Hey there birth nerd, you're listening to the birth order podcast. My name is Kyleigh banks. And I am totally obsessed with birth, and equally obsessed with business. And this is the show where I help women turn their passion for birth into a sustainable, profitable and most importantly, impactful career. All right, let's get into it.

Hey there, welcome back to the podcast, you are listening to Episode 14. And before we get started, I just wanted to say thank you so much for being here. I hope you're having a wonderful week so far. And I really appreciate that you're taking time out of your day to listen to the podcast. And if you're here for the first time, make sure you subscribe to the show. Because all month long, we are chatting about business. And in case you can't tell, I am a little more than obsessed with business because of the success that I've had. And now my obsession is actually growing exponentially. Because I get to watch my students create massive success in their businesses, too. I originally created this podcast as a way to share some of my favorite tips for growing your doula business, beyond supporting births in person. And all of the topics that I share here on this podcast, are actually topics that I dive deep into inside both birth worker Academy, which is my 15 week doula certification program, and now also inside the birth worker membership. And you're gonna be hearing a lot more about the membership over the next few weeks. And if you love chatting about all of these business topics that we talked about on this podcast, you are seriously going to freak out when you hear about what is actually inside this membership. But right now, the membership is only open to a small group of my past students. But keep your eyes open because we are going to be opening it up to you later on this fall. Now, I know that's not what you're here, you are here because you want to learn the secret to making social media content for your doula business. So let's get right into this episode. Now, when I started on social media, I started from zero, I created a brand new Instagram account for my Doula business. And I was like gung ho, like, I'm going to do whatever it takes to grow an Instagram account. And I freaking did. And what I did was not sustainable. And that's why I want to tell you about it. So when I started, I would make three posts per day on Instagram, three posts per day on Instagram. And what I would do is I would just wait until I had a good idea. And I would pull out my computer and I would go to Canva. And I would choose like a random Canva template, it would be different every single time with different colors and different pictures. And I would make it from scratch every single time I had an idea three times per day. Yes, it was bad. If that sounds like what you're doing now, hang with me, because I'm going to show you how to make your life so much easier. I swear I had no strategy at all. It was like literally, let's just go to Canva. Find a template, random colors, who cares? And let's throw this thing together and post on Instagram. And when I say throw this thing together, it actually makes it sound like pretty quick. But no, it was taking me for ever. It was like a full time job making all of that content. And so now this is really important. What happened was after a while, I started asking myself, hold on. How can I make this easier? How can I make this easier for myself? And so welcome to the theme of the rest of 2022. Which is how do we make this easier for us? How do we make it easier? No more hustling, no more grinding? Constantly, I just want you to ask yourself, How can I make this easier. And so today we are talking about how to make creating social media content easier for you, how to save you time, how to have better overall strategy, how to not feel like you're constantly on that content creation

hamster wheel. That's what this episode is about. And so I wanted to introduce you to the idea of what is called social media content. Batching what in the hell is social media content? Batching so we're just gonna call it batching for this episode, what is batching batching is grouping smaller tasks together so that you can actually be more productive with your time. And so when we're talking about social media batching and because you can talk about batching for everything heck you could even like batch the way that you do laundry at home or grocery shopping at home, but we're talking about social media batching. And so what does this mean? This means that the first thing, and we're gonna go through all of these actually like way more specific, this is like the high level overview. Social media batching means that you are going to write all of your captions, write like a month's worth of captions. And then when you're done writing the captions, then you go make your pictures on Canva. And then when you're done making the entire month, pictures on Canva, then you go schedule all of your posts. And then when you're done scheduling all of your posts, you do it again, over and over, and over and over. So the key here is that you're not doing one post all the way through, and then another post from start to finish, and then another post from start to finish. No, you're doing all of your captions at once, then you're doing all of your Canva pictures at once. And then you're scheduling all at once, right. And so the big thing, the big takeaway from this episode, and we're just getting started, I'm really gonna go into how you do this, the big takeaway is that you need to put some time on your calendar on a regular basis, maybe that looks like once per month, maybe that looks like three half days per month. And what you're going to do is you're going to spend that time, you're going to block it out of your calendar, and you're going to spend that time to batch your social media content, right. So maybe the first first day you write your captions, second day, you make your Canva pictures, third day you schedule them all, that would be an awesome way to do like three half days back to back, just do that every month, put that in your schedule every single month. Now, before I actually tell you my five steps to batching, and I lay it all out for you what I do and what I also teach my students, I also I just want to jump into like, Should we be batching content? Should we be making a lot of content ahead of time and then pre scheduling it? Because this is kind of an argument that I see online that everyone should batch content? No, everyone should just post in the moment. So here's what I think. I think that social media batching is a necessary part of taking your business to a higher level of efficiency. 100% like without a doubt, it's necessary, if you want to take your business to that next level. But here's the thing, I also know that randomly posting on social media in the moment, when you get a random good idea and just going and posting. That's awesome, too, that can be so beneficial to. And so I actually think that you should be doing a mixture of both. Now, if you only batch. What's the problem with that? What's the problem if you only batch your social media content? Meaning what's the problem, if you only create content, 30 days in advance 60 days in advance 90 days in advance? The problem is that you miss out on the really hot topics that are super relevant right now. And then what's the issue? If you only post live? Like, what's the issue, if you don't batch? Well, then if something comes up in your life, you might miss a couple days, a couple of days might turn into a couple of weeks. And before you know it, you can feel super behind and then super, super overwhelmed. And before you know it, you're not even posting on social media anymore. And so for me, I've actually gone back and forth between batching all of my contents, and then only posting in the heat of the moment when I get an idea. I've gone back and forth for a really long time. So I definitely see the need for both batching and posting in the moment. So my dream for you is that you can always batch at least one month ahead. And so here's what I want you to do, I want you to set aside one full day at the end of every month or beginning of every month, or maybe two or three half days. And you're going to spend that time creating the content for the next month, right for the next 30 days. So how about this? What if you make and schedule 15 posts per month? Have them ready to go completely?

Forget about them. You just know no matter what 15 posts are gonna go out next month. Awesome. And now for the other days that you don't have any posts going out any posts scheduled? How about you just come up with your ideas in real time? Right? And maybe if that month you don't have any cool ideas in the moment. Awesome. You know for a fact that 15 posts are going to be posted no matter what. If even if you don't log on to Instagram, you're going to have 15 posts go out. That would be almost the bare minimum that I want for you is every month you set aside time to create 15 create batch create schedule, post, create and schedule 15 posts per month. That's the minimum I want you to do at maximum. I mean you could do 60 days in advance and 60 posts one post a day for 60 days. I love doing that. I love to do batching as big as I can if I could do 100 posts and get them out of the way and scheduled, you bet I will. Now with content batching, you are gonna save so much brain power by not having to constantly be on that content creation hamster wheel, right. And I know that sometimes when we're just starting out, it can be hard to understand like, just how life changing this process that we're about to go through is. But trust me, this will save you big time, like big time. This is the stuff that most entrepreneurs don't learn until they hire out a content team 234 years later, 234 years into their business. But this framework, if you start it now, from day one, it's going to make it so you don't ever even have to hire a content team, you are going to streamline it. So it is so easy for you to do. So let's get into my five steps for batching content. And then I'm going to throw in a little bonus idea at the end a little bonus idea that I always teach my students inside birth worker Academy and now the membership. So step one of batching is this, you need to make sure that you are brainstorming and idea dumping all month long, in a very organized way. And so here's what I want you to do, as you go through life, as you scroll, Instagram or Tiktok. If you're at the store, listening to a podcast, reading a birth book, whatever it is, anytime you get inspiration for a post, you need to be writing that down in the moment, and in an organized way, right. And I mean, that could even look like in the notes section of your phone, that could be an air table, I absolutely love air table. And we'll talk about air table in a little bit. It's like my favorite software in the world. It could even be like writing it down in a little notebook with a pen. Whatever you do, make it organized, make it consistent, and do it all of the time, like constantly, multiple times per day if you can, if you can and make a habit of it. So that's step one, number one, brainstorming and idea dumping all month long in an organized way.

Step number two, once you've done that, and once you have a ton of ideas, you're ready to actually like sit down and do a batching session. And so the very first thing you need to do when you sit down on either that one day you book every month or those couple half days, the first thing you're going to do is you're going to sit down, you're going to look at all of the brainstorming that you have, hopefully 100 ideas that you can choose from for like good Instagram posts. And then you're going to actually select the ones that are worthy of living on your Instagram grid. So you need to ask yourself is this idea for a post because remember, at this point, they're just ideas. It's just brainstorming ideas for posts. So you need to ask yourself is this idea share worthy is someone going to see this on their on their newsfeed and share it to their stories. And then also is this idea that I have scroll stopping? If someone is just Mindlessly scrolling on Instagram, is this idea that I have for this post, enough to stop there scroll, and not all of your brains, the ideas that you brainstormed are going to actually be good enough to turn into Instagram posts, I would even go as far to say that like maybe 40% aren't going to ever become posts. But we have to just brain dump all of our ideas, and then pick out the good ones, right? That makes it so so easy when it actually comes time to sit down and create this content. So that is the second step of my batching process is selecting which ideas are Instagram worthy. And that's really easy. Now we get into the meat of like creating the actual content. And so this is where it's really important where we're doing batching correctly, meaning we're doing all of the captions first. And then when we're done, we're doing all of the graphics. And then when we're done, we're scheduling all of the posts. And so what I'll do is I'll see how many of these ideas that I have the how many of the brainstorming ideas turned into like good ideas that are Instagram worthy. And I'm going to shoot for 30 Because I'm going to shoot for one post every single day and I'm going to try and bet every single month. So once I pull out the 30 brainstormed ideas that are actually Instagram worthy. Now we are ready for step three of batching which is the copywriting writing the caption essentially. And so when you actually sit down on your writing day, like I said, the goal is to have dozens and dozens of ideas from inspiration from the previous month. So when you actually sit down to write, all you are doing is writing you do not have to come up with new ideas. You don't even need to be inspired you already have your idea down, you just need to turn it into an Instagram caption, right? And so what happens now is you bust out all of the copywriting all of it like all as you're doing 30 posts,

you sit down one day, right? 30 captions, but you're not scheduling them yet. You're not making the pictures in Canva yet, you're not doing anything else yet. You're literally just writing. And I know someone is thinking, Well, where do I actually like write the captions? Where can I put them, so they're easy to find easy to move around easy to copy and paste over into Instagram easy to schedule, don't worry, I have the most amazing software for you. It is called Air table. It is by far my favorite software, it is totally free. And I will link it in the show notes for you guys. But air table is I like to explain it as Google sheets on steroids. So it's like a Google, it's like a spreadsheet. But you can do so many different things with it. And so that's actually where I am doing all of my copywriting. I'm doing an all in air table. And when I'm done with my copywriting for the 30 posts that I'm batching, then either I continue going in that day, and now move into creating the graphics on Canva. Or I come back the next day and just start with creating the graphics. Now, before you actually start creating your graphics for the social media posts that you are batching, you need to actually spend some time creating your own Canva templates, branded Canva templates for your social media. And this seems a little funny, but it's gonna save you so much time. So instead of just going to Canva. And like finding a random template that has random fonts and random colors, and whatever, no, you need to actually put together a Canva document full of different graphic combinations that you can actually use on your social media, right. So you can use your brand colors. So you can use your different fonts, your different backgrounds, different symbols and shapes, whatever it is. But you need to put that together, you need to put together a branded social media template with I'd say like at least 15 to 30 different combinations. And that way, when you're going to make these graphics in Canva, what you can do is you can just go to this template that you've created, and either duplicate it or just copy and paste certain backgrounds, certain templates, and create your pictures from them. So you don't need to go be creating posts from scratch anymore. No, seriously, if you have templates created in Canva, if you have your own branded templates that you've created, when you get to this point, it's going to take you I'm not kidding, five seconds per post to create each post. Can you imagine like I used to spend 15 minutes like scrolling through and picking a template and changing the fonts and moving things around and making sure you can see it and none of that we were cutting all of that out. So once you've created remember, first you have to create your own branded Canva template, essentially for social media. And then once you do that, you're ready to batch create your Canva pictures. And after you're done creating those graphics in Canva. Now it's time to schedule all of your posts. So I love to use a platform called plan only.

So I would 100% If I were you go get a plan only account, because it's by far my favorite scheduling software. I have downloaded like every single scheduling social media scheduling software out there, I've paid lots of money for some I've done all the free trials. And for some reason I keep coming back to plan only. So I definitely love plan only. And then after you have scheduled those posts, maybe you wanted to do one every other day, maybe you want to do one every day. But whatever it is schedule them, set them up and forget about it. Now you're done batching. And now you know that essentially no matter what you are going to have X amount of posts go out to social media this month, you don't even have to pick up your phone. And you know that 15 posts no matter what are going to be posted on Instagram. So those are the initial five steps of batching your social media content. But of course, I wanted to jump into one bonus step because this is something that's going to change your life and keep you from overwhelm in the future. And so this last bonus step is repurposing your content. So here's how this works. After let's say like six months or so, every single one of your posts, and we're talking social media, podcast, whatever. After six months, you can start repurposing that content using and again, turning it into new posts. So what I want you to do is in this batching process, always keep track of which date you end up post Doing which posts. So yes, like keep a spreadsheet, I do this in air table air tables, like literally my favorite, I talk about it all the time. So I keep track of all my captions, the date that I'm posting something. And the reason is, now it's really easy for me to see which posts are six months old. Because I now know that I can actually take those posts, post the exact same caption, the exact same graphic, or maybe you want to update your caption a little bit, and maybe your branding change too. So you want to change your graphic a little bit. Your copywriting is probably going to be better six months from now. So yeah, like look at it updated if you need to, but you don't have to be creating content from scratch anymore. And I hope you understand how life changing that is. So listen to me, again, if you were not paying attention, multitasking, whatever, come back to me, six months from now, you never have to create a new post from scratch. Again, ever again, if you don't want to, you can if you love it. But if you don't like creating content, put in the work now for the next six months, batch create as much as you can, and set up those systems. So you're alerted every time a post is six months old. And now you can go in, repurpose it, update it if you want to. And post again. So freaking life changing. And again, I do all of this in air table. So let me just mention one more time that I am a proud affiliate of air table, you can get air air table totally for free. Literally you never have to upgrade, you never have to pay, you will never have to pay for air table totally free. And I have a link for you. So birth worker.com/air table, and that will get you in for free forever. So let's recap those six steps in case you were driving your kid to school or you're at the gym, let me just go through the six steps really quick so you can remember them. So the first one is brainstorming and idea dumping all month long. But the most important part here is that you're doing it in an organized way. So that's step one, all month long, you're collecting ideas, you're putting some them somewhere in an organized way. And then when you actually sit down to batch, the very first step there, which is the second step overall, is select which ideas are actually Instagram worthy. which ideas are you actually going to turn into posts. And remember the whole thing about batching is that you're not going to select one post here and then go make it No, you are selecting the amount of posts that you want to make. So let's say you're sitting down to batch 30 posts, the second step here, which is select the ideas that are Instagram worthy, you are selecting 30 posts, and then you're moving on to the next step. And the next step, which is step number three is copywriting. So this is where you're going to sit down, you are going to write the captions for all 30 posts or however many posts you're batching. And then after you have the copywriting done that is when you move into graphics and Canva after the graphics are done, that is when you schedule everything in plan only. And then just make sure that at some point, you have a system set up that you can repurpose that content later down the line. Now, if I were to pick one step that is the most important out of all of this, it would be step one, it would be step one, which is to always be on the lookout for content ideas. And always, always stay on top of putting your ideas somewhere airtable the notes on your phone, maybe like handwrite it in a notebook, right? The worst thing that can happen here is you sit down on that batch day, and you have zero brain dumping 00 ideas to choose from that is what I don't want to happen to you. So the very first, the very most important step is to all month long, just be putting down your ideas somewhere. And of course, like all of this is great. batching is great. But batching social media content is not worth crap, unless you actually have a social media strategy. So yes, you need to work on social media as a part of your overall business strategy. And so this is what I'm talking about, like, how are you getting your followers off of social media? Because you can batch create content all day long. But if you're not actually getting them onto your email list, or into your programs, what's the point of it? Right?

So how are you getting them off of social media? How are you nurturing your followers, so they know you like you and trust you? Right? You can batch content all you want, but if you're not showing up in stories with your face, if you're not presenting yourself as like a normal human, maybe you're not nurturing your audience really well. Right? So batching is great, but what's your overall business strategy? Another question I like asking is Is the is your time Um, that you spend on social media bringing you a direct return financially? Are you literally making money from what you're doing on social media? And if not, what are you doing right now to fix that? What are you doing right now to create a way to funnel those people either into your in person doula services or into your ebooks or digital courses or mother's circle or whatever it is, you need to set up that funnel because none of this social media stuff matters. Unless we are doing that unless we have this overall, this big overall content creation strategy as part of our business strategy. Now if this is something that you want to learn more about, I have to tell you that you're not alone because content batching and social media strategy. These topics were absolute hits inside birth worker Academy, so much so that I'm actually bringing this lesson and so many more business classes like this to you inside the birth worker business membership. So the doors to the business membership open in October, so stay tuned because when the time comes, you can jump on the waitlist for a special little bonus. Okay, if you have any questions on this, shoot me a DM over on Instagram at birth worker podcast and of course let me know I would be happy to answer your questions. And as always, I love to hear your feedback. If you haven't already left a rating and review for the show. That is the best way hands down to support me and to support the show. And after you leave a review, don't forget to snap a picture and upload it to birth worker.com/review and I will send you out a little gift as a thank you. Thank you so much for listening. I hope today was helpful for you and I will see you right back here next week.