and let's say we want it to be Wednesday tip for example, let me get green.
So if we go back to this view, we can start to see, you know, Monday is motivation, the green, it means tip. And then let's put this one on. Let's publish this one on the Friday. So we'll actually make it March 20th and let's give it a sub task or a tag of Friday Funny, that could mean whatever you want it to be for your brand and what colors have we used. So let's try purple. Um, so now we can see that each of our posts that are gonna happen in this week of March 16th, Monday, Wednesday, Friday, they're hitting on different themes, right? We've got motivation, then we have the tip and then we have the humor right here.
We can repeat that same system for the following week. So let's change this to the 23rd, if we're going to keep it to the Monday. And then again add the tag for Monday motivation. So that allows you and your team member to also get a sense of what theme to follow when writing your caption. So again, we'll follow the same pattern. We'll change this to a Wednesday and then we'll add a tag to make it a Wednesday tip. Okay? So that's how I recommend to work with a team member in filling out your content calendar. Again, this is just for the month of March. And you can repeat things for all the following months and you can also have the ability to mark the task complete either when it's published or when you've moved it over to Later. So that's probably what I'd recommend is once you know where was it right here. So once us as a team have written the caption, it's been approved, then one person needs to go into Later.
So let's find this image and pull it up just for demonstration purposes. So there's the image, then all you have to do is copy the caption, right in here. Later now has the ability to add in a first comment. So if you'd like, you can add your hashtags in the first comment right here. And that's pretty much it. Just make sure that whoever is scheduling schedules it for March 18th. So once we determine our date and time, you can choose auto publish or notification, then just hit save. And if we go to that week, we'll see it scheduled in for this week. And again, that's where you're going to get this preview button. Once all the images are in, you're going to be able to see them previewed on how it's going to look on mobile. Then once it's scheduled, then just go ahead back to the task and you can mark it as complete. So again you can this out with your team, but you can see that it gets grayed out showing that that task is complete.
Obviously this one should be published first before that one, so eventually over time you're going to have columns filled with completed tasks. and then the great thing is once these are all built out over a couple months, you're going to be able to see at a glance all of your content and the captions that you've written, which could be used again six months down the road. They can be repurposed as blog posts. It's really going to become a great content bank for all of your content to live in one place.
Plus you can have your team members involved so that you're not the one writing and creating all your content for your feed. Another cool thing is you can always switch between board view and list view. So you can see that even though I built it out as a board view, I can still see the list view and it still categorizes the pieces of content by month very, very nicely. And the other cool view is by calendars. So maybe after I've given everything a date, then I can go ahead to the calendar view and see. Perfect. Pink means Monday motivation. Wednesday means tip and Friday means funny. So I can start to see that I'm hitting the mark with that content theme even in my calendar view. So I hope this overview has given you a sense of how to use Asana in terms of building a Instagram content calendar and how you can involve your team members to help out with the writing of the captions and curating content too.
So there you have it. That's how I plan content for my feed. Now let's talk about your Instagram Stories. If you're ready to take an entire year's worth of planning off your plate for your Stories, then I invite you to check out Story Vault. Story Vault is hundreds of prompts and ideas for you to use in your Instagram Stories that cover all seasons of a business, including needing visibility, needing engagement, leads, and sales. So no matter what season of business you're in, you're going to find prompts and Story ideas for you to use today. To ease and revenue. I'll see you in the next video. You've made it, you made it to the end of this video. I hope you found this demo super helpful. And of course, if you liked this video, please subscribe. Don't forget to hit the bell so that you never miss a future training just like this one.