EASY WAYS TO REFRESH YOUR CONTENT CALENDAR | EP. 130

This week, we’re talking about super easy ways to fill your content calendar all year.

If you’re anything like me, you’re always looking for new ways to keep the ideas coming. Because creating content is not easy. In fact, creating content can be really hard. And one of the hardest things is coming up with ideas. It’s easy to lose motivation when you don’t have a consistent flow of ideas.

But your audience is counting on you to be consistent. The reason they tune in each week is because they expect you to deliver more new content, so you need to create great habits to keep that content flowing.

So how do you create more new content in your niche, in your industry, in your field? How can you come up with new content, refresh your content, extrapolate, and bring those ideas to bear to fill your content calendar?

Here are my three favorite habits for you to develop:

Add clarity.
Dive deeper.
Share remixes.

FILL YOUR CONTENT CALENDAR IDEA #1 – ADD CLARITY

You don’t necessarily have to have a brand new idea to fill out your content calendar. You can make an old idea new by adding clarity to existing content and experiences.

Add clarity to old content

When you’ve already created something, especially if you’ve been podcasting or creating YouTube channel videos or blogs, looking backward is a great way to create things forward. What I mean is you should be looking at older content to source new ideas.

For example, when I wanted to talk about my personal branding framework in Episode 74, I actually brought back clips from Episode 1. I shared quotes from that previous interview, then reflected on what those clips meant to me and the information and insight I had derived from them.

I used that old content to form my whole new episode and to really hone in on the point I was trying to make.

You can do that, too. You can look back at your old content, reflect on it and add clarity to your audience around the point you’re trying to make in this new piece of content.

Add clarity to past experiences

Another way to add clarity would be to reflect on past experiences. Look back on the things you’ve gone through and that you’ve now overcome. Don’t just talk about things that are happening right now that you’re still struggling with. I’d prefer you look back on the things that you struggled with a year ago or two or three or five years ago, and add clarity to that.

You could say, “This is something I struggled with that you might be struggling with, too, that I got past. And here are some ways I got past it. Here are some solutions I found, some resources I use, a mindset I had that helped me to help me get through it.”

As you think about your past experiences, write them down so you can use them and share them — and not just in your content. You can also use these stories when you’re out there creating PR for your business or networking and meeting new people.

Those stories really connect you to people because it lets them know that you’ve been where they are and that they might need to work with you or listen to you to get past it.

Add clarity to current events

The third way to add clarity would be to reflect on current events. Look at things happening right now in the world, in your industry or to other people.

Then ask, what can we learn from what’s happening right now? What are some takeaways or some practices we can apply to something happening right now? And how do we learn from those current events?

Now, take your experience and inject your perspective. Do you have an opinion? People want to know, based on what’s happening right now that’s relevant to them, what would your opinion be?

This helps cement you as an authority in your field. You might be the one who helps them through whatever’s happening right now in their life, because you brought it to them in this context of something that’s happening to everyone. Specifically, it’s happening to other people in their business right now.

Adding clarity can be really powerful in terms of creating new content, and it simply requires you to look inward and backward into your past experiences, current events and old content. Then bring that forward and find ways to provide clarity in terms of advice or solutions.

FILL YOUR CONTENT CALENDAR IDEA #2 – DIVE DEEPER

The second way to fill your content calendar all year is to dive deeper.

Refresh Your Content Calendar By Asking New Questions

This could simply be asking a new question based on an old topic, a topic that you may have already covered

Listen to your old stuff. A great way to get better at producing content is to listen, watch and read your old content and ask new questions. There are some simple questions — like who, what, where, when, why, or how to — that you can ask about a topic you may have already covered.

For example, if the topic is podcasting, and your first piece of content was about why you should create a podcast, a way to take that piece of content and make it new and create something new and dive deeper is to ask a new question.

Instead of why should you create a podcast, look at another question:

Who should be creating podcasts?
Who are podcasts great for helping?
What is a great podcast?
What is a podcast, and why is it important?

Another great question for this particular one would be how to create a podcast for people who know they want to create one but want to take that next step. What would you do to get started? What would you do to get through the process top to bottom?

Every topic you’ve covered in the past may have new questions you can ask that will provide new information that you didn’t cover the first time. So ask a new question on an old topic.

See what people are asking

I have another great resource for you. The website AnswerThePublic.com asks questions for you based on Google searches and populates a list with the most asked questions regarding your keywords.

So if your keyword was podcasting, Answer The Public will tell you all the different questions people are asking on Google about that right now. Not only that, but it will dive into other types of queries or searches that are happening regarding that topic.

For example, you might search “podcasting versus YouTube.” Answer The Public will give you examples of all those types of questions.

I did a search about the phrase “content calendar,” since that’s what this episode is about. Here are some of the questions that popped up on Answer The Public:

Why a content calendar?
How to build a content calendar?
What is a marketing content calendar?
What is a social media content calendar?
Why is a content calendar important?

All of these questions could be new pieces of content I can be answering.

The second trick is searching with prepositions. So with the preposition “for,” you might get “content calendar for Facebook” and “content calendar for social media template.”

It even offers alphabetical listing. Say I was looking for words connected to content calendars. Answer The Public tells me content, calendar, creator, creation, Canva, checklist, categories, all these C words that connect to the term “content calendar.” And it has every letter of the alphabet.

You get the picture. How useful is that? All these words that you might be racking your brain for, it does the work for you based on real searches that people are doing. It’s a very powerful tool.

Focus Your Content Calendar By Zooming In On a Niche

Another way to dive deeper is to zoom in on a singular niche or topic of interest. Take one piece of something you’ve already talked about, and really hone in and dive deep on that niche topic.

So to continue with the topic of podcasting, if I wanted to dive deeper, I could ask, what do you need to create a podcast? Well, microphones. What if I dove even deeper and just did a full episode about microphones: all the different types, why you should use them, how to use them, what brands to buy, and how to plug them in?

Each of those could even be its own niche topic of interest.

The point is to go really deep. Answer every single question you can about one particular niche topic that’s of interest.

You can figure that out by asking your audience what they’re interested in or looking at the questions they ask, then asking, “How can I provide the most thorough answer possible?”

This is about depth instead of breadth. A lot of people will cover a lot of topics at once, but very shallowly. This would be the opposite. This is just picking one thing and really focusing on that thing and not getting distracted by the other things you could talk about.

Another way to dive deeper would be to provide a road map of some sort from beginning to end. How do you take someone from where they are to the end of the journey, step by step?

That could be for something simple, something medium or something very complicated.

FILL YOUR CONTENT CALENDAR IDEA #3 – SHARE REMIXES

If you look at all the content you’ve created in the past, you’ll have this deep well of things that worked and things that didn’t.

Refill Your Content Calendar by Reposting the Best Content

Sometimes, the best thing you can do is to find out how to use it again. In some cases, it might be straight up reposting the episode or video or blog in its entirety. Maybe you just add a new intro to it based on the current day and share the reason why you’re recycling that top piece of content.

For a podcast, I can look back and ask, “What are the most popular episodes that people really responded to?” Then I could just handpick the most popular ones and share them again because someone new who didn’t tune in six months ago or a year ago might really want to hear that content. They might never find it otherwise because they never took the time to look back through 120 episodes.

I can help curate and share with them my own best content and repost that based on not my opinion, but based on its popularity as proven by the listeners.

So repost your top episodes. I actually try to do that toward the end of every season. I try to pick two, three, or four top episodes to reshare them out so my newest listeners can hear some of my oldest best content. Do the work for them. Don’t make them find the diamond in the rough. Share your diamonds with them right from the start.

Combine related clips

Another way to share remixes is to mash up a topic with related clips.

Think about how much of your content is related. Even though you have maybe one general theme for your show, there might be these many themes that end up surfacing. If you look back, you can actually categorize and tag each episode according to a certain type of topic. Then you can mash that up.

For example, one of the topics I talk about a lot is personal branding. So I might be able to go back and find five, six, seven episodes that all talked about personal branding. How can I bring those together? I mash them up.

Or maybe there’s a question I asked certain guests that all tend to be related to each other. If I can find those answers later on, I can say, “These are what five people I’ve interviewed have said about the topic of XYZ.” And I can present that.

What do my listeners get from that? They get several industry leaders’ opinions on one topic all in one place that they can download and say, “You know what? Some of these were really useful. I never even thought of that.”

And they didn’t even have to listen to all those episodes to figure it out. You brought it to them. That’s the power of a mashup. So bring all that together. Tie together related content or interviews.

Then, you might want to add your own insight to it. Tell people why you chose these and what you loved about them, or maybe add your own. Now, you’re also an expert adding on top of and being related to all these other experts. Mashups can be really powerful.

Widen Your Content Calendar by Curating the Content of Others

The last way to share a remix is to curate other people’s content and then add your own perspective. Most of us are not in a bubble, right? We’re reading things, listening to shows. We’re watching videos all the time.

Even if you’re a content creator, you are usually consuming other people’s content, too. But that doesn’t have to be just for you. If something affected you and you really enjoyed different opinions from different people, why not highlight them?

You can say, “I really enjoyed these three shows/books/podcasts, and here’s why.” Share them out, and let other people discover them as well.

And guess what. The people you’re sharing might notice you’re sharing their work and appreciate it, especially if you have peers in your industry that you’re pulling from. If you say, “Hey, by the way, I mentioned you as one of my top 10 shows,” they might really appreciate that and shout you out to their audience as well.

So a great way to create new content and build some momentum behind your brand is to share other people’s content and add your perspective to it. And don’t just share an episode and plagiarize it. That’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about letting people know about great resources.

Mix new content and throwbacks upfront

Add clarity, dive deeper, and share remixes. If I’m in a funk and I’m hitting a wall on creating my content calendar, those three tricks tend to be the ones I go to the most.

And here’s another way to think about it. Here’s a bonus.

If you are thinking about how to design your content calendar, maybe you just plan for remixed content upfront. Just decide, “I want to make sure that every season, I include a couple of old episodes, a couple of remixes and a couple of deep dives. You could even have your editors go through and do that for you, and you can add your perspective on the top of it.

Planning that upfront is one way you won’t ever hit a wall because you’ve already got these episodes coming and you don’t have to think about it in the moment. You’ve planned ahead for it and built it into your mix.

Be sure to leverage these three techniques to create more niche content and keep your content calendar full all year long.

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