Latest / Imagine If with Doone Roisin | Health, Wealth & Wisdom for Women (formerly Female Startup Club Podcast) / Breaking Down Our Content System

Transcript

Breaking Down Our Content System · Imagine If with Doone Roisin | Health, Wealth & Wisdom for Women (formerly Female Startup Club Podcast)

• 0:09
  Oh, hey. Hello there. How's it going? Oh, you know, it's so good. Just so good. Having a great day. How are you? I'm good. I'm feeling the same. I feel like life's good. Lots of changes, but life's good.
• 0:25
  Life's good. There is lots of changes. I feel like we're going through a bit of a transition time over here at FSC. I know. These come across every once in a while, don't they? I wonder if there's a pattern to them, just in life in general. Sometimes it feels like there's these tectonic plates shifting and everything changes a little bit and then it settles again. Ooh, yeah. I hear what you're saying. I like it. I like what you're putting down.
• 0:52
  Let's see. I'll see if there's something happening in the stars, I'm sure. Yeah, please do. Please report back. So today we're talking about content. And I feel like this is such a, I don't know, a fun episode. We are great at content.
• 1:09
  Exactly. And so organic because of that as well. I think it came up because last week you mentioned how you often get asked the question, how people are like, how do you put so much content out all of the time? And it's just a great topic to get into, like give a peek behind the curtain about how we do it all, how we keep it organized, how we chose what channels to focus on in the first place.
• 1:35
  Yeah, give a bit of a sense of the behind the scenes magic that people consume on a daily basis. Yes. Oh, my God. I'm so excited. I also feel like now because we've started kind of like expanding and doing content for other people and other brands and, you know...
• 1:52
  putting some more content on the internet in different ways, it kind of like further, I don't know if you feel like this, but it kind of like further cements or like solidifies like the strategy and the process and the systems and the workflows and makes it even more like, oh, okay, now that we're like doing this, you know, a second time. And then now that we're
• 2:15
  clearer and clearer or something. You're kind of replicating this system that you've... The engine. That we've kind of worked to create over a couple of years and kind of fine-tuned here and there. And then, I don't know, sometimes you then question like, oh, is this how you should be doing this? Yeah. And then you kind of...
• 2:31
  Because what we're doing now with FSC is we're also starting to produce content for other brands, which is really exciting. We're kind of copy and pasting that process, doing it somewhere else and seeing how it works there. And it's a really kind of fun way to force yourself to look at how you're doing stuff and seeing what, you know, what makes sense, how to trim the fat. And even more reasons to kind of jump on here and share that process as we're going through that ourselves.
• 2:58
  Yes, let us take you through our content engine. How does it work?
• 3:05
  Where should we start? Yeah, I wanted to start off by kind of chatting overall strategy and the foundation when it comes to producing any kind of content and putting it out there. So for someone starting out now, like how do you decide which platforms to focus on? I feel like there's so much stuff out there. There are so many avenues to go down. There are 10,000 people telling you that this is the one set way. Kind of how do you navigate that in the early days? Yeah.
• 3:32
  Totally. Oh my gosh. There are so many channels. I was talking to someone the other day and he had 17 social channels. So there's the obvious ones like YouTube and Instagram and TikTok. But then of course there is still LinkedIn, Twitter or X, and then there's still Pinterest and there's still Tumblr and there's still like these other...
• 3:55
  Snapchat. Like if you're in the kind of like younger generation space, like Snapchat is so important. There are just so many channels. And I think it's like, especially when you're just starting out, it's so overwhelming to figure out where to start and like what to really focus on. But
• 4:11
  If it was me and if I was starting again tomorrow, I would be kind of asking myself, what channels do I like? Like, where do I actually hang out? Where is my customer hanging out? And what is the channel that I can really focus on as my kind of primary channel? And yes, maybe there's some like reposting and repurposing to, you know, if you're going to be like, yep, Instagram is my favorite channel and that's where I'm going to focus a lot of time, but maybe you're still repurposing to TikTok. Yeah.
• 4:37
  fine. But choosing the channel that you like, enjoy, that you want to build, that you know your customer is there and just like doubling down. And then only once that channel is kind of in action, you are consistently contributing to it. You're consistently showing up every single day doing stuff, then stacking other channels. And I think for us with Female Startup Club, I started
• 5:02
  the podcast first as a primary channel. And that was obviously, it was kind of accidental. It was for, you know, wanting to build my network, wanting to learn from really smart women who knew playbooks much better than I did. And yeah,
• 5:19
  The problem with like starting with a podcast is a podcast is like less discoverable in some ways in the sense that you then have to promote the podcast on other channels. So like if I was starting today, I would definitely not start with a podcast first or even probably a newsletter first because they become these different kind of beasts that require being marketed on other
• 5:48
  whatever I was selling, I would be focused on like cool Instagram or cool TikTok. And like those are the channels and stacking those first because when you're building a channel like a podcast or like a newsletter, that additional marketing mix is like absolutely required to get people to then go to those channels and listen to that content properly.
• 6:10
  But obviously for us, that's where we started. The podcast came first. Then I think we focused on Instagram or then I was kind of like focusing on FSC was a really small account at the time. It obviously started from zero followers, but I also had my own personal channel. So I was just talking between the two of those channels. And then at some point I started posting on TikTok, both for the business account and my personal account. And it was my personal account that
• 6:40
  Yeah, I think like for us having that kind of hero content that comes on the podcast first and then gets repurposed across all of our channels in very different ways makes sense now. But if I was just starting out, I would be picking like Instagram or TikTok as a primary channel and repurposing on the other one.
• 7:02
  Absolutely. And I think kind of when we first started out with, in the way that you're describing there, that we have the podcast and we're repurposing onto Instagram. That's also very much how it looked. We were directly taking content from the podcast and putting on our Instagram. It was very clearly a podcast Instagram page. And I think we quite quickly figured out that in order to grow,
• 7:27
  it was going to work better for us to lean more into this educational space and to kind of have the Instagram be its own kind of entertainment sphere on itself without necessarily linking back into the podcast very often. Yes, exactly. And that's where I come in. That's where you come in. That's where I come in. My wing woman.
• 7:48
  Exactly. And I kind of took over the Instagram part. And I'd say if we kind of divided into buckets, you're still very much TikTok podcast. And we worked together on the Instagram and on the newsletter.
• 8:03
  to kind of look into how we plan that content calendar and kind of what tools we use and how far we plan in advance. I feel like we've really kind of got into a good flow more recently, as we mentioned at the beginning of the podcast. So how we structure it is that every Monday is essentially asset day for me. So
• 8:24
  On Monday, I sit down, I open my Notion document, which is where we schedule all of our content for the week coming up ahead. And I make a little tab of every single piece of content that's going to be going out on Instagram. And we have a lot of stuff going out. And this document just really helps us to keep a track of that. So we have about three pieces of scheduled content going out every day. Then on top of that, you also have your kind of daily engagement. And I'll get into that later. Yeah.
• 8:52
  And I also think it's like for us, like repurposing is such a big thing where it's like there's this hero piece of content that comes on the podcast. Then it goes to the newsletter. Then it goes to Instagram or TikTok or both on my personal, on FSC. Then it also goes to LinkedIn. Then it also goes to YouTube Shorts. And it's like this whole system.
• 9:12
  And I think what we did well was we did like one channel at a time, stacked it, like I was saying before, really got it kind of the process and the system and the workflow smoothed out and then added in, you know, YouTube shorts at some point. We were like, okay, well, if we're reposting over here onto whatever, then let's also do it here. Or like, if we're already kind of pushing this content here, let's also put it on LinkedIn. Yeah.
• 9:35
  And kind of adding in those additional channels, even though we're not focused on, you know, the growth of those channels, we've still got content ticking along. And like YouTube, I think, is a great example where we have a lot of content parked there. We repost our...
• 9:51
  Reels to YouTube shorts, we have the podcast on the channel, and we only have like a few thousand followers or a thousand followers or something like that. But actually, we get a lot of views. And like from those views, we get a lot of traffic to the website. And like, it might only be, you know, 100,000 views at the end of the month or 200,000 views at the end of the month.
• 10:09
  But still, that all adds up over time and it only takes an additional tiny step to push it there as well and not really focus so much on the strategy. Whereas for us, we focus a lot of strategy on our Instagram and our newsletter and the podcast.
• 10:23
  Exactly. It's a great way to have this kind of it's a bit of a brainless channel for us in some ways. That's still a huge clog in that system and driving a lot of people back to us. I even get people in our DMs on Instagram like, oh, I found you on YouTube. Shut up. Oh my God, I love that. Yeah, I always forget that.
• 10:40
  You know, we're even on there because it just takes up less of your day, but it's just as important. And that's a great example for how when you produce content in one space, it's not isolated for Instagram. For example, if we create a static post where we're repurposing a tweet and we put our own spin on it and we have a caption there.
• 11:01
  that post will also act as a bit of a navigator for what our audience wants to hear and what they want to hear us talking about. So we'll often have that something will really kick off on a tweet post like this and it will start a conversation in the comments or people really want to get involved and then we know okay this is something that people want to talk about. We add it to our list for what's going to be spoken about in the newsletter and then we
• 11:27
  flesh that out into a bigger blog post at some point later on. So all of these things are also kind of flags for what you think is going to work well on another platform, which is really cool to see how that all comes together when you have all of these different channels and how easy that actually becomes because you're very rarely in the space of...
• 11:47
  you know, fully questioning what am I going to speak about today or where am I even going to get started? Because there are so many loose threads from which to go off when you have that Instagram strategy nailed. And when you have that trust with your community on there, that really feeds into every single other channel, which is brilliant.
• 12:07
  I wonder how many pieces of content we post across all of our channels. Like if we were to think about LinkedIn, Twitter, the Facebook group, YouTube Shorts, Instagram, my Instagram, TikTok, personal, TikTok brand, TikTok brand US, YouTube, YouTube Shorts, podcast and the newsletter. I'm like, I've...
• 12:30
  I don't know. I feel like it's going to be like a couple hundred pieces of content. But I feel like we need to actually circle back for a second and be like, okay, cool. If you are kind of just getting started, you're a small business owner and you need to figure out your content engine, like where do we start? And actually, just before I forget, because...
• 12:47
  We've been through this many times. And I was talking to one of my coaching clients the other day, and we were talking about these tools like LATER. I'm sure there's more of them, like the social media scheduling tools. And I just want to say upfront, I'm not a fan. I just don't relate to these platforms. I think they're more hassle than they're worth. And I don't like them. Yeah.
• 13:08
  There. I've said it. I've said my point. I've said it. We've put it out there. We've tried to use those damn platforms multiple times and they make it harder, not easier. And it always makes it harder. Exactly. And I also, I mean, maybe don't quote me on this, but I feel like the algorithm doesn't love them. I feel like the algorithm knows when you're not using the platform itself for these things and...
• 13:29
  I've always felt our reach plummeting as well. Plus, it doesn't offer a lot of tools that are useful to you. So what the Instagram algorithm loves is they're often bringing out new tools, new stickers, new kind of crazy things to try out. And they love it when you actually use these things because...
• 13:48
  You know, people at Instagram have spent a lot of time creating these things. And they love it when you use their tools. But the thing, the tricky thing with these scheduling apps is that you often, they don't catch up with Instagram. And for when these tools come out. So something that's popular at the moment, these collaboration posts.
• 14:07
  You can't even schedule something on there with the collaboration posts. You can kind of tell it to give you a signal for when you want to post it, and then it will give you a little notification that you still have to manually go on there and post it yourself. So at the end of the day, like you said, I also find these tools...
• 14:24
  kind of end up taking a lot more time than they have. And this actually came up in a book that I was reading yesterday called, the chapter was called Counter Productivity. And for me, it's a great example of something that's sold to you as something that's gonna save a lot of time, but actually at the end of the day,
• 14:42
  By the time you familiarize yourself with the platform, by the time you run into all of these issues and tech issues and limitations here and limitations there, you actually might as well just kind of stuck with what you were doing before. And what we have found working for us is it used to come with a lot of bugs, but it's been really brilliant lately is just scheduling within the Instagram app itself. So on a Monday, I schedule everything.
• 15:06
  Beam on the platform. It's already a platform that you're familiar with. You can create the content on there and then it's scheduled for the week ahead, which is just really great. We use that first Monday as kind of like a base schedule. So we know we have three pieces of content going out every day and that's definitely happening.
• 15:24
  And we do this weekly and not a month ahead or two months ahead, because I think the nature of our content is that it's very much on the pulse and it's very much kind of relevant with what's going on at the time. Which brings me to another kind of piece of this puzzle, which is really important, which you really taught me and also remind me of a lot, is how important it is to consume content yourself and to know what's going on in this space.
• 15:52
  Yes, this is what I was about to say. So to have some time every day to just consume and read and see what's going on and what language people are using and what the topics are. And yeah, you're probably better explaining this because you taught me this one. But keeping in the loop. Keeping in the loop.
• 16:11
  Exactly. Yeah. I think like something that we do a lot, and then I'm going to pair this back to like, if you're a solo founder, what I would do, you know, if I was starting tomorrow kind of vibe, but like what you and I do a lot is back and forth on Instagram. So like we're sharing content with each other. That's cool. I'm constantly being like, this is cool. This is cool. This is cool. We should try this. We should try this. We should try this. What about this? Let's do it differently. Like that kind of vibe. I have ongoing swipe files for different things in my phone as well. So I'll have like, you know, bookmarked for, you know,
• 16:40
  I'm wanting to outreach to that person and I want to work with them in this way or bookmarked for here are content ideas that I think I can like take inspiration from and replicate for our niche or here are memes that I like in a totally different industry. But like, here's how it could work for us. I save a lot of content or share it with you or screenshot it or whatever it is.
• 16:59
  And then when I'm doing kind of like, you know, a bit of a blitz on great, let's create some new styles of content. Then I'm like opening up my swipe file again and being like, cool, what did I like about that? And what did I like about that? And kind of pulling things together. And I think for me, and I tell this to my coaching clients that I work with is it's like...
• 17:19
  Choose a time once a week. Let's say it's a Monday. You want to dedicate, okay, an hour in the diary or two hours in the diary being like, cool, let's do like a bit of a research, pull together, find some ideas and commit to creating kind of like these pieces of content.
• 17:35
  Ideally, if they're repeatable kind of content series that you can just keep doing rinse, repeat, rinse, repeat while it's still working, amazing. Or building kind of like this week I'm doing three pieces of content. It's going to be me on a green screen outlining your content plan for the week. So like research, decide what that content is going to be, commit to it, and then skip.
• 17:56
  schedule into your calendar when you're going to produce that content. So it might be straight away following that hour of research, or it might be, yep, cool, I do it every day in the morning from eight till nine golden hour or whatever it is. And
• 18:12
  When then like, if you're like, you know, solo founder working on your business alone, when you're in a 10 minutes idle time, you're commuting or you are in the bath or something like that being like, cool, I've got 10 minutes. Let's just go through and find some cool content for today. And like do that every day where you're just, again, keeping your finger on the pulse, seeing what's working, seeing what's trending and then being like, cool, how can I just like create something like this today? Especially if it's something topical or something.
• 18:42
  you realize, oh shit, it's Met Gala. Okay, great. What am I saying? How am I like chiming into this kind of moment that everyone's chiming into? And how can I apply this to my brand or my content style and kind of like think about it daily? Social media as well.
• 18:57
  It's meant to be fun. We need to be having fun creating like lol entertaining content or educational content that is, you know, getting a response and getting attention from people. It doesn't just happen with boring or crap content. Like you've got to like put in that time and that effort and that energy and that love to...
• 19:19
  you know, find content that is worthy of getting eyeballs on it and like trying new things and just putting yourself out there basically. And yeah, I guess like researching different types of content that you can try. And so if Instagram is your channel, you should be on Instagram every day being like, cool, what's cool today? Or like, what could I create? And then just creating the thing and posting it and seeing if it works, you know?
• 19:42
  Yeah, and observing your own behavior in that. So if you find something funny, and it does, it has performed well on there, the chances are that someone else will feel the same about that thing. And very rarely does kind of a post pick up that hasn't had that kind of like background seeped into it. So you want to kind of know in advance that something's going to hit in some way. And
• 20:04
  I think this daily kind of research and getting that stuff really in your brain is so helpful, especially I have a notes app in my both in my phone and my laptop as well, which is like content copy inspo, something like this. And if I see a word that just keeps coming up and resonates, I just write it in there. And then I know by the time Monday comes around and I'm creating that content, for example, confessions kept coming up last week and I said, oh, I love that word. Let's see if I can incorporate it somehow. Yeah.
• 20:31
  And over time, you just build this bank. And it's the same with the conversation we have with each other. And now if you're a solo female business owner, you can also create that conversation with yourself, right? You were telling me just before this call that you have a broadcast channel with yourself and WhatsApp. You can...
• 20:47
  keep that as a space in which you send yourself these links and make sure all that content is in one place. Because for me, by the time Monday rolls around, it's an absolute gift to just be able to open this chat, see so much content that's resonated with both of us that week and see how we can repurpose and tweak and get inspiration from that for us.
• 21:06
  Totally, totally. Yeah, social media is fun. I just love organic content and kind of like lol entertaining or educational content that makes you feel something. When you can get into a rhythm and you start finding things that work for you and you start finding things that you feel excited about creating.
• 21:26
  I don't know. It's just a fun little vibe. Fun little vibe in there. Exactly. And you want to keep that fun up because, you know, it is that consistent effort and that daily chipping away at it that's going to make the difference at the end of the day. I think we see that with, you know, Instagram and TikTok more than anything else, this 1% effect. And you want to keep having fun every day. You don't want to fall out of love with that process. And yeah, so the more fun that you can make it for yourself, the better.
• 21:56
  The better. Love. The better. Love. Love this. Wait, did I say that TikTok did get banned? Is that what happened? Is that a thing? Did it happen yesterday? I've been online yesterday. Wait.
• 22:10
  I feel like my husband told me something. Like, it's happened. It's going to court or like something. I'm probably getting it wrong. I think Trump has come out to support TikTok. Oh, okay. I don't know. I'm going to research it after we're doing that. Let's circle back on the current status of TikTok in the US. Tune in next week. Also, I'm like, it's July. Where is TikTok Shop Australia? It's meant to be here. Yeah, I know. What's happening with that? I know.
• 22:38
  I don't know. I haven't heard any updates. I feel like it's not happening in July. Yeah. I mean, it's fast approaching, right? We have one week left, so it doesn't look like it. Also something to check back with us. Yeah, we need to know. Anyway. Anyway. Great pod. Let us know what you want next. Thanks for this slightly chaotic episode. I hope you've enjoyed it. And yeah, let us know if there's any topics that you'd like us to cover. Let us know. That's the pod. That's the pod.
• 23:11
  Hey, it's June here. Thanks for listening to this amazing episode of the Female Startup Club podcast. If you're a fan of the show and want even more of the good stuff, I'd recommend checking out femalestartupclub.com where you can subscribe to our free newsletter. We send it out weekly covering female founder business news, insights and learnings in D2C, and interesting business resources.
• 23:36
  And if you're a founder building an e-commerce brand, you can join our private network of entrepreneurs called Hype Club at femalestartupclub.com forward slash Hype Club. We have guests from the show joining us for intimate Ask Me Anythings, expert workshops, and a group of totally amazing, like-minded women building the future of D2C brands.
• 23:58
  As always, please do subscribe, rate and review the show and post your favorite episodes to Instagram stories. I am beyond grateful when you do that.