how to plan a whole month of content (in 7 steps)

Do you ever sat down to make content and stared at a blank page wondering what to post? This is [music] the workflow that ends that problem for good. Most people I talk to treat content ideas like a creativity [music] problem.

The problem is that the things that should be feeding your content, your sales calls, your analytics, your candid [music] frustrations you're dealing with have nowhere to go. That's why I want to show you the exact workflow that I use to run my profitable personal brand. It's also the system that we install for founders [music] inside of FounderOS when we go and build their content machine.

The end result is a full month of assets across all platforms in their voice completely scheduled in a content calendar. Section one, organic sources. So, first things first here, we're going to go and show you how I go and think about generating these content ideas, okay?

We're going to use a bunch of tools here and some little-known insights that I've used to drive some of my most profitable content, which I'll be showing you some of my dashboards as well to show the proof that this stuff actually works. So, first things first here, one tool I love to use is called Poppy. Now, inside of Poppy, I'm able to go and really come up with a bunch of different ideas that are all pulled from my best content ever.

And I also go and utilize a lot of the data I get from Fathom as well because inside of Fathom, I'm able to go and record all of my core sales calls, and then we use the core objections or the hot buttons that people have come up with to then infuse our content ideas, okay? So, I can go and show you here, right? Is inside of Poppy, what I could do is basically go and look at the outliers on my channel, whether short-form or long-form videos.

From there, I can go and populate a lot of the topics and hooks into the Poppy kind of smart AI chat here. So, what I like to do is pull them all in. I can create basically a group of those short-form videos, right?

My top outliers. And then, now what I'm able to do is based on that group, I can go and start coming up with a ton of ideas. And so, what I may go and do is look at, you know, other amazing creators, go and look at their outliers as well.

Look at my long-form videos, take those outliers in. As we look at this whole dashboard, okay? The next thing, again, let's dive into Henzo.

Essentially, every single Friday, I do a little founder walk, okay? And there's this content ritual I like to do where I answer about 5 to 15 different questions. And essentially, I'm just using my actual voice to go and answer each question in about 2 to 3 to 4 minutes, right?

I like to do this right after a nice iced Americano, so, you know, the blood's pumping, my ideas are flowing, I'm feeling fresh. And what I try to do is just expand vulnerably around the sort of stuff that has been going on in my life, right? The wins, the struggles, different lessons I've learned.

So, oftentimes, the best content just comes from like the little stories from my everyday life. And the beautiful thing is that it's able to take those kinds of stories and then use the best formats for LinkedIn to go and combine my actual voice with these proven formats to then go and generate my content. So, this is not AI content, this is my actual voice.

It's just then formatted in a proven way so that it's scannable, it has an amazing hook and an amazing image along with it. And so, if you're interested, by the way, in checking out Henzo, you can go and check it out via the link in the description. Um this tool has been like 700 hours of work on my side.

Um I've been testing it. If you like my LinkedIn content, you know, we've grown to over 900,000 people on that platform, all organically, and Henzo has been the backbone of it over the last 6 months. So, you know, now's the time, go check it out.

In addition to that, I love a tool called One of Ten. And so, inside of One of Ten, I go and save different ideas that really go and stand out to me. I have my ideas area, and here you can see I'm saving different outliers.

An outlier is simply a video that has gone and outperformed that channel's average videos. And so, when I'm thinking about creating titles for YouTube, different packaging and thumbnails, I'm constantly pulling from one of 10 to come up with endless content ideas. And because YouTube is such a high-signal platform, the chances are that if something's really performing in a title on YouTube, it could also perform really well as the hook on an Instagram carousel, or it could perform well as a newsletter subject line, right?

So, because YouTube so high-signal, one of 10 is a really powerful platform to be able to pull really good titles and go and use those to infuse into your content strategy. So, here you can see as an example, you know, I can see a title like, you know, "Why I Became an Extreme Minimalist. " And I may go and just remix that title to, you know, "Why I Became a, you know, extreme systematizer.

" Right? And just slightly augmenting that title, and then making it my own, right? And then just talking about whatever I want to talk about that day.

That's a key piece to all this as well, right? When we're coming up with ideas, I you know, I'm taking data from what's performed for me on LinkedIn, I'm using things like X analytics and YouTube Studio, as well as Instagram's dashboard. But I'm also not losing sight of just the kind of stuff that I want to talk about because, you know, you can also just get lost in all this sauce if that's the only way you're pulling content.

As we keep going here, one of the biggest hacks for creating content that actually goes and drives monetization is going and hooking up your Fathom to something like Cloud Code to be able to go and take your transcripts from your best sales calls, and then utilizing the real words that your customer is saying, the hot buttons, to then go and become part of your content. And so, this is just what we did um with one of our most profitable YouTube videos. Here you can see our YouTube dashboard.

And here, when I go and sort our videos by highest revenue, you can see a video just here. It's our sixth most profitable video ever. It's called copy this content strategy, it'll blow up your business.

And a lot of the language inside of that video which drove us over $30,000 was taken from our most popular sales calls. Before we go deeper, I want to give you the content machine scorecard. It's a free diagnostic that we run on every founder before we install this.

You answer a short set of questions and you get a score telling you exactly what part of the content engine is your bottleneck. It takes just 4 minutes or less and you can bring that score directly onto a call with me and my team to get a head start on building your content machine together with us. Link is in the description, go and check that out right now.

Section two, your performance signal filter. All right, sources alone are not enough, right? Because even if you post content based on the right signals, you can easily just lose track of which signals to double down on if you don't have this next layer installed.

This is the signal performance filter. Now that we've got a bit of data, a bit of customer calls, and the founder interview inside of Henzo, we can then go and start actually posting this content, okay? Now, one quick side note here, okay, is that along the way, as you keep on putting out more content, you're seeing what stuff works best, and I'd recommend you're also talking to your customer.

There's nothing that beats just talking to your actual customer, right? And using that data to become kind of like your voice of customer extraction. So here you can see one from Founder OS, right?

Which is the community of founders that I help go and scale their founder-led brands, build their social media machines just like I'm showing you here in this video, but doing it custom for founders inside of Founder OS. This voice of customer document basically gets into using the actual words that I hear founders talk to me about all the time, right? Like I'm doing too much as of now, growing pains, you could say, or my bandwidth is the biggest problem.

I just crossed the milestone of a seven-figure top-line business, but I'm doing too much. I hear about their dreams as well, things like, you know, I want to have more focused time and less business-as-usual dedication, more strategic space of mind to think. You know, I want to be better, you know, not just like Matt, but I want to, you know, really have more time like him.

You know, I'd like to reduce the amount of dependency the business actually has on me. And so, this is exactly the stuff that we help founders with inside of Founder OS, helping them go from founder dependent to founder independent businesses, right? Where not everything's relying on you and you're able to remove yourself from more of the operations and have a social media machine that works while you sleep.

it's really helping founders go and develop this kind of content machine that can run without them. You know, and then when it comes to these founder goals then, right? You know, they're doing about 180k per month right now and want to triple that.

You know, if I could get to $5 million a year, that would be the realistic next step. You know, they want to 4x or 5x their revenue in the next two to three years. So, with all of this, right?

You can imagine how this would go and inform some of my topics for YouTube, some of my newsletter subject lines, right? I'm able to go and generate endless content ideas off of all of this customer data that I'm extracting from things like customer interviews, as well as the Fathom transcripts. From there, you know, the seeing things like objections and constraints as well, right?

Oftentimes, the point of content is basically to help presuade and pre-sell people before they even get on a sales call with you. And there's no better way to do that than actually go and create content that addresses those objections on Instagram, on YouTube. So, before someone even gets on a call, ideally, they're just ready to open their wallet and get going because so many of the common questions that they ask on the calls have already been addressed well beforehand.

Now that we've got that all nailed, right? When it comes to posting the content itself, okay? There's a lot of different things that I look at here.

So, first off, you know, inside of YouTube Studio here, right? This is where we go when we post all of our YouTube content. One big thing you can go and see in this Figma doc over here is that prior to any post on YouTube, right?

We're actually going and coming up with 10, 20 different title ideas, right? Based on all that research we just did and then we're AB testing these different titles. This is the benefit of having endless content ideas is that often times when I'm posting on YouTube, I don't even know what the hell is going to work and that's not the point.

The point is to have endless content ideas. You're able to go and put up 10 to 20 different YouTube titles and then just see what the winner is, okay? And so that's how we go and use YouTube and it's AB testing functionality to go and grow our content.

Here you can see, you know, on this video right here, the psychology of selling anything, right now we have a whole, you know, different batch of titles being tested, right? The psychology of selling anything, the psychology of why people buy. We'll let that run for another 12 days and kind of see which title emerges as the winning title for that given video.

And so you can imagine we have this going on across every video we put out there and it's only possible because we have an endless stream of ideas. As we go and we look through this as well, right? Every single video and piece of content that we put out there, right?

Always has UTM links, right? So unique trackable identifying links, okay? And so when we look at what that looks like over here, right?

You can see every piece of content we have typically below it, like this video right here, you'll see that there's a core lead magnet that we're giving away, right? That lead magnet has a trackable link and so there's a given URL, as an example, my master plan here has a URL where people can go and get it. That leads to a unique landing page and that unique landing page has an identifier in the link.

So we know when people go and put in their first name, last name, email and phone number to this and then we're able to track those people all the way from downloading that lead magnet all the way through to sale. What that allows us to do then, based on all of these different lead magnets, is then track inside of things like the YouTube dashboard. So, what that allows us to do is inside of this YouTube dashboard be able to track which of this content is actually generating the most cash flow.

Now, let's keep grooving here. So, we've got HubSpot that I'm using there for all of those trackable links, right? I go and I have my website all built off of Webflow, but it doesn't really matter what you use.

From there, all those landing pages as you see, there's no links around it other than just inputting your information and getting the guide. Okay, from there, our lead magnets are often times and things like Google Docs, Slides, and more recently, I've actually been using Cloud Code to go and generate different tools, right? So, we've got a ton of tools we've been making more recently.

Things like my personal brand scorecard, which you can get below, my things like my founder dependency test to see how dependent your business is on you and whether you actually have founder freedom, which you go check that one out down here as well. And so, we're using a lot of these different lead magnets that combine with kind of an application to Founder OS. So, what we're doing is providing people with an assessment, and when they've gone through that assessment, we're providing them with a custom scorecard based on how they did so they can go and immediately start improving the areas that they're weak.

The cool thing is that it also serves as an application to then, if the founder's right, to go and get on a call with us, bring their score, and get on a call with a brand strategist from my team to then get help going and evolving their business. What I've been able to do with these is essentially take the flow from going from my content to sales call from about 12 steps all the way down to just three steps. So, you can imagine how much that's also helped us go and increase the amount of leads we have.

It's like 4x the leads to the company and had a similar effect on the overall cash collected as well. And this is exactly one of the kind of core flows that I'm going to be doubling down on to get the business to $2 million of cash collected per month this year, okay? Ambitious goals, but it's these kinds of systems that allow us to make those kind of ambitious goals happen.

So, as we look at all these as well, I just also just use the dashboards that these platforms provide to help me go and come up with amazing content ideas. And so, the thing to do if you find yourself in a moment where your content feels like it's underperforming, what I like to do is just go back and like I'll look at a given dashboard, say, you know, my Instagram dashboard like this over the last 90 days, and I'll just go and start studying the content that has performed well. And so, I'll go and look at it.

Let's just say based on views the last 30 days. Here I can see, you know, people seem to have liked this more sort of >> [music] >> aesthetic cool video that we had posted up, No Founder's Perfect, but ones who build a personal brand will survive. So, you know, a pretty bold take there, but my belief is that the future belongs to founder-led brands.

Um we can see that a lot of these carousels are working. So, this is like the five levels of building a personal brand, and we've gone and broken it down, and this was actually waterfalled from a longer form piece of content we made, which I'll show you how to do that here in just a minute. You know, we'll see things like even me using the my handwriting to go and create these custom carousels.

So, it's my handwriting plus just like a paper background um that is providing a lot of value and doing well. And so, what I'll do then is when I look at this data, right? I'll just start doubling down on the formats I'm seeing working.

So, I'm seeing here some nice design carousels, some handwriting carousels, and I'm seeing a bunch of these kind of yapping videos I've been doing more recently that are also performing well. This is my entire tech stack for a million per month, you know, showing folks how I use things like Cloud Code, HubSpot, Vercel, Supabase, and 8 then Fathom, Slack, and Calendly to go and kind of build the stack of my business. So, it's content plus this autonomous engine that helps me scale.

And it's on well. So, I'll use then these videos to then come up with just more ideas, right? Because clearly this is what my audience on Instagram is resonating with, all 960,000 of them.

Section three, the anchor piece. Once you're able to identify the signals that are working, they should point to the specific piece of content that is worth amplifying and multiplying. I call this piece of content the anchor piece, and it's the single piece of content that is undeniably resonating.

The one that earned the right to be then waterfalled across every other platform. As we then go and we start going and posting this content, what then ends up happening, right, is that my anchor content is the longer-form content that I will then go and waterfall. I'd recommend you having kind of a pod-based approach to all this, right?

so you're going to come up with these ideas, it's probably going to be you, and then maybe you have a social media manager and a writer if you're moving on platforms like X and LinkedIn with your ideas, or if you're going more video-first, it may be you and a video editor and a social media manager, and that being the initial kind of pod to get your whole content machine rolling. With that little pod, you're able to then go and execute on the content waterfall system. So, as you can see here, this video here, how to build a profitable personal brand in just seven steps, goes and becomes multiple different formats.

So, here you can see I made it into an Instagram reel, right? It went and became, you know, a pretty successful reel on my channel with over 110,000 views. I also turned it into a carousel, how to build a personal brand in just seven days, which also was an insanely high performer, right?

And from there, you know, I'm able to take things like, you know, this long-form video, I'm 35 if you're in your 20s or 30s watch this, and use that for things like my major life hacks, right? And using the pieces of that video to become [music] individual cards within this carousel. Now, the key thing here, too, as you can see is that every end card of this carousels has a course CTA that then drives people to my email list and drives them to a conversion, right?

So that we're not just coming up with ideas here that are going to drive views. We're always focused on actually making sure that those views lead to cash, right? Because cash pays the bills.

And so, not only that, right? You can see across all these different formats, even on LinkedIn, right? We're going and using those same pillar YouTube videos to then come up with long-form LinkedIn posts.

We're using it to come up with the infographics for those LinkedIn posts, which is a super key aspect to going and building a high-performance LinkedIn presence. You know, amazing hooks, long-form value, and then a value-dense image, okay? And now we're using it as well for all of my Instagram presence.

You know, my most popular video on my channel is how to work less and earn more. You can check it out over here. And we've used that to go and create, you know, [music] different carousel formats, even content for my X as well, right?

Including both short-form tweets, as well as long-form articles like this. This concept of waterfalling content is key, and that should be a core verb that you and your content team are using constantly. When you see a high performer on any given platform, you should be saying, "Hey, let's take this idea over here.

" Could be an Instagram carousel that's gone viral, and let's waterfall it. When you hear that, what that means is, "Okay, we're going to take this carousel, and we're going to turn that into a long-form YouTube video. We're going to turn that into a LinkedIn post.

We're going to turn that into a newsletter as an example, right? So it's just this idea that we're going to repurpose that into more pieces of content. " Section four, the content calendar.

All of this content that you're now waterfalling, you're drowning, right? And just amazing, profitable, high-converting content ideas at this point. Now we want to go and filter that through to our content calendar.

So this is an example of a content calendar that I made for a founder named Mark inside of Edge, which is where I work with founders one-to-one every single week, helping them go and construct all of this for them, right? Getting my hands in there, building out content machines, building out um lead magnets and landing pages and content counters. Like this is the kind of stuff that as you probably can tell jazzes me the [ __ ] up, okay?

And so, this is an example of a content calendar going and making sure that Mark's got a LinkedIn post per day, a YouTube video per week, a newsletter per week, and then he's taking that YouTube video that he's made and also publishing that to Spotify as well as Apple Music. From there, it's then the conversion architecture, right? And basically, without getting into all that, you can go watch this next video that I'll get into more of that, but we're going and creating different CTAs, landing pages, and things like workshops to be the bridge between all of these amazing content ideas and your monetization.

Now, just to show you two behind the scenes how me and the team go and construct all this, this is our Asana internally that Diego goes and manages. Here you can see all things like the different ideas that we're going to be recording. You can see the bank of content then that we've shot.

So, at any given moment, you know, you can see here, we've got a lot of content in the backlog, right? Around like 16 different concepts at any given time, which is going to last us like two two and a half months. So, there's never this feeling like I'm on some content treadmill, right?

I film in batches um those content ideas I just showed you, right? And then that content then lasts me months. And so, this allows me to build a peaceful content operation where I'm not lost trying to freaking keep up with some, you know, just, you know, slave driving mentality of getting all these things going.

It's very much something that like runs and it's just a part of what I do, not everything I do. I'd say I spend around probably 7% of my time on content, the rest is just actually building the team, the business, the culture, um and new products. The best part about this content machine is it's not theoretical, right?

This is the exact workflow that I've been using for about 18 years now, and it's exactly what we build for you and train your team on inside of your business in Founder OS. By day seven, your brand foundation lands. We've built your own unique brand positioning, right?

So, you know your customer, your content pillars, you're really clear on your founder narrative, and you're basically able to watch us, you know, senior operators go and translate your voice into core strategy documents that are being built live in front of you on calls. Day 30, your content machine, just like this, is delivered. And by day 60, your conversion infrastructure is live.

BSL scripts, email sequences, lead magnets, landing pages, workshops, the full machine on every platform in your voice, scheduled and executing without you. If you're ready to finally own your distribution, hit the first link in the description and go and apply today. And if you want to dive deeper into the content strategy that's going to blow up your business, go and check out this next video.

All right. Thanks so much for watching. I'll see you in the next one, and let's win together.