Hello my badass, how are you doing this week? I hope that you are as excited as I am to chat about content today; specifically how I'm able to create two months of Instagram content in just two days.
This podcast was inspired by the fact that I posted a story over on Instagram and I was just talking about what I was up to that day, and I said that I was going to be filming 60 reels that day. People were just messaging me like, “What do you mean? What are you talking about?! 60 reels?!”
[00:00:36] The Ease of Content Creation: A Personal Journey
I get a lot of questions about how content creation has now become just so simple and easy and I'm just able to objectively bust out so much of it without it feeling hard, clunky, like a burden. In fact, it feels so easy.
I actually love the way that I am recording this podcast episode right now because it is a testament to the work that I've done in this space, because my husband, my Frenchie, his father is over from France in New Zealand at the moment. He's over here for the very first time in his life and I knew that this month was going to be really special and that we'd want to explore and go on adventures and do lots of cool things.
So this week in particular we are down in Fiordland, in New Zealand, down near the bottom of the South Island. And we've been exploring around Wanaka, and Queenstown, and we're going to Milford Sound tomorrow, and we just had an hour and a half to kill before our dinner reservation tonight, so I've popped myself into the bedroom, and I'm sitting down to chat to you guys, because I could've, very well, sat there on the couch scrolling for 90 minutes on Instagram (and I've done that plenty of times this week) but I was like, “You know what? I'm just gonna get my mic out, sit down with my laptop, and have a chat.” And it gets to be that easy.
Once you've created so much content, that content gets to be that easy. And just a reminder that four years ago, I did this. I wasn't like this. I didn't have any of this. I've gone through all of the struggles and trials that you have when it comes to creating content and creating it consistently.
But that is why I'm here to show you the way and teach you exactly how I make this process so much more seamless and easier for myself now so that content actually feels fun. I think that's the keyword.
So what do I mean when I say two months of Instagram content? So specifically I'm going to be focusing on the content that I create for Badass Careers and I'm talking about the Instagram reels that I create.
So I create five, what I call, face-to-camera reels for Badass Careers per week. So that's me educating, actually speaking, actually showing up on camera. So five of those per week. And there are approximately nine weeks and two months because it's just over four, four weeks each. So I've just rounded it up to nine weeks.
So let's call it 45 reels to have those two months of worth of reels essentially. Around 45 reels, face-to-camera reels, would be my content schedule for Badass Careers.
[00:03:25] The Power of Batching: My Secret to Content Efficiency
But also, I want you to know that as I go through this episode and break down how I split my time in my days, this would also work if I wanted to create two months of YouTube content because two months of YouTube content for me is eight videos, eight, nine videos.
So it would work exactly the same in terms of timeframes, two days, and it would work the same for the Badass Empires podcast as well. So whether you have long-form, rich media content like YouTube or podcast content pieces that are 10 to 20 plus minutes long, you require less of them. You'd release maybe one of those per week versus me creating five Instagram reels per week. So it all kind of balances out in the end.
What we'll be covering in this episode is a bit of an insider's view, a behind-the-scenes view of my own content strategy, how I generate my content ideas, how I manage my time, how I split that time, and some practical things like the tools that are being used to film and edit as well.
Just a disclaimer that this works really well for me, because I'm me, and this is the way that I like to do entrepreneurship and content in my business. I will never ever tell anyone that one way is the way to do something. You will be different. But I think what's interesting in the strategy though is why it works for me.
My brain very much works best in batching mode. I love to get ahead on things, I love to get things out of the way and clear the to-do runway. I am an introvert, I have very much fluctuating energy levels, and I have ADHD, which has a few practical implications, such as if I have a meeting at 11 am, I can barely focus on doing any deep thinking, or deep work.
I can't get into flow. I can't get into content creation before that meeting. I know myself. I'm going to have to do quick tasks like team check-ins, emails, bits and pieces, responding to clients in my WhatsApp, and whatever it is. There are some things that come with the ADH brain that make focusing and getting into flow really good when it's good, but really hard if you already know that there's going to be some kind of interruptions in your day.
I like to get things out of the way. I know that life and business can throw surprises at you, and that's how I've been able to stay consistent, is that I'm not going to rely on things like energy, on things like willpower, on things like a wave of creative inspiration hitting me, when actually there's so much going on all the time. If I can get ahead and have one big to do checked off my list, I'll absolutely do that.
And quite honestly, I just hate the idea of doing two reels here, five reels here, one reel here. I love a good sprint of work. That's how I work. I love to clear the runway. I love that feeling of completion, and I love that feeling of knowing that I am two months ahead and no matter what comes up or what is thrown my way, I'm all good on the content side of things.
It also works really well for me because I've been creating content for seven years now. I had my YouTube as a side hustle when I was in corporate and Badass Careers has been going for years. So I've gone through the awkward phase of having to pretend that my camera is a friend when I chat to it and getting over the self-judgment and that negative self-talk like, “You look terrible, you sound terrible, oh that was such a stupid way to say it.”
I've done the inner work as well to get over all of those blockers that are going to hold you back in terms of imposter syndrome, perfectionistic thinking, overwhelm and all of that kind of thing. And as I said, the only way to get better and faster at content creation is to create, and I have done my share of creating.
So with all of that background in mind, this is why this particular strategy works really well for me. But please know that you do not have to post as often as I do. Remember, I'm doing this full-time, right? This is my full-time thing.
You also don't have to do as many face-to-camera reels, for example. A lot of people at the moment are using a bit of b roll, which is background footage, which doesn't require you to speak. It could be you walking, you on your laptop, you're doing your makeup, it doesn't seem to matter. You can put text over that with a trending sound, and that's also a content piece done.
I personally focus on face-to-camera reels because I believe in them as educators and experts that it's really important to build that value and trust using face-to-camera reels, but you don't need to do as many as I do. B roll content can carry a lot and it can reach a lot of people as well. So all of this being said, this is why this strategy is my strategy and works well for me, and hopefully you can learn a lot from it.
But again, you don't have to do it my way. Your brain may work in a completely different way.
[00:09:00] Laying the Groundwork: Strategy and Mindset for Content Creation
Concretely, how do I create two months of Instagram content? That's 45 reels in just two days. So firstly, let it be known that I would not be able to create this much content in such a short time frame had I not done the groundwork.
So that's where we need to start when it comes to content creation. We can only become master content creators and master batchers when we've done this groundwork. The groundwork includes things like your content strategy, and part of your content strategy is having a really clear niche.
I can create so much content because I know who I'm speaking to. I know exactly who they are, what they might need to hear, what they're going through right now, what they're struggling with, and how I can help them. When I was chatting to one of my clients the other day, and it was in our first ever kickoff call for private coaching, which was super exciting because we'd get to nail the niche and the direction.
And this particular client came to the call thinking that she wanted to help women with confidence and mindset. So improving your inner self-talk, the way you carry yourself, the way you feel about yourself, self-love, the way that you view the world, and the way that you view how incredible you are, all of that good stuff.
The profile was, a woman, 20 to 50 years old, who wants to feel more confident. And she said “I know that this is super vague, this is broad”. And she's right. I mean, if I were to create content for that kind of profile, I would be paralyzed. I would be completely overwhelmed, because the amount of things that you could speak about is so vast.
Where do you start? How do you decide? How do you know what message is going to resonate with them today? What kind of mindset and confidence work are you doing? Because the mindset and confidence work needed for a young student in her 20s to a 50 year old woman just coming out of a really rough divorce is a very different kind of content.
So we were having this conversation about what would it look like based on the person's background and based on what they've been through and why they want to speak about this topic in the first place. But also what would it look like if we were speaking to a single woman in her 20s. We want this woman to feel so secure, so good in her skin that she genuinely loves her own company.
She's thriving all on her own. She doesn't need a relationship to feel validated or to feel whole. That's only ever a bonus. So it's very much the woman in her 20s who's currently single or has come out of a relationship breakdown and feels like somehow she's on the back foot in life. You still get to speak to this person about mindset and confidence topics, but you're speaking directly to someone who's at a particular point in their life.
If you've personally been there, it makes the content ideas come so easily. If you can relate to this person, if you get it, if you understand where they're at, the content ideas are going to flow so much easier versus the overwhelm and the analysis paralysis and throwing stuff at the wall to seeing what sticks, when you've got a really vague idea of who you might be speaking to.
So having that clear niche is going to be really key because instead of saying something like “Here are five ways to improve your self-talk” and hoping that some woman out there from 20 to 50 years old resonates with it, you can say “Five ways to improve your self-talk after having come through a rough breakup.”
It's going to be a very different angle and the mission of your content in terms of building women up till they feel so strong, so good in their own skin, that a relationship's only a bonus. Like, you will not let these women into their thirties, thinking that they need anyone in order to have a happy and fulfilling life.
It's also a very different energy. People like to follow people who have a clear mission, who have a set of values, who have convictions that they can relate to. So all of this is going to help you when it comes to creating your content. Having that clear niche is absolutely necessary.
It's also really important in terms of the groundwork as part of that content strategy that not only do you have a clear niche and you know who you're speaking to, but you have very clear topics that you cover in your content and things that you don't speak to, things that you don't speak about.
So I like to call these your content pillars and your pebbles, okay? So it's very much giving ‘marble stone formation’. But essentially, you have three content pillars, and then you have three pebbles that fall out of each pillar. With Badass Careers, for example, my three pillars are clarity, branding, landing.
I'm in the career space and it's all about clarity, branding, and landing, for a very specific kind of person. Then if we look at the pebbles that live underneath the clarity pillar, we've got career purpose and self-awareness, but for career alignment (so knowing your strengths, knowing your values, knowing how your mind works, all of that good stuff) and growth mindset. So all of those sit under career clarity, essentially as a pillar.
Then under the branding pillar, my pebbles are resumes, cover letter, and LinkedIn. And then under my landing pillar, I've got my three pebbles, networking, interviews, and salary negotiation.
So because I am super clear on my content pillars and my pebbles, I know what I speak about and I don't get lost in what I don't speak about.
I worked in human resources for over 14 years. I could have easily spoken to things like women in leadership, learning and development at work, and landing internal promotions. There are so many topics navigating the workplace for success and being seen as a talent. There are so many topics I could speak to, but I don't. I want to make sure that my content creation is clear, specific, and helps to create that audience who are interested in the same kind of things and that community around the same kind of pillars.
So because I've done this groundwork and I know my content pillars and I know my content pebbles, I know that I don't need to go out there and become an expert as well on confidence in the workplace, for example, because it's not actually something that I speak to right now. It allows me to stay focused and it allows me to ideate within a frame, so that, yes I've got freedom, and yes I can play, and yes I can generate so many ideas, and get really creative with them, but at the same time, there are boundaries, and it helps me to stay on track.
It also means that if I have an idea pop up on my feed, on Instagram, I can think to myself, “Ooh, I could do that for careers” and then I think to myself “Where would it live?” I can decide in that moment, does it belong in my content strategy or not?
So there's a lot to be said for having that clarity from the get-go in terms of what is your niche, what are your content pillars and your pebbles, who are you speaking to, what are your topics and what are you known for. The frame of all of that actually giving you more creative freedom with more focus and less overwhelm than if I spoke to every single careers topic in existence.
[00:17:09] Day 1: Ideation and Planning for 45 Instagram Reels
So with the groundwork set and done, let's break down how exactly I split my time within these two days of content creation.
Day one is very much about ideating and writing. This is where I research, ideate, plan, and prepare my reel scripts. Assuming I'm working an eight-hour day that day, I would spend about two hours ideating those 45 reels, coming up with 45 reels concepts. And there are many different ways to ideate content. These days I could easily come up with six months plus of ideas in half a day. That’s just no brainer for me. And again, that's because I have been doing this for a while, but if you are new to ideating content, and this is a new muscle that you are learning to flex, here are three ways that will allow the ideas to flow in for your content.
The first is what I call an empathy session. Now, this is where you go on a date, an imaginary date, your ideal client avatar, this person who you're speaking to, and you sit down and you have a think about where are they at and what are they going through right now, and what's on their mind? It's imagining you're out for a coffee with them, just like with any other close friend and they're telling you about what's going on for them right now. This is why you really need to know this person so well.
What we're going to do is we're going to take your content pillars and your pebbles. So for each pebble, and you know you've got nine of them, right? Because you've got three pebbles under each pillar. You are going to call out a mistake that this person might be making, debunk a myth, a commonly believed myth that the industry or society in general likes to perpetuate about that particular thing, you can give a quick tip, you can share a personal story that relates to that pebble, something that you've been through or overcome in relation to that, you can answer a commonly asked question, you could give an actionable, step by step tutorial, you could challenge a limiting belief that they have about their ability to do that thing. And you could share a spicy conviction or opinion relating to that pebble.
So those are just eight different prompts that you could use against each of those nine pebbles. And each of those prompts generated an idea. For each of the nine pebbles, that's already eight times nine. That's already 72 content ideas in total.
So don't worry if you don't have something come to mind for each of those prompts against each of your pebbles, because you're already going to be generating more than enough ideas, even if you hit half of them. So that's what I like to call an empathy session.
The other thing you can do, of course, is market research. You could follow accounts in your niche, or ideally outside of your niche on TikTok or on Instagram. I personally follow a lot of accounts in the personal development space, career development, purpose, confidence, and all of that good stuff. As the weeks go by and I see something that inspires me, I save it on Instagram into my saved folder and I think to myself “How could I make it my own? How could it be related to careers? How could I inspire my person, with my take on a similar kind of topic?”
So of course, when you look out to the market and you see the content pieces that are blowing up, aka they have far more views and far more engagement, than the person's follow account, for example, if they've got 200,000 followers and this Instagram reel has a million views, it gives you precious data and information that the market really enjoyed that content piece far more than could ever be explained by audience size alone. So doing some market research is always a really good place to take some inspiration.
And I say inspiration because obviously, you would never ever copy a content piece. But think about “Why did this work, why did so many people like it, and how could I make it my own?”
Then the third idea to get plenty of content ideas is to look at your own content if you've already posted content. What's working well for you? Hop into your analytics to make sure that you sort your content analytics by popularity. That could be views, engagement, all of that good stuff.
And then for those content pieces that are already resonating and already working for you, ask yourself, “How can I create sister content for this?” This could be feed posts that you could turn into reels, this could be other reels you've already created. Whatever it is, ask yourself, “How can I create more like this?”
It's kind of like that 80/20 rule where 80 percent of your results are coming from 20 percent of the effort that you make. That is so true for content. You will see that it's that top 20 percent of content that is bringing in those views, those numbers, that engagement, that conversation. So once you find what's working for you, double down and make the most of it.
Now the reality is for me that I'm ideating all the time now. I have ideas for content pop into my mind when I'm in the shower, and whenever I open an app like TikTok or Instagram. I'm flooded with ideas because I've got the content creator mindset now. I've got the mentality and I know what I'm looking for.
Now once you've identified your ideas, the rest of the day, I've put here an estimate of six hours, I would spend fleshing those ideas out, which would mean maybe five to 10 minutes per reel to really flesh it out.
I would only put bullet points. I wouldn't script the reel because I find when you script things, you get into perfectionistic thinking, you stop-start too much and you overthink the whole thing. So really just a few speaking points.
What really helps is when you have your go-to structure of how you film a reel. So for example, it tends to open with a hook, that opening line or question to capture that attention, and then you have the value you want to add and these are your bullet points that you've fleshed out, and then you usually have some kind of call to action. That call to action can be for engagement, so conversation starters, or follow me, or it can be for sales or getting people on your list.
What really helps me here is that not only do I quickly flesh out the ideas with bullet points only of three tips or something that I want to share some value that I want to add, and what I actually want to say. But I actually have a content “base document” now where we have a list of 50 go-to hooks that we can use. We have the list of CTAs, calls to actions, that we use frequently. And that means that all of the sandwich of the reel I can just pick and choose and be like, “Oh, that would be a good hook for this kind of reel. Oh yeah, let me look at that list.” And that way I'm not having to come up with smart hooks from scratch every time.
I've got these formulas to plug and play. I grab a hook, which might be the number one secret to X, Y, Z, I have my bullet points for the value, and then I have my CTA, my call to action, which depending on the intent of the reel might just be a simple read the caption, follow for more, all the way through to comment ‘word’ below to watch my free masterclass.
So that's pretty much day one, very much dedicated to research, planning, and writing and making sure I feel very clear on what exactly I'm going to film and what those 45 reels contain.
[00:24:59] Day 2: Bringing Your Content to Life Through Filming
Day two is all around executing that and bringing it to life, aka filming and kicking off the editing process. Now, to be fair, I have been known to film 80, 90 reels in a day before, and I know that's a little bit extreme because, I mean, hey, I've been in the game for a while, I know what I'm doing. I'm very much at ease with the person I'm speaking to and my content pillars and all of that good stuff. But for the purposes of this episode, let's just keep it chill and imagine we're going for the 45 filmed in one day.
What I would do is divide the 45 reels into 5 different shooting locations for filming. This could be a specific corner of my house, in my car, it might be on my couch, the corner of my office, in my bedroom, it could be walking down my hallway. It could be more active shooting locations like I'm making a coffee, or I'm doing my makeup, or whatever it is, but I would split up the reels into filming locations.
Then I would choose five different tops that I can put on per location. It might be a blouse, a t-shirt, a blazer, whatever it is. Sometimes I'll even switch up my hairstyle as well. So I'll have a couple of hairstyles in mind to shake it up a little bit in addition to changing what I'm wearing up top as well.
Again, this makes life easy because I know if I'm wearing, say, my purple blouse and I've got my hair down and I'm going to be on my couch I'm going to film nine reels there, and once those nine are done, boom, I'm moving on. So I keep it super simple at this stage. All I have is a tripod for my iPhone and my iPhone in hand. I just use the front-facing camera, it's good enough.
What I do is, I actually use a tripod with the camera app on the iPhone. I'm not in Instagram at this point, and I do this so that I can just swipe across to the video option, hit record, and keep the footage rolling. I don't need to worry about any time limitations or anything like that, the Instagram app crashing and I don't need to use the filters within Instagram.
Filters are out anyway, people are so sick of seeing overly filtered faces. So I just keep it natural with nice lighting, and I will have that video footage rolling essentially. I try to get entire chunks filmed at once to make the editing process easier. So just say my reel has five points or sentences within it, I'll try to do one sentence at a time and I will keep filming until I've got that sentence, that one sentence perfect, which is obviously a lot easier now in that I will get it all out in one go and then I can take a breath, take a sip of water, look down at what the next sentence will be, and I'll come back to the camera and I'll go again.
So what this means is that for a one-minute reel I might actually have five minutes of footage. However, within that five minutes of footage, within that five minutes of filming, I know that I've got five clear, easy chunks to pull together that will be really quick in the editing phase.
As long as you take a nice big pause between your chunks, you look at that camera in the eye again, and you take a moment before you start speaking again, then when you edit it together, it will look like you've just pretty much been chatting the whole way through. Actually, to be completely fair, social media comes across as more authentic or whatever you want to call it when there are cuts, and people can tell that you've filmed in clips anyway. That's kind of just that jumpstart style that people are used to anyway.
So that's pretty much it. Could take about, I would say on average, three to five minutes for each reel that I film, each face-to-camera talking reel that I film.
[00:28:55] Editing and Scheduling: The Final Steps to Content Mastery
Now when it comes to the editing process, I do have a team behind me now. I do have a video editor. So I have my wonderful editor who can help me out. How it works is that I will airdrop the files from my iPhone over to my Macbook and I will name them, organise and upload them to Google Drive.
Google Drive is important because yes, I could attach the file already within our sort of project management software within ClickUp, but it loses quality. I like Google Drive because it retains its full quality. So all of the raw files will go into our Google Drive and then we use ClickUp to basically like a Kanban-style board to manage the editing flow and process.
So, if you can imagine several columns I've got to film, edit, caption and cover photo, schedule, to post. We create a card per reel with the title, the script inside, the link to the trending audio, with whatever we need, and we drag that card along the process, and it automatically assigns the relevant person, depending on where we're at.
My editor will get pinged when we need to edit it, the person who then captions and schedules them will get pinged when the card is dragged into their column, and so on and so forth.
Now, ClickUp is amazing when you are working across multiple different people and multiple different work streams, but it is quite complex, so I would honestly start out more so with a program like Asana, which has less features, but it's a lot clearer and easier to use.
Whether you have an editor or you're doing your own editing, essentially what we would do is we would edit that base reel using a program like iMovie if you're working on a Macbook. Then we would pull it into the Instagram app to add the bells and whistles to add the text, and add the pop-ups and that kind of thing.
Obviously, they'd never go out and say it, but I do believe that Instagram prefers content that has used its native features in order to add the text and everything. The auto caption feature is there. It can therefore read that auto caption for SEO purposes. I do think where you can, you should try to do that final stage within the Instagram app. However, good content is good content and it will absolutely blow up even if you edit it outside of the app, of course.
If you just want to do everything in one place, edit the base reel plus add the text and the captions, whatever you want to do with it, then I would recommend CapCut because it's free and super easy to use.
Then for the final stages, you want to caption your reel and put a cover photo on there. I have noticed less and less beautiful, built-out in Canva cover photos being used. Most people just take the hook in the first few seconds of the reel itself and find a nice frame, and use that for the cover photo that's a feature within the app.
Now you can directly schedule those reels within the Instagram app itself. Before we were using the Facebook creator studio backend or later, but now we just do it directly within the Instagram app and it's easy peasy.
Now, looking back at the earlier phases of my journey, I would estimate that I took on average about 30 minutes to go through the entire flow from editing to scheduling a reel. So that would be two to three hours per week of editing work if you're doing five face-to-cameras or talking heads like I am.
So once you finish the creation process of researching, planning, identifying, scripting, and filming your reels, and you've got them there, the 45 reels ready to go, I would then just do the editing in batches so that you can be running a few weeks ahead at any one time.
[00:32:45] Bonus Tips: Leveraging B-Roll for Quick and Effective Content
Now as a bonus tip for you, it's not the focus of this episode, but I would absolutely create a b-roll folder. This is a folder full of b-roll footage of you. It can be you walking, working, talking on the phone, typing on your laptop. Whatever it is, whatever's relevant to you, just doing daily life and make sure you have this big, beautiful folder of clips of you that are six to 10 seconds long.It doesn't have to be any longer than that.
You can use that b-roll footage to create really quick reels on the go. This is great if you're running behind, or if you want to compliment your strategy. So just say you only want to, or have time to, do two face-to-camera talking head reels per week and put out another few that are b-roll only.
Essentially it means that you have footage of you that doesn't require any further creation. You take the footage of you, you slap a trending audio on top of it, you put some text on it, something that's thought-provoking, maybe a little bit spicy, an opinion of yours, a mic drop moment of yours. And that works as a great content piece as well. It is far quicker to create than anything that I've just walked you through in terms of coming up with a full on face-to-camera talking head.
However, the risk is that these are great for views, they're great for visibility, but I still have a question mark on the depth of connection and conversion that they bring to your account. So just be aware of that. We all know that views and followers don't equal sales. They don't equal relationships.
They don't equal trust. So always make sure that you do still have some educational talking head in there as well.
[00:34:27] Your Next Steps in Content Creation
Well my badass, that was a juicy one. I know you would have found so much of value in this behind-the-scenes sneak peek of this process. I would love to hear from you over at Instagram. Send me a DM.
What's your biggest struggle when it comes to content creation? What's your biggest roadblock? What do you take the most joy in? What comes easily for you? And is there anything that I've shared in this episode that's going to change the game for you and change the way you do things going forward?
As always, I'm sending you lots of badass energy for that empire you're creating. Reign on, and I will catch you in the next episode.
