Content Management in a Click!
We all know we need to create content, but along with creating it we have to manage it. And that’s when we start pulling out our hair or throwing our computers across the room!
Melody and I are here to share how we manage our content creation and scheduling with tools and strong S.O.P.’s.
You can watch the replay above where Melody shows you how her ClickUp is set up. You’ll get a peek of her Master setup as well!
See below the show’s transcription:
Mary Fain Brandt 01:43
What's up, everyone? How are you doing? This is 15 Minutes of Fain. I'm the Fain, Mary Fain Brandt here, LinkedIn strategist and career coach. And today we're talking about content management with a click. Okay, maybe not a click on my finger, but with using a tool called ClickUp. Now we all know that we have to create content, and along with creating content, you have to manage it. And sometimes you feel like pulling out your hair, right? Can I get a high five or a heart on that one? Sometimes you want to throw your phone or your computer across the room because things just aren't automating like they should things get lost. I don't know if that's ever happened to you guys. And they're just not processing in as streamless way as they should. So today, my special guest, Melody Johnson, and I, we are going to be geeking out and talking all about content management. Now, why are we doing this today? If you haven't been to the last two shows? Well, you just don't, you're not on the end, right? Because the last two shows have been all about content, types of content that you should create who owns your content. And my most popular live show was actually when I did a couple months ago, about my favorite tools and apps, and ClickUp was on that list. Many people are always asking Mary, how do you do that? How do you make that video? How do you schedule your posts? What tools do you use, right? And so we're going to start taking a deep dive into ClickUp today, which is a great project management tool. And a shout out to Yvi, Yvonne Heimann, who actually got me set up years ago using ClickUp. And I've been diving more and more into it, and I love it. You're going to get a view of our setups are actually Melody's, maybe mine, color coding, and all she's gonna give it all the way and show you exactly what it looks like. I don't know about you guys, but I'm a visual learner, right? So I need to see what is it going to look like? So let's get Melody up on stage. She calls herself get this the processpreneur. I love that title. She's also the founder of the Course Consultant and loves to geek out on processes. So we're gonna bring Melody up. Hey, how are you doing?
Melody 04:06
Hey I'm good. Thanks so much for having me. I'm so stoked.
Mary Fain Brandt 04:10
Of course, I've got one thing to tell our viewers before we dive in is right after the live show, we're jumping over to the living room, which is my LinkedIn audio event after the live shows. And the LinkedIn audio events are amazing because you can raise your hand and come up on the virtual stage and ask questions to Melody and myself and get answers right away. I happen to think LinkedIn audio events are amazing. No disrespect, podcasts are great. But LinkedIn audio events, you can interact with the hosts and the other attendees. So I've already dropped the link to the audio event in the comments. If you don't see it, just let me know. And as always, let me take that banner off. There we go. I'd love to know who's watching, where you're watching from and what you're looking for. Because I'm a known connector. I like to connect people, places and products. So Melody, thank you so much for being here today. Oh, we got a look at that we got CJ with us. Hey, CJ, he was last week's guest. So we're really just, you know, talking content content content. Before we get started melody, can you like, share with the viewers how you fell on to ClickUp and how all that got started?
Melody 05:30
Yes. And absolutely shout out to CJ, and of course, Yvi, who got me started on ClickUp as well. When I first started, I was helping so many course creators and online coaches, and consultants organize their ideas and actually execute on their big goals. And after trying a ton of systems myself, for project planning, I decided to learn a little bit more about ClickUp. And when I did, I became absolutely obsessed with creating streamline systems and processes. And because of that, I am here today to talk all about how to get your content together and get your systems ready for the summer sales or beyond. So super stoked to be here Mary.
Mary Fain Brandt 06:14
Thank you. Yeah, I've got to start off in saying ClickUp is really robust. And so if you take just a peek at it, you could feel overwhelmed. Like I always like to be honest about things with my viewers. But anything that's worth it, there's going to be a learning curve, right? And once you dive in, I feel like it's got endless possibilities.
Melody 06:40
Totally, I think that when you decide to join, ClickUp, it can feel a lot like drinking water from a firehose. So I always say do one to two things first, so that you can wrap your mind around it. It's kind of like if you were to take a bike that you're riding well, and you want to upgrade to a bike that has a lot more gears, well, the first time you're on it, you're probably going to, you know, wobble a little bit, you're going to try and figure out the gears and how they work. And that's absolutely okay, so I'm so excited to help people take that first step, dive in without feeling that overwhelm.
Mary Fain Brandt 07:12
Yeah, we started using it with my VA, my virtual assistant, as a way to put all of our projects in instead of email, I'm not a fan of going back and forth on email. So we used it as that project management tool. And then I and then, you know, like you said, a couple of things. And then we started using it, I started using it with my clients, I don't want to get emails back and forth from clients. So we have a client base in there. And there's templates in there for them. And then it's just evolved. And we just keep adding to it. And truth be told, I was using like Airtable, I'm such a visual person, right? Airtable is pretty. And you know, I just I was using that to create my content. And then my VA would take that and schedule it in our scheduler, which is Agorapulse. But then I was like, why am I using one more platform that I have to manage? When I could do this in ClickUp. And so it's a little bit of a learning curve. But we are using ClickUp. Now for content management. So is this like perfect timing? And I know that you're going to be like sharing your screen? Do you do all your content management in ClickUp Melody?
Melody 08:23
I do I love creating my content within click up. One of the reasons why is because there's something called a calendar view. And I would love to share my screen and show a little bit more if that's cool.
Mary Fain Brandt 08:35
Let's do it, share your screen.
Melody 08:37
So very excited to share my screen because like you I am also very visual. So hopefully y'all can hear me Mary a shout out if there's some big problem with seeing this. So here I want to just give a quick shout-out for if you're brand new to ClickUp. I have some YouTube videos. There's some great content there. But first off, this is the area that I call a space. Basically, if you think about nesting dolls, it's just kind of like Inception. You look into it, and it keeps going.
Mary Fain Brandt 09:07
I love a nesting doll. It's such a visual for me. That really helps me understand, you know, because I'm always like, is that a space? Is that a folder?
Melody 09:15
So they're asked legals? Yeah, so I kind of think of them as nesting dolls, we have the space first. And then after that, Mary, we have the folder, which you're very familiar with. And then underneath that level, we have something called the list, which is where I'm at right now. And so you can see here that I've got these colors. And I really like using that color because it helps me to visually see how my content is actually going to appear when I'm organizing multiple formats like blogs, podcasts, maybe a Facebook live stream or LinkedIn live stream or YouTube and then repurposing it into some other social media. So like, for example, as I was saying, I love creating the content within ClickUp specifically because of the fact that I can see it In a way that's going to make sense to my brain. So let's say for example, I wanted to just see all my To Do lists. This is my to do list, this is just an example space. Let's say I have a blog post, and here is the task level. So now I can have this as a template. And every time I create a blog post, I can have the article title, headline, any links that need to be added any external links. And then from there, I can actually create a template where I can say, now that I've had this blog post approved, and I'm wanting to publish it, I'm going to make sure that all of these repurpose content, get inside my project management tool, I can assign it, I can use automation to auto assign, it's just so much easier, right?
Melody 10:43
It is beautiful. Well, we're just moving over. And so we're using it a different way. But I'm starting to do, like we repurpose a lot of content, right? Like the 15 minutes of Fain show becomes a blog post becomes micro-content. So I haven't quite set up these templates as you have. But I'm totally going to copy it. Okay, that blog post right there, like blog posts, so it would be different like you work from the blog post, I work from the live show. So it would be a live show, turn it into a blog, turn it into Instagram, LinkedIn, that kind of stuff.
Melody 11:21
Exactly. And so as we kind of see here, these are all the sub-tasks underneath this main task. And if I wanted to, I could actually start, you know, putting, you know, some dates in here. Let's say that this is due tomorrow, I'll look here on the calendar view. And there you go, we can actually see this blog post come up on this view. So if I, let's say that I wanted this to be colored by the list. And here you can see now that I've changed that color to the list, it's now yellow. So let's say that I had a blog post and a live stream video maybe, or maybe like a podcast. And we would make the podcast show up here. And it would be marked as red. If I change this to show color tasks by list. And because it's actually a color, I would now be able to see multiple different formats on the calendar, I know exactly what's going out. I know when it's due. And I know what status it's in this right here indicating that this is an approved status, which shows me where it is in the process, which is pretty handy, especially if you're outsourcing to a VA OPM or a marketing strategist.
Mary Fain Brandt 12:28
I love it. And I'm a fan of color coding. I've been color coding for decades before it was a popular thing just because I like colors. And I'm a visual person. So I love that you can color code and one of the things I do love about ClickUp is I can assign those due dates. And if if something goes past due date, you get the email notification. And then you can go Oops, did this slip through? Does my VA need to do this or the marketing person? So I love that it has all of that built in right where you're creating and managing your content.
Melody 12:59
Exactly. I wonder if you were the highlighter person I remember back in the day would have the gel plans and highlighting everything was one of my favorite tasks you'll so
Mary Fain Brandt 13:09
Guilty as charged. Yeah.
Melody 13:11
Yeah, so I loved doing all the color coordinating. So it just helps my brain I'm visual. And so while you were talking about making it easier for yourself, one of the things that I love doing is actually creating automations. And so automations is going to be different based off of your plan. But if you decide to join on paid aspect, you will have options to make some automations, which gives you basically the Zapier a version have the ability to do a lot more customization based off of what you create. So give you an example of what I mean Mary so we have in this specific list of the blog post, when a status changes from any active status, meaning anytime this changes to complete, I'm going to move this blog post to this list. So blog posts gets published, we need to repurpose it we need to tell people to drive traffic to our actual website so that they can join us in a deeper level. So here we have the social media list name, we apply a template and remember how I showed you all those sub tasks, bam, it's going to apply all of that same sub tasks to that specific task that was created from this blog post and we can actually make sure that we change the status from approved from that other list all the way to to do again and I can even add another action based off of the plan to show and change the assign me if I wanted to assign it to another
Mary Fain Brandt 14:41
okay, I totally need to get on board with this automation part. So I will be downloading this video as we do all of them. But I will be asking my virtual assistant to like, watch this and implement it because this is magic. You're you're reducing time between a VA, you're organizing yourself. It's all in one place. You don't have to, you know, go to your Google Calendar, go to Airtable go to you know, some people still use an Excel spreadsheet.
Melody 15:12
Yeah, and Excel spreadsheet. I was just talking with my husband. And I was thinking about this process. And I was thinking, why are people using the equivalent of a pager with content marketing? When you could be using an iPhone or an Android? Depending on who you are
Mary Fain Brandt 15:29
Such a great analogy. Did you? Do you get to do a post about that? I know, I see that on LinkedIn. Like, I want to see that. Are you still using a pager to manage your content, step it up to the new to an iPhone or Android. So XL versus ClickUp. Right?
Melody 15:46
Totally yes. And likewise, with your live stream show, you can do the same thing like just exactly the same process, maybe you change the names a little bit, maybe change color. And lastly, the fact that I can look at the overall space because everything's color coordinated, I can now see everything at a glance, my blog posts, my social media, my email marketing, this is even going into further down in the list. Like if I have Facebook ads, affiliate marketing, and other sorts of resources that are all underneath this space, which just makes it so much easier to look at everything in a glance. And hey, if you're a really big project planner, and you're a project manager, you can get really intense and actually do something called the Gantt view, other friend who says I can't even and I just love it. That's so cheesy. And definitely, that's my take on getting started with ClickUp. Stop sharing for a second.
Mary Fain Brandt 16:42
That's pretty intense. So if someone wants to get started managing their content in ClickUp, would you? So first off, do you help people set up their ClickUp Like boards and all that.
Melody 16:57
I don't personally set that ClickUp board, but I do have some training around it. And I also train team members about it as well. So I do offer team training, where I actually walk people how to set up their operations, their marketing workflows, and we actually have a live version where I walk you your team through this whole process and a whole workbook and everything. So I'd love to just share people with some great free ways to join and learn about how to get started. And then, of course, I'm always happy to answer questions.
Mary Fain Brandt 17:28
Perfect, so we can drop all those things into the comments. I know that you also sent something over to me, should I share that as well?
Melody 17:38
Yeah, well, for sure.
Mary Fain Brandt 17:40
Okay, so let's get that in there. So, Melody
Melody 17:49
Yes, CJ, I love it that you're getting started with ClickUp. I can't wait for you to get started too.
Mary Fain Brandt 17:55
Did you guys talk about that last week or did that happen?
Melody 17:59
Yes. CJ was like, Yes, I need to know this. Look up. Seriously, I can't wait to go to the show. So CJ I see you.
Mary Fain Brandt 18:06
That was fabulous. I love it. So I want to do one thing. But I didn't set it up because I'm that crazy girl.
Melody 18:18
All good.
Mary Fain Brandt 18:20
All good. Right. So
Melody 18:26
Yeah, and that freebie, thank you so much for dropping that Mary. While you're setting that up. I am really excited because that actually has some really great tips and just getting started.
Mary Fain Brandt 18:36
Okay, so we're gonna try to share, I'm going to try to share, wait, let's go back.
Melody 18:43
I see it. I love it.
Mary Fain Brandt 18:47
Okay, so I have to go over here to look at it. So as you guys can see, like, close that out wait. Clients, I'll do that. So I have this whole section is just client work, right. And then you can also you didn't even like we can use this for forms. Yay. So live guest live show guest form speaker summit form. And then we have a lot like this needs to be cleaned up. Look, I have blogs for website. Like I just need to move that all into we started like trying to use the content calendar. And so we need to set it up a little better. And then for for the B show that's the weekly LinkedIn audio event. We have a whole tab here and why are folder why I have that there is because I have my co-host and my VA on this. So we have all of the episodes that we're doing and the ones that are upcoming. And we have like I can show you guys this is why I love it. All the information is here versus being an email going back and forth. Right? So we have everything here which I happen to love. I put all kinds of things goals, LinkedIn Accelerator Academy, you guys know, I do LinkedIn Local. So again, we put everything here completed in progress, links to things, I just, I think ClickUp has so much potential. So these are like all the links that we use time and time again, for LinkedIn Local, so you guys can use it for content management, you can use it for project management, you can use it for clients, you can use it for events, mine probably isn't organized the best, but I'm sure Melody will help me clean that up soon. I need to I want to start using your template on that. You know how you had your blog. And then for me, it would be my live show and then the repurposing of it.
Melody 20:45
Yeah exactly. And I think that it's a great way to just decide where does this part of my brain live? And how can I make it easier for my brain to process that because I was talking with a fellow consultant, and she actually has left her career in teaching. She's always had like, lots of coaching clients on the side, and I and she said, I'm so used to just writing it out. And I said, well just start first where your brain feels comfortable. And then let's migrate this over into a system. It doesn't if it's not natural, you're not going to use it. So what's the craziest thing for you to do right now that's keeping you from actually saving time later.
Mary Fain Brandt 21:29
That's really a good point. You don't have to dive all in. You don't have to jump in. You can take baby steps. So maybe you have a note section. Maybe you have a goals board or space. You know, we created so as my VA and I have continued working together there, we created weekly tasks. Because even though things are everywhere, sometimes I just throw so much at her. So I'm like, here's the five things I need done this week, or the three things. So we put them on weekly tasks, and then I assign them to her. So she gets notified. And then when they're completed, she marks it completed. So I'm not like Sherry, did you get that done? I can't remember, did we post about company pages? Do we post about CEOs? Did we make that video or that PDF, because as a business owner, when you're creating content, such as myself, it, it can get overwhelming. And so using ClickUp, has definitely reduced the number of emails that my VA and I go back and forth, I can go into any of those boards and see the progress and the status. So I just I love it. I think it's a great tool.
Melody 22:42
It is. And I feel like as you were saying it's so versatile events, content management, having assignments for actual clients itself, there's so many things that you can do with that which you know, in itself can be overwhelming. But like we were saying, just get started, take that first step and then gradually kind of dig in deeper.
Mary Fain Brandt 23:02
So do you think when someone decides they're going to jump over to ClickUp a you got to know what are you using it for project management content client? One thing? But then also, don't you feel like having a template? Excuse me, there's two things I feel you need an SOP, what's your standard operating process, right? You want this done than that, and I write it out in drive first, before I go in and try to manage it over there. But also templates. So with my clients, we just copy those pages or those spaces in there, we make like 10 copies of those because it's the same template of how I work the clients. And then what we put in there is a little differently. So for career clients, the exercises are always the same. So we just have template, you know, LinkedIn Bakery Client, copy, 12345. And then I go in there and rename them. Do you set up templates in your ClickUp form? Or do you manually do it each time?
Melody 24:03
No, I absolutely 100%. I love making forms and making templates, because it just makes your life easier. So what I actually do is, every time I have a repeatable process, just like you Mary actually go in, I create this standard operating procedure. And I start actually by identifying what's the frequent tasks that I'm doing on a weekly basis, maybe a monthly basis. Or if it's something very frequent, like a daily basis, I'll actually create that SOP or workflow. And this is something I actually talked about inside of my process powerup or actually create a template for your SOP for building out your second brain within ClickUp. And so from there actually map out who's doing the task who's assigning and creating the folder, what templates are we creating, what automations are we going to use? Or is there going to be something custom that we're making like a custom field, or is there some sort of form that's attached to the folder list or some other template for the blog post. So yes, Mary says, who hates back and forth emails? Me, I hate those back and forth emails. So templates save you tons of time.
Mary Fain Brandt 25:09
Yeah, the templates and just if it's something that you do over and over again, just make a template, and then copy and then, you know, we copy that over and over again, instead of trying to recreate it, but I didn't do that at first, because I didn't know. And it's okay, you guys, you have to start somewhere. So as Melody says, it doesn't have to be overwhelming, just get started. So decide, you know, CJ, I can't even imagine where CJ is gonna start. Like, whoa, like, is it for content? CJ? I'm curious, are you going to start using it for content? Is it for your SOPs, in your business, project management, it really is a very robust tool. And you can have, you can invite other people. So my clients get invited to their space, I call it a board, they get invited to their board, and they have access to everything in there. And then I take them off when we're done working. I removed them. So that because you can have I don't remember how many,
Melody 26:05
Nine
Mary Fain Brandt 26:06
How many people nine people in there? Yeah.
Melody 26:10
Yeah, there's different, there's different types are up for sure. So definitely keeping that in mind to onboarding and offboarding, who's actually getting access, what kind of access they have, and when their access is ending?
Mary Fain Brandt 26:23
Yeah, and I don't know about you guys, CJ and Melody, but I recorded a ClickUp tutorial that I send when I onboard my new clients. And I show them their ClickUp board how to use it. So that you know, they're not, you know, as a coach, like, Oh, this is a tool I use, go for it. So I just recorded a ClickUp tutorial of how you know to navigate how to tag someone how to upload something. And now we have that save that little videos edited and we just send that out. makes things so much easier. Okay, we've got a great question Quinn. Why ClickUp? Why not? Trello, Monday, or some other modern collaboration pm tool. I gotta be honest, I started with Trello Quinn. I love Trello is very visual, but it's limited. And it got clunky, real fast, like board and task and task. And I've tried Asana didn't really worked for me. So ClickUp. You know, Yvi introduced me to it. And she's a tech geek. She knows her tech. She's test systems all the time. So Melody. You want to take this question?
Melody 27:37
Yeah.
Mary Fain Brandt 27:39
You're like, please, please, please.
Melody 27:41
Yes, tag me and Mary. So the biggest question of why this tool versus another tool, I really say, what are you using it for? And then from that workflow, then determine does this system meet the actual needs of me and my team? And if the answer leads you to ClickUp, then here's what I would say to that ClickUp is really great for team collaboration, you have the ability to custom your views. For example, I use something called a dashboard, which allows me to create private areas where I can create customized things to view anything from embedding a Google Calendar, adding custom task lists, identifying workloads for the team, which is great for staffing requirements, if let's say you have a larger team, and you need to see if there's going to be a backlog, it's going to put you behind if there's not enough people on the team, or if maybe one actual project is consuming too much time and actually decreasing your profits. But I essentially believe it doesn't really matter which tool you use, you have to first start what's the workflow and then build out that system that's going to support the operation?
Mary Fain Brandt 28:51
Yeah, absolutely. It's got it you've got to use for anything, whether it's project management, video editing, social media, scheduling, whatever it is the tool, there are several tools out there, you have to find one that's the right fit for you and your business and or your career or your team and one that you're going to use. And I love to Trello that's what we started with. I simply outgrew it. Right, it was a great jumping off point and Amy Airom and I used it together when she was doing my Facebook management back in the day. It was easy. But as business grew and as things shifted, it became too clunky and not I felt it wasn't as organized as ClickUp is.
Melody 29:35
Yeah, and it's so customizable, like you said it's just which is the great thing about it and the challenge about it right so you just need someone to guide you through how do I get started with this?
Mary Fain Brandt 29:45
Definitely. Well, you guys we're just about out of time. But don't forget Melody and I are hopping over to the living room. The LinkedIn audio event right after this. I dropped. Yes, I dropped the link to the audio event in the comment just click on that. And we'll we'll you'll come into the event automatically. And I'll tell you how to use the event. If it's your first LinkedIn audio event. No worries, you don't have to say anything, you can just listen. And you don't have to be camera ready, because it's just audio you guys. So thank you so much Melody, we dropped your freebie. And we'll go back. And if you're watching the replay, just type in queue for a question and then write your question tag Melody or myself and we will go back and answer your questions and point you in the right direction. So you can keep pulling out your hair, get over organized and use a great platform like ClickUp to see all of your content or with clients or with your weekly projects that you have. So it works for everybody. You just use it different levels. So thank you, Melody.
Melody 30:48
Thank you so much, Mary. So excited to chat more.
Mary Fain Brandt 30:52
Okay, see it just in like two minutes over in the living room. Okay, bye.
Melody 30:56
Bye.
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