Lesson 1: How to create content for your Reels
Step 1 – create categories related to your blog or business
What are 5 or 6 areas that can define your business or blog?
These categories are simply the areas of what you will focus on when creating content for Instagram.
You know that Joanie Simon publishes her YouTube video every Thursday… (it’s her Free Food Photography Resource Thursday)… others might create Business Wednesday, or Inspirational Mondays… these are the “categories” day when you share something concrete related to that category.
Choose your categories strategically. Make sure the areas (categories) touch everything from your business or blog and provide a good mix of inspiration, something about you and your business, valuable free content, and promotion of your products too.
By creating these categories, you simply make sure you speak about every aspect of you blog or business without neglecting any part.
If your goal is to work with food brands and create images for them, your strategy will be different than someone who has a food blog or who is providing online courses or mentorship. You might focus on using Instagram as an extension of your online portfolio and make brands get to know you better.
Therefore, your categories might be:
- PromotingyYour skills – in such case, you will share images from your work or personal projects, or other things you proudly create 🙂
- “Behind the business” (to share more about you) – you can share image of yours working in the studio, from the location, talking about your business and yourself. This helps your audience or food brands getting to know you better
- Clients & processes – write about your processes, how you work with clients, testimonials, etc… This will show how great you are at your job.
If you have some free and paid digital or physical products, you might want to add a few other categories, such as:
- Promotion of free content – talking about your blog posts, freebies or your newsletters
- Promotion of your products/services – promoting your paid products – talking about testimonials, offerings, transformation your clients achieve, etc…
- Inspiration – something that can inspire your audience
*These are just examples, you need to create your own categories that will fit your business and focus.
Step 2 – Schedule your categories for this challenge
Plan your categories ahead and make sure you make each category repeated regularly.
Creating your content based on the categories will make sure your audience will see a variety of content, and it will help you to talk about your business 360° regularly.
Another aspect to think about is:
- do you want to approach categories randomly during certain period of time?
- or do you want to dedicate specific days for specific category? For example, Business Thursdays, Inspirational Mondays, Promotional Wednesdays… etc… People remember things which are repetetive, as they create habits and become part of their life. Such repetitive schedule might increase the engagemnent, on the other side, you need to stick to it, which means less flexibility for your weekly agenda.
You can use the October calendar in your workbook to schedule the categories for October for this challenge.
A few tips for scheduling your categories:
80/20 is a good proportion for sharing free content vs selling. If you post 5 times per week, spread 4 categories of free content into 4 posts(or reels or anything else), then 1 post dedicated to offering your services or products.
before schedulling your category of “selling” it helps if you share “non selling” content before and after your “selling” day. Non selling means: promote your freebies, blog post, or write about something that can inspire others.
Step 3 – Brainstorm content for each category
Sit down, take pen and paper, and write down your ideas for every category. What can you talk about? What can you show? If you have 5 categories and you decide to post 10 reels, it’s enough to write down only 2 ideas for each category.
Seeing your content in categories, will help you have more control over your content and see it from a higher perspective, plan your future posts or reels easier and be more creative too.
Now, you are ready to start working on your content for this challenge 🥳