You. This is the show for creative entrepreneurs who have a message to share and want to live a life of freedom. Learn how to grow your network and net worth. Hear from exciting guests and more. My name is Dylan Schmidt and welcome to Digital Podcaster. You are listening to Digital Podcaster. My name is Dylan Schmidt. Today I want to outline for you a 60 day plan to create content. Now, who's this for? This is ideal for someone that is just getting into content creation. Maybe you're kind of sure about what you want to talk about, but you really don't know how to find success. You don't know how to get traction going. Maybe you've started and stopped a bunch of times. Maybe you just need a plan to follow. If you're like me, this is what I wish I would have had. This is also for someone who's already created content but has fallen off or is just like, tired of the whole thing because it feels very abstract. For myself, I know that I do best with challenges. I do best with things that I got to push myself to do. And so the idea for this outline for creators came to me from the idea of 75 hard, which I believe is by a man named Andy Frizella. Might be saying his name wrong. Here's the thing. I don't know exactly what 75 hard is. I don't know the specifics of it. I've never done it. The closest thing to that, and I think it's not actually that similar, is the whole 30, I guess, which is like, basically eat organic foods for 30 days. I did that quite a few years back. But the 75 hard, from what I understand, reading about it very briefly, just as part of including it in my email newsletter, was saying. And what I found is that the 75 hard is part fitness challenge, part nutrition challenge, and part personal growth challenge. So that basically got me thinking, popped in my head, what would a challenge like 75 hard look like for content creators? And so that's where I came up with this 60 day challenge. And I could have done 75 day, 75 days of content creation. Something about 60 days to me, seems just enough. It feels like a good point. 75 feels like a lot, and content creation is already overwhelming enough. Not to say that you couldn't do this for 75 days, but I think 60 days is a great place to start. So this is version one of the outline, and this is basically what I did when I first started, except I didn't know that I was doing it. And it helped me grow my platform, and it helped me get some wheels going. But I wish I would have had this because it would have been able to allow me to divvy up my time better. And I could have just scheduled this instead of being like, I'm always doing this thing, it's either all or nothing. And so if you identify with any of the things I'm saying so far, this is what you should be doing and this is what I did. And this is what a lot of others do that don't talk about it. So 60 days of content creation, we're going to go through it real quickly. And then I'll just break down a little bit each more. So it is 123-4567 tasks that are done each week. Some of them are done daily. Some of them are done just once a week. There's publish consistently once a week. There's engage your audience 15 minutes daily. There's improve your skills, that's 15 minutes daily. There's trend research, that's ten minutes daily. Collaborate and network, 30 minutes each week. Self review and analyze, 30 minutes each week. And reflect, 20 minutes each week. So let's go through those just a little bit more and break them down. So that if you're going to be doing this challenge, you know what you're doing first is publish consistently once per week. So this is where you would pick a platform and publish at a consistent frequency for the 30 days, or, sorry, 60 days. If you're a podcaster, you might choose one episode a week that you're going to publish. And that's it. And that's totally cool. You don't need to do everything. I'm not saying post everywhere, all that stuff. It's literally just publish consistently once per week or however many times per week based on what you need to do. Now, I leave this up to you because you don't need to be a podcaster. This could be for any platform you choose. But the idea behind this is 60 days of content creation for one platform. Not all the platforms, just one platform that you are choosing. If you do other platforms, that's totally cool. But that's outside of the challenge that I'm listing here. So if you're like myself, you're not very comfortable with LinkedIn, for example. You might use all of this for just LinkedIn, which I should be doing now that I say that out loud. Or you might want to use this for podcasting or YouTube, whatever you choose, but publish consistently. And you know you're publishing consistently when you choose the frequency at which you're going to publish and you hit it. So for myself, with this podcast, for example, I publish consistently every Tuesday. Now, if I didn't publish consistently every Tuesday and I missed a week, that wouldn't be consistent, right? So for me, if I was just starting out and I didn't have this, I would go, when am I going to publish? Okay, I'm going to choose Tuesdays, and then I'm just going to publish every Tuesday for 60 days. And then the next one goal here is engage your audience for 15 minutes each day. That's things like responding to comments, responding to DMs, or feedback that people give you. And here's the thing if you're starting from scratch, you're not going to have much of an audience, right? We all start with zero and you might not really get any comments or DMs, things like that. For myself, I get overwhelmed, actually by sometimes comments and DMs because at first there was nothing, so I was able to reply to everything. And then as it went on and as I implemented the things I'm talking about here, it gets harder and harder and you want to respond to everything and I think sometimes you can, depending on what life has got going on for you, but it's not always possible. So engage your audience though. And if you're just starting out with nobody and you still allot 15 minutes for this, which I think you should, instead of responding to comments that you're getting, or DMs that you're getting, this could just be outreach. Like, this could be leaving comments or leaving or DMing somebody or giving feedback on something constructive feedback. So while you might not be engaging your audience in the very beginning, if you don't have enough engagement on your own platform to fill that 15 minutes, you could always go to someone else's platform and engage with them. And then when it comes to the next one, is skill improvement. So 15 minutes each day dedicated to improving your craft. This could be things like storytelling techniques that you want to learn, that you want to pick up on, that you want to get better at, or it could be writing. And the idea behind the improving the skills is you're going to be improving all of your skills and all of these things, but the idea is like a specific thing that doesn't necessarily need to be published. So it could be learning something, it could be watching something, reading something. But the idea here is that it's dedicated to one specific focused skill improvement. I know for myself, especially early on, it was a lot of marketing. Like, I wanted to improve my skills as a marketer, so I would read marketing books or I'd read business books or product books. I still do this, I still improve my skills, but whatever it is, and I still read podcasting books and I still read all of these subjects that I talk about a lot. I still actively focus on improving my own skills around that. But 15 minutes each day, every day for 60 days will dramatically change your skills by the end of it. The next one is trend Research, and this is ten minutes each day. So this would be spending ten minutes each day keeping up with platform trends and updates. This is mainly to help make sure that your content that you're posting is relevant. I see a lot of people do stuff repeatedly without any change in effect that it has on the content that they're creating, but they'll keep doing it because they're comfortable doing it. And that to me, is the sign of a result of not keeping up with platform trends. So if you're constantly posting in one type of format, if you were doing something for Instagram, for example, and you're not seeing any change, well, it's likely not your content at that point. It might be the format and just simple updates. The algorithm that the platform has made, you'll never probably stay on top of like no one's, I don't know, really on top of every algorithm update because it's changing so frequently. But there are some general trends and updates that do happen that if you're going to be on top of it and you're going to be publishing it, you might as well be up to date on it. And for podcasting that might be researching the latest, I try to post a lot of this in my newsletter that I publish every Tuesday and Friday. Important things that I think you should know. So Trend Research could honestly just be looking in the newsletter, seeing a link that I provide and then spending the three minutes, five minutes, whatever, reading through what it is that I linked in there, but things like that. The next thing is collaborating and networking. And this is 30 minutes each week, which might seem low to spread out 30 minutes for a whole week, but it's again, this approach to all or nothing. I either don't collaborate at all or I'm constantly collaborating and then I'm going to lead to burnout. So collaborating and networking, here how I list it, is reaching out and engaging with fellow content creators that's commenting on their work, discussing possible collaborations with them, or just like simply interacting through DMs, things like that. It doesn't have to be this conscious, what can we do for each other kind of thing. It could just be as simple as just building relationships, but that's a form of collaboration and networking, right? Next is self review and analyze. This is hard for so many of us, I know, because it causes us to confront and use the more analytical side of our brain that's not as creative and fun and careless and in the clouds and all that good stuff. But this would be 30 minutes weekly and this would be reviewing your content's performance and figuring out what works best for your audience besides what you want to make, what is your audience responding to. And the reality is most content creators just kind of like skim through their analytics after they post maybe an hour or that day, they look at their analytics. But rarely do creators go back about a week or a month later and then at a broad overview, really kind of go through and review like, what did they put out there and how did the audience respond? We don't live in a time where we publish to social media and only our direct followers find it, right? I have an account that I experiment with on Instagram and it has, like, 300 followers. But I posted a video yesterday or the day before, like 100,000 views. And that's not because of the followers, necessarily. That's because content is being shown worldwide and it caught on. So analyzing that after it's been like, three or four days, because if I analyzed it within the first day or two, it would be really confusing and be like, maybe this wasn't that successful, but it really took until the third day to really take off. So reviewing your content's performance and figuring out what works best for your audience can do wonders for improving your content and having a deeper understanding of how people view you. And then the last of these goals is reflection. So this would be something you do for 20 minutes weekly, and this would be taking a break from creating more content and more reflecting on your own journey. Jotting down any insights or changes that you want to make to what you're doing. And this could be unrestricted, just like, say it all in a journal. Don't worry about structuring it because you're not creating content, you're just reflecting. And the best way to reflect on your own journey is not through trying to share and then edit at the same time. It's just like free writing, free. Write down anything that comes in your mind and then really give yourself the opportunity to just say what it is that you're doing. You might find in there that it's dumb, whatever you're doing. And you're like, this is not what I want to be doing at all. You want to change things up, and that's okay. But I think having dedicated time for that is really important. And it's 20 minutes each week, but that would save you so much time on the back end or doing the same thing repeatedly for super long before you reflect on it. And then you get a coach like me who's like, so why are you doing this? And you're like, I don't know. No one's ever asked me that before. You can ask yourself that now and just simply take a break. 20 minutes break each week. So that's the 60 days of content creation that I would recommend. And I think that so many people who do this will be surprised at what could happen in just 60 days. And the whole thing breaks down to around seven to 9 hours a week, depending on what you're going to be publishing and how frequently. And I wanted to make it like a challenge, right? So it's not something that's like, oh, you just do this in your sleep. It's not automatic. It's challenging you. That's the point. And you don't have to do it this way forever, but it's forcing you to have a 360 approach to what it is that you're creating. And also it's intentional. And it's made for people who don't have full time jobs creating content, because that's a different thing so many people I talk with, they look at what I'm doing, and they're like, I want to do what you're doing. I want to maybe make digital products. I want to sell digital products, or I just want to make a living doing this thing. Here's the first step. Everything I'm outlining here is the first step into how you can get that momentum, how you can get that traction. It's not by just, like, winging it constantly and then burning yourself out and then stopping for, like, a couple of months and then starting again. That's not how you do it. You got to be intentional about how you do it and have a plan around it, and this is that plan. So if you do this, it would be awesome if you message me saying that you're doing it, and then when you're done with it as well, and let me know how it was for you. So definitely don't message me how awesome it was before 60 days, because you got to do it the full 60 days. If you're going to do it, do the challenge right, and I hope to hear from some of you doing it, because it's a game changer, and that feels like a cliche word to say these days, but it really will change your game, your content creation game forever. I know. All right, that's it for this episode. I hope you enjoyed. I will talk to you in the next one. Bye.