My 6-Week Content Sprint - Journal Ep. 1

I am Jasper Meurs and you are listening to Growth Journal, the podcast where I talk about everything I am learning while I am growing my business. This is the first episode of my six-week content sprint, where starting August 15, I will attempt to create a content calendar where I post across different channels on a daily basis. Let's first talk about the concept of this six-week content sprint. I tried promoting the podcast already with just the cover and the tagline, and it didn't really work. And the reason for this is pretty straightforward because instead of telling people what you're capable of, you need to show it. So what I want to do for this six-week content sprint is make a system where I create little snippets of content to post across social channels from the bigger pieces of content that I'm creating. Like for example, this podcast.

And I already did a bigger push into content creation over the last two years. And right now I want to take everything that I learned over the past two years and put it into a fully-fledged six-week content plan. We are going to post across different channels, so the podcast is definitely one of them. Video is a second channel also for the more long form content. And the video can also be a video version of this podcast. This is something that I'm not sure about yet. It could get a different form over time as well.

Then we have the social channels like TikTok, LinkedIn, Instagram, the different forms of Instagram sort of stories, the reels and feed. Then we also have YouTube, my blog and email. And I want to serve all of these channels. A couple of them are basically going to be like more or less a copy of each other, but then with small changes based on the platform itself.

I'll give you an example. So for my podcast, I will also have a transcript of what is being said in the podcast itself. This will then be posted on my website as well. And this makes that... A podcast by itself is not really searchable. It's hard to get this covered if you just have the podcast. So by creating the transcript for the podcast and publishing it online, it'll make it way more searchable and you will get people coming from Google organically over time through these transcripts on the website. Then for the email, it's more or less a recap of the things that have been going on over the past week. So it's a weekly email that I sent out on Fridays, and I will just take whatever I did in the podcast and put it all together in a nicely formatted email.

What is the plan for actually achieving this? So I already have a pretty good process for long-form content like YouTube, this podcast, and also my newsletter, but it's mostly the social channels, the micro content let's say, that is a little bit slacking. This is something that I haven't figured out just yet, but it's something that I really want to try to get right? So for this six-week content sprint, I am going to create a process for repurposing the content that I'm already creating, and come up with a plan to do this and find the right cadence of producing this content. Usually I try to work in batches because this seems to work better for me. For example, when I was creating the YouTube videos on a weekly basis, I would plan one week where I would, for example, script two videos, and then the next week I would actually record two videos. So this makes that you can really focus on a single task on a single day and be a lot more productive in creating this content, if you will.

Another part of the plan is what I was talking about earlier. So for example, recording this podcast, creating a transcript, which I will get through a service. So this is basically... This doesn't take any work. From this transcript it's much easier for the editor to create a short form content because he can quickly see where the best nuggets of information are within the podcast itself. And then I can also send this to the copywriter to create some blog posts out of this podcast as well. Right now we are in the research or planning phase over the six-week content sprint. And I've set up a structure in Asana and Basecamp.

Now, why am I using Asana and Basecamp right now? So Basecamp is a tool that I'm already using for the work that I'm doing with clients, because it's something that's way easier for most people to understand. I usually say Basecamp looks more like a social media tool than actually a project management tool. Whereas Asana is more for power users. It's really capable. You can set up automations and stuff. So I'm using both right now. So Basecamp is mostly for the ideation and the discussions we are having about the planning for the six-week content sprints and just posting some ideas for the content sprint as well. One of the things that I'm doing to find these ideas is basically just scrolling through Instagram and TikTok for inspiration, not looking to copy anything I see on there, but I'm mainly looking for interesting formats that I like. Like really the formats that I think that my content would work well in.

And next up is creating a full six-week calendar with all the content in there and also the linked content. Now, what do I mean by the linked content? The linked content basically means that I want to see where the bigger pieces of content go and then link the small pieces of micro content to them.

Now last, but not least, the most important part is to actually execute. We are not striving for perfection here, but just for doing and perfecting along the way. So I already learned a lot over the past two years creating content. So I basically started creating content on a regular basis at the end of 2019 more or less. And this was mainly for YouTube. So we were already thinking about how can we repurpose this content for social media as well, to make things more efficient?

We did a couple of tests, but it never really got to a point where we could do this consistently. And that is my main goal for the six-week content sprint, to create this consistency of posting on social channels as well. So I want to take all the learnings and I'm really going all in on the weaknesses that I found, and whatever I did with content in the past. And the only way you can really get better at this is with practice.

That brings us to the end of this episode. I hope there were some interesting information in here for you. Something that maybe will inspire you to create more content yourself, or how you can create a better content plan for yourself, for your business. As always, thanks for listening to Growth Journal, if you enjoy our show, please rate and review us on Apple Podcasts and be sure to come back next week for the next episode of the six-week content sprint, which will probably be about the content plan itself and how we are going to create that content plan. Until then, this is Jasper and don't forget, enjoy your week.