Hi everyone! How are you doing? Welcome back to Lavendaire.
So if you've seen my 2018 goals video, you may know that one of my goals this year
is to get better at planning ahead for my content, getting more organized with my channel.
So today I've partnered up with Trello to show you
how I plan and organize my content for my videos.
So first off, the biggest question that I always get is:
Where do I get my ideas for my content?
How do I come up with new ideas?
Generally, most of my ideas come from whatever I'm going through at the moment,
whatever I'm currently learning, whatever I'm currently inspired by.
So sometimes it's life lessons, things that have happened to me that I want to share about.
Or it could be books that I'm reading that are really inspiring me at the moment.
Whatever lessons I'm learning from the book, I'm usually dying to share about it.
Other times, ideas might come from writing morning pages or meditating.
So you guys know about morning pages.
It's where I stream-of-consciousness journal in the mornings.
And usually I just word vomit whatever's in my mind.
And it's funny because lessons and insights will just flow onto the page,
and when I read back, I'm like, "Whoa, that's really good. I should share that."
So I get a lot of ideas from journaling, and when I'm meditating, when I'm sitting in silence,
I'll have thoughts pop up.
Usually they're random thoughts, but sometimes they're actually good ideas.
I feel like I get a lot of inspiration when I do those two things because it's where I'm
more in tune with my spirituality.
Lastly, I get a lot of ideas from you guys.
I love collecting feedback on topics you want me to talk about,
usually from comments on my videos, Instagram, even emails or DMs.
I'll read what you guys suggest and I'll collect them on my Trello, which I'll show you in a bit.
Trello is the app that I use to organize my content ideas
and bigger projects like my Artist of Life Workbook,
and also to organize my task to-dos with my assistant, Alice.
Trello is a productivity app that helps you manage your work.
Whenever you need to manage big projects and lists in your life.
You can create boards for each project and lists within that board,
and also cards to help you organize tasks or any information you want to collect, basically.
I love that you can move lists around.
You could rearrange them, rename them.
And you could do the same thing with cards as well.
And also, you could put so much information onto cards which I love.
I love that you could put due dates, attach files, put comments, tag people.
It's really, really flexible, and so helpful.
There's also so many other ways you can use Trello.
You can use it to organize your recipes, plan out a home project,
plan out your job hunt, your creative process,
and just any other projects or lists that you can think of in your life.
The best part is: Core features of Trello and completely free,
so if you're interested in trying it out, you can click the link in the description below.
Alright, so here is my Trello board for content ideas.
And this is where I'll generally input my random ideas.
So when I have an idea, I think I would usually put it into "Ideas" or "Great Ideas".
Great Ideas are just ideas that I like more or ideas that I think will do better.
And then these are more general ideas that maybe I just haven't felt the spark for.
And then "Up Next" are my upcoming videos that I plan to do.
I don't always stick to it.
I definitely always like moving things around or moving great ideas onto Up Next,
and just playing around with it,
which is why I love Trello because I love the flexibility of using cards
because my mind's always changing.
This year I'm trying to create my series and organize my content, so I generally –
I did some research here on what were the top videos that people liked on my channel.
And then I basically wrote the idea for series here
and then I decided to make a separate list for series.
So within each of these are ideas.
So these are personal growth ideas.
These are self care video ideas, habit video ideas, journaling video ideas,
organizing ideas and inspiration, dream life series. You get the picture.
I'm trying to just get better at organizing ideas.
Moving over to this side of the board, I have suggestions.
At first I started inputting your suggestions into cards,
but it took a long time.
So now I just input it into a Google Sheet.
So here's my 2018 Feedback sheet I just started.
This is the Google Sheet for feedback and video ideas.
I have Alice help me input this.
So whenever you guys comment on Instagram or YouTube, we'll put some ideas up here and
I love how we have it organized.
And then this is just my system that I used last year for 2017.
Same thing, I had a category, put it all your suggestions, category, all your suggestions,
which I copy and pasted.
And the blue highlighted ones are ones – I think it's ones that I liked or ones
that I was planning on doing.
So skincare routine I did, travel packing I did.
And then this doc is just one that I created long ago, maybe 2015.
And I keep it around in case I want to pull any ideas from this one as well.
The rest of these are just other ideas like vlog ideas, podcast topic ideas.
But I really don't spend that much time back here.
This last list are just reminders, things that I want to remember, Q&A folder, just random things.
So sometimes I will put notes in each card, of what I want to include in the videos, like this.
But for the most part, I just write the title here and I flesh out the video ideas onto a Google Doc.
So this is my "Just Write 2018" Google Doc where I flesh out my video ideas.
If you see here,
I basically have a doc for every single year since I started Lavendaire.
So we have 2014, 15, 16, 17, and 18.
So usually – this is 2017's version – the top is where I put reminders for myself
as I'm shooting my content, what I want to focus on and stuff.
And then if you scroll down, you have the month that we're currently in
and then the video title, and then I flesh out the video ideas.
Usually I just do an outline. I don't write exact scripts.
So here are some future ideas for videos that I'm fleshing out.
And then after that, I have "February & later",
and then these are just other ideas that I have fleshed out from the Trello.
And then at the bottom of the doc I have a "Done" pile.
So these are just ideas that I've finished and so I just want to put them
at the end of the doc because I don't really want to look at them again,
and yet I don't want to delete them completely.
As you can see, this was my previous video, the "How to Make a Plan For Your Life".
This is basically what I'm looking at when I'm making this video.
I just have an outline and then I just talk from there.
By the way, I also try to plan out my thumbnails for each video
because thumbnails are increasingly important,
so I always just brainstorm what kind of photo would be good to match this video.
And then lastly, I also pay attention to different ways that I can title this video.
So ways that I do title research are: I use the YouTube search bar
which is great for kind of giving you an idea
of what other people are searching for, what's popular.
Make sure you open an incognito window in Chrome
so that you don't use your YouTube search history.
So go to YouTube.com.
You see how this is a fresh version of YouTube?
So I would type out "how to plan your…"
So I see that "plan your day", "plan your life", "plan your week".
These are popular and more searched.
So my other options were "how to plan out your life" which is still there.
So if you're trying to compare between two or three video titles,
then another tool that I love using is Google Trends.
So in Google Trends, you can search the popularity of different search terms.
So I would be like…what was my other option?
"Make a life plan".
Okay, so for example, with these search terms, "plan your life", "plan out your life" vs "make a life plan",
you see the differences in the popularity and this is what I factor in when choosing my video titles.
Lastly, I use a tool called "TubeBuddy Tag Explorer".
It's an extension for YouTube.
So I would type in my video title, "how to plan your life",
and then I'll get most used tags related to this title.
And it could also help you craft a better title or it could just give you ideas for tags.
Alright, I hope you liked this overview of how I plan and organize my content.
As always, if you have video suggestions, podcast ideas for me, leave them down below.
I love to read and collect all your feedback.
And also, you know, I'm trying to plan ahead with my content this year, so I need new ideas.
Alright, have a beautiful day.
Love you all so much, and I'll see you next time. Bye!