Why we stopped posting every day (00:04)

Hi, welcome back. So today I want to talk about how we plan a month of content in one afternoon, because for a long time we didn't do it that way at all.

So for about a year we posted every single day. Every single day. And by the end of it, nobody on the team wanted to open the content calendar. Nobody.

And the posts got worse, not better, which is the opposite of what you'd expect, right? You'd think practice makes it better. But we were making content to fill a slot, not because we had something to say. And people can tell. They can always tell.

One video a month (00:48)

So we changed one thing. Just one thing. Now we record one long video at the start of each month, and everything else comes out of that recording. So the short clips, the carousel, the newsletter, the threads, all of it comes from that one video.

People ask how long the recording takes. It's about an hour, including the bits we cut. And the planning afterwards is one afternoon. One afternoon a month, that's it. That's the whole planning.

The three parts (01:24)

So how do we actually do it? There are three parts.

The first part is before we record. We write down five questions our audience actually asked us that month, in comments, in emails, in DMs, and we answer those on camera. We don't make up topics. We answer real questions.

The second part, and this is the big one. Say the point in one sentence before you explain it. So every answer starts with the point in one sentence, and then we explain it. And that sentence becomes a post on its own. You can lift it straight out and it works.

And if you can't do that, if you can't say it in one sentence, the idea usually isn't ready to record yet. So we park it and come back next month.

The third part is after we record. We clean the transcript before we write anything. So filler out, headings in. And we pull out the best lines, the lines that make sense on their own, and every post is built on one of those lines.

So the carousel is for saves, the LinkedIn post is for the story and the thread is for the steps. Different shape for each platform, but it's the same idea underneath.

And then we plan the week in one sitting. One post a day, and one day off on purpose, because you need a day where you're not posting.

What changed (03:05)

So what changed? Well, we post less now and we hear back more. More replies, more people saying "I saved this", more people asking follow-up questions, which, by the way, become next month's five questions. So it kind of feeds itself.

The other thing that changed is the team actually likes it again. Recording day is fun now. It's not a chore. It's one day where we sit down and talk about things we know about.

Mistakes we made early on (03:40)

A couple of mistakes we made early on, so you don't have to. The first one was trying to write the posts from memory after watching the video. Don't do that.

Use the transcript, use the actual words, because the way you say something on camera is usually better than the way you write it later. It's more natural.

The second mistake was making every post open with the same line, so people who follow us in two places saw the same thing twice. Now no two posts open with the same line.

And the third one was making the carousel need the caption. A carousel should make sense with no sound and no caption, just the slides. Three slides that work on their own.

Where to start (04:33)

So if you want to try this, here's where I'd start. Next time you record anything, a call, a video, a voice note, check every answer for that one sentence. The point in one sentence.

If it's there, you've got a post. If it's not, the idea isn't ready yet.

That's it for today. If you have a question about any of this, leave it in the comments, because it might end up in next month's video. See you next time.

Quotable lines

1. "Say the point in one sentence before you explain it."
2. "Now we record one long video at the start of each month, and everything else comes out of that recording."
3. "Use the transcript, use the actual words, because the way you say something on camera is usually better than the way you write it later."
4. "A carousel should make sense with no sound and no caption, just the slides."
5. "Different shape for each platform, but it's the same idea underneath."