Alright. Cool. Alright. Here we go. So, hey, thank you so much for coming to the how to plan a content calendar in 2025 lightning lesson. I'm really excited to have you here, and I think we're gonna have a really great time together. If you are not familiar with who I am, then you can see here I am Tommy Walker. I'm the founder of The Content Studio.

I run a consultancy for Fortune 1,000 and b to b SaaS startups that, is focused exclusively on content marketing. I've worked with some really cool companies. I was the first marketing hire at Shopify Plus. I was the global editor in chief over at QuickBooks and, have worked with a ton of really great brands here. But for the purposes of our conversation, what I actually wanna focus on is more of my background, as an actor. Before I ever got into marketing, I was a career actor for about 10 years. I graduated from a conservatory, in Manhattan. It was the New York Conservatory For Dramatic Arts, and I've had this lifelong obsession with stories and telling stories and learning the language of stories.

And I think that that language of stories is really important, primarily because, like, if we understand the language of stories, because our lives are built on stories. Right? We, my wife and I, we are about to go to, Connecticut on Monday to go get a new puppy, and that's gonna start a whole new chapter. I wanna make sure that we give this puppy to our kids for Christmas. So we have that puppy on Christmas morning core memory that we unlock, and it's gonna be a story for them. Anytime we start a new job or start a new relationship or lose a job or anything, our lives are built on stories. And I have this fundamental belief that if we have the ability to tell stories and we know the language of stories, that we can write our own. And if we're really lucky, we're able to become a part of somebody else's story. I say that because I've lived it.

I started my career with a broken laptop and living in a boarding house after getting fired from a retail job over a pair of pants. Now I get to work with some of the most recognizable brands in the world. I know how stories work. I know the mechanics of a story and the language of storytelling, and I think that if we have that ability to tell stories, again, we can write our own, and we can become parts of somebody else's. And if you're with me on that, we have that same basic understanding of each other, then I think we're gonna do great things together. If not, that's fine. Hopefully, I'll take some time, and we can you know, maybe I'll convince you to come over to my side. But if you're already on that wavelength with me, I think you're gonna get a lot out of this session.

So let's go. That said, I am gonna be throwing a lot at you in this session today. I expect about halfway through, maybe you might go, oh, this is a bit much, and your brain might get overloaded a little bit. That's fine. That's why, the way that we've doing the the recordings on these is you will have access to, the notes, a service that we use called Cast Magic, which will give us access to the transcription, very easily. Right? You'll be able to click anywhere throughout the transcription and get to points in the story that you want, which is cool. But more importantly, what I think is cool about Cast Magic is that there's also these AI enhanced notes. So you'll see all the key topics and bullets.

There are a number of other things that you can, get through here, like cool clips, and things like that. But most importantly is that they have this chat GPT like functionality where you can interact with the transcript, and and leverage both what we talk about in the session today as well as whatever the large language model has access to. So if there's a concept you would like to expand on, go ahead and ask it, and you'll be able to go back and forth with it and get a pretty deep understanding, not just of the stuff that we're talking about today, but even more potentially how it can pertain to what you're working on right now with your stuff. And, of course, always feel free to email me afterwards too. I love talking about this stuff. I could talk about it all day long. So it's tommy@thecontentstudio.com if you wanna talk, but this is something that you will be getting, as part of the lightning lesson, just for being registered. So thank you, and, hopefully, this will be helpful on the other side.

So let's get into it. So here's the problem I see with traditional content calendars. I was looking at the chat, before, and one of the things that someone said was randomitis. Right? Something that's just kind of random. Most calendars are just a repository of articles. They're created from the big old keyword list that are high volume, low competition. We sort it by that. Maybe they'll include product road maps, if if you're lucky, if your product teams are actually talking with you, and maybe they might feature company news.

But for the most part, it's really just a repository of articles that have very little continuity between them. And this sucks because it leads to a disjointed reading experience. Right? Here's a calendar. I use an automation that pulls in all of the content from a particular any website I want, and it will show me what they're publishing. This is one from a major comp a major player in one of our spaces, and you can see here, right, how to find truth in data and analytics. Okay? 60 best books about marketing. Okay. Murder mystery marketing.

How Caspian Studios bought fiction of b to b like, none of this stuff has any sort of congruency between it. It's all very, very different types of pieces. So it gives the readers fewer reasons to return or click deeper unless you happen to be catching a moving target, right, of people's attention span, gives people very few reasons to return or click deeper into the site, and it's mentally taxing the plan. I can't tell you how many times I have, previously been wondering, hey. What am I gonna plan for my content calendar? What's coming up next? How do I do this? And just bang my head against the desk. And that's why this method that I'm showing you today, it it's partially why it exists. It's to help with the time and resources part of it. And for authors and anyone who's creating, it's impossible for them to gain momentum.

Right? You can't go particularly deep into any one of these subjects if you're just constantly context switching to get to the next topic. Right? So the way that we look at this with narrative content calendar planning, that's the solution. Right? Is it's, it's the entire content calendar. We're treating the whole year as if it's one long cohesive story, not just a random collection of topics. It works because it gives readers, listeners, viewers, your audience, reasons to return, subscribe, and take action so they can get to the next chapter or tune in next week. And my promise is that for you, by the end of this session, between this, what we're talking about today, the workbook you'll get later, and the AI enhanced notes, is that you should be able to build your own narrative content calendar, with very few problems, by the end of the session or at least within a couple of hours. Right? So that's my promise to you. So to make this work, we have 5 core concepts that we need to go over.

Right? They are the super objective, the central conflict, the 4 acts, the 3 sequences in the 8 key episodes. So your super objective, right, when we're looking at main major storytelling is, what does your protagonist ultimately want? We'll talk about this a little bit deeper. Central conflict is what is the primary force of antagonism that gets in their way. It can be external. It can be with specific people or within themselves. Alright. We've got the 4 acts. So once we know what the central conflict and the, super objective are, what are the 4 broad phases that advance the narrative to guide the person from where they are to where they want to be? What are the these three sequences or the 3 goal driven sub arcs within an axe? The 8 key episodes, what are the individual topics that we're gonna be covering? What it does is once we have this stuff all mapped out, right, it becomes very clearly defined.

Once it's all mapped out, it gives everyone involved, your your authors, your managers, your collaborators within other parts of the company, gives everyone a clear idea of the direction of the content that it it's gonna be taking. It's not just, hey. Here's a calendar of random subjects. But it gives our creators the ability to dive deeper into the subject, and it can proactively build setups to read other pieces. So if we know that we're gonna be talking about this other thing in 3 weeks or 2 weeks or next week, we can build in a sense of anticipation to the one that we're creating right now, and it gives that sense for the reader that tune in next week type feeling. Right? So those are the 5 core concepts. Let's build the content together. Let let let's build the calendar together, shall we? Let's do it.

So to do this, we need to take these steps. Right? First, we're gonna define the super objective. We're gonna identify the central conflict. We're gonna structure the acts. We're gonna divide those acts into monthly sequences. We're gonna develop a plots and b plots, which we'll talk about a little bit later. We're gonna determine the antagonistic forces, and then we're gonna outline the key episodes. And then we're gonna bridge each one of those acts with a climax, which in our case, we'll think about this like a, like a webinar that talks about everything we just talked about in the last 3 months.

Alright. Ready? So step 1, define the super objective. What does the protagonist want? So first of all, we have to consider our protagonist as the reader. The reader is the protagonist. We're trying to tell their story or help them guide them through their story. It's not us. We are not the protagonist. Our reader is the protagonist.

And if we're looking at super objective to the lens of, like, filmmaking or acting, which is where my background is, we're ultimately looking at what your primary character is looking for by the end of the story, the thing that they hope to achieve. Right? So I like to use Disney movies as part of my example set just because a lot of people have already seen them. So in this case, Moana. Right? Moana wants to save her island. Rapunzel wants to experience freedom. Woody wants to make Andy happy. These are their super objectives. This is their goal that they wanna have.

By the end of the story, this is this is what their whole story is about, what their what their desire is, their conscious desire. I was thinking about this for anybody who's joining a lightning session called, building a content strategic content calendar for 2025. What would your super objective be? So I started jotting this stuff down. Right? So, you know, one of them could their super objective what they ultimately want to achieve be, build a content calendar? I was like, no. No. It's it's probably a little bit broader than that. This is probably a smaller objective than a much larger goal. Maybe that larger goal is to schedule enough evergreen content so they can take a vacation without anyone noticing.

Alright. Mm-mm. No. No. It didn't seem right either. So maybe it was generate enough keywords to make sure we're covering enough topics. That that didn't seem right either. So when I'm thinking about your super objective and what that might be, one of the things if you're in house, especially, is I was thinking maybe your goal by the end of 2025 is to be viewed as a strategic leader and get promoted next year.

That seemed right. The super objective is something that has to be broad. It is a broad overarching goal, you know, save the world, get promoted, make somebody happy. Right? Like, the like the objectives that we talked about in the story, these are broad goals that are governing a large source of our actions. Get the girl is another one. Right? Get the promotion. These have to be universal, in in in reach. Right? They they're broad in reach, and they can be completely out out of the out like, seeming out of the ordinary or seeming out of reach.

Something like Aladdin saying he wants to marry the princess as a street rat. Like, that's a really interesting starting point. Right? As a as a as a impoverished, homeless nobody, he wants to marry a princess. Whether it makes sense or not, that's we're not here to tell Aladdin that his dreams can or cannot be achieved. His goal is to marry the princess, and that's what part of the story becomes about. Right? So your goal, I'm assuming, might be to become a strategic leader or get viewed as a strategic leader and get promoted if you're in house. If you're a service provider, I know that a lot of the conversations I've been talking with or I've been having with people lately have been to be viewed as a strategic partner to my clients and being seen less as a service provider. Right? More of a strategic partner and less of a service provider.

So that's sort of this is based on your audience, your specific audience, and who you're talking to. It's really important that you're doing your customer research to to make sure you're nailing that right properly because you gotta you have to be broad, but this is something where I believe your goal might be to be viewed as a strategic leader and get promoted or a strategic partner, to, again, get promoted. Right? So once we understand that, we have to have a really strong idea of where somebody's head is at and where they want to be, and this is the perfect time of year for that too because this is where where everybody's heads up anyways. New year, new me. Perfect. We've got a lot of people are really thinking about their super objectives at the moment. Step 2 is identify the central conflict. So what's getting in their way? Right? So in our case, if we go back to our examples from before, right, Moana, her super or her central conflict of the movie is the imminent destruction of the ocean's ecology.

Right? Rapunzel's mom wants to keep her hidden independent so she can, you know, keep taking advantage of her hair. Right? And, in Toy Story, it's the race against time and space to return to Andy before he notices. Right? These are the things that are getting in the way of pretty much everything. Right? That like, if if there are 2 forces that are opposing each other, this is the this is the part that's opposing the the reader from getting their goal. Now the thing about central conflict, and we can think about this, pretty pretty cool. There's a cool way to really think about this. Robert McKee is a screenwriting, expert, and one of the things he brought into play is the 3 layers of conflict. And if you've followed my work at all, you've probably heard me talk about this quite a bit.

But you've got 3 layers of conflict. You've got external conflicts, which are intangible circumstances out of anyone's control. So these are forces of nature, roles in society, existential threats. For people like us, it would be like the economy, weather, deadlines, AI, legal departments. Right? Things that are completely out of our control and, and usually roles. Right? If we're talking about people, we're not really talking about people. We're talking about the roles of which those people represent. So this is why I say, like, legal departments.

Personal conflicts, these are challenges with specific individuals. Right? So friends, family, lovers, colleagues, unsupportive bosses, angry spouses, hypercritical fathers, those are some examples of what we might be able to talk about if we have personal conflicts. And then we have inner conflicts, which are conflicts with challenges or challenges with the mind, the body, or the emotions, challenges within the self. And for me personally, like, these are being scatterbrained. I'm often overtired or anxious about certain situations. These are conflicts that can be big oppositions to, achieving goals. Right? So if we're thinking about our if I'm thinking about you and what your goal might be as as we start to build this calendar out together, your super objective might be to be viewed as a strategic leader and get promoted by the end of 2025, and your central conflict might be a boss who doesn't understand content marketing. Right? We have to have these things really dialed in because what ends up happening when we start looking at our calendar as a whole, right, is the events of the story are made up of these two things being in conflict with each other.

You can see the arrows here. Right? Every event of the story is about the the the protagonist trying to achieve their goal, the central conflict throwing something in their way, and then we're watching the protagonist either, go over, under, around, or through whatever obstacle it is that's being thrown at them. And our obstacles are going to be the events that make up the story. Right? If we look at this, through a couple of other lenses here. Right? Moana, we can see again her goal is to save the island. The destruction of the ocean's ecology is the external conflict. Watching her deal with the different things that come up as a result that, those are the things that make up the story of Moana. Right? Same with Toy Story, same with Tangled.

K. For a story to happen, we must clearly see what the protagonist wants in a more powerful force of antagonism that prevents them from getting it. The story comes from watching our protagonist or watching how our protagonist faces any and all obstacles thrown at them on their way to overcoming the central conflict. Super important we have these things dialed in from the very beginning because we need to make sure that we're always laddering back up to that super objective and the central conflict. That way there's a sense of cohesion between all of the events of our story. K. It's, like, step 1 and 2. Step 3.

Now that we have that idea, we're gonna break the calendar into acts. So what are the 4 main phases of the journey? So if our reader's goal is to become seen as a strategic leader and their central conflict is the boss doesn't understand the content doesn't understand content marketing, then the four phases of that story as we start to break out that calendar, right, we're gonna start building on a in a way that makes it so it's very easy to see the progression of them becoming as be becoming seen as a strategic leader. So in this case, the first act of the Q1, right, January, February, March, are gonna be about building a foundation. The next quarter is gonna be about mastering operational excellence. So now we've got the foundation. We can see people and then start putting that stuff into action. Then we can start taking that stuff that we're putting into action, and we're gonna start showing them how we can show strategic value to the work that we're doing. And then once we've shown strategic value, then we can help help them negotiate a raise.

Right? So the idea when we start breaking this up into acts is what are the 4 broad phases that a character would have to go through to achieve their ultimate goal at the end? These are the 4 acts as I see them for this particular objective and, and conflicts. Now when we start to define what these acts are, right, I wanna start looking at 2 things. I wanna start looking at the focus of the act, which in this case would be teach readers how to build a content calendar to take control of their time and resources, and the purpose is to set the stage for overcoming the external challenge of time and their internal doubt. Right? And then I start defining these a little bit closer as we go through. So act 2, mastering operational excellence. Position them as operational leaders by optimizing workflows and improving team productivity. Right? Trying to keep a very tight focus on what this whole thing is gonna be. Can I can I say what I'm trying to do with this entire quarter's worth of content in a single sentence? I ultimately want to achieve that.

If I can't define that goal within a single sentence, I need to refine that goal further. Again, I wanna put the narrative purpose in here as well where we're gonna start addressing personal conflicts by equipping readers with the tools to demonstrate measurable value to value to leadership. Right? We're gonna continue moving forward. Right? So the focus of act 3, if the act 3 is demonstrating strategic value, then our focus is gonna be to help our readers think beyond operations and establish themselves as strategic leaders who can position or can influence company wide initiatives, and the narrative purpose will be to help build their confidence. Right? Build your confidence by equipping you with frameworks and strategies to demonstrate long term impacts. And then with act 4, we're gonna talk about negotiating a raise and promotion. We're gonna arm people with the strategies to negotiate or raise and establish a vision for a role as a chief content officer, and our narrative purpose will be to close the arc with confidence in strategic leadership because the other part about, storytelling is not just the events of the story, but the also the story of change that happens within our characters. And if we're thinking about our protagonist as our reader, if we're thinking about our reader as the protagonist, we're trying to I want to also think about the the emotional journey that they're going through.

So if you could personally right now are at the place where you're going, I don't feel like I'm quite in a place where I'm seeing a strategic leader right now, then my goal as the creator would be for my content throughout the course of the next year to help you feel more confident as a leader or feel more confident to position yourself as a leader. So that's the other journey that I'm thinking about as we go through. By the time we get to the end of the year, ideally, you're at the place where you can go, yep, I can show you personally all I can show you all of the steps that I've taken to be create content that is valuable to us as an organization, but, also, I feel confident in my ability to be a strategic leader. And I feel confident that you I have the skills to be a strategic leader and that you can see that now. Right? So the other part about this, breaking it up this way, is that if I were to show somebody who was not familiar with content marketing at all this. Right? They'll they'll wait for that. Next thing that I wanna do, just because I might get the ideas, get some ideas as they're they're they're being captured, like, as I'm putting this stuff down, is I'm gonna capture whatever key topics that come to mind, as I'm breaking out these acts. Right? So, for example, right, build a foundation.

Some things that come to mind immediately are, like, why content calendars are the first step to becoming strategic leaders, templates and tools, align content calendars with leadership priorities. Right. You can read. So I'm gonna just capture these ideas as we're going along. Now what I was gonna say that is occurring to me now is that do you see how, to somebody who's not familiar with content marketing or the intricacies of what it is that we do, how just this alone can give a really strong sense of direction of where the calendar is gonna go and what our goal as a publication is going to be over the course of the next year, I can show this to anybody in the organization. Say, hey. Here's what I'm thinking of for this year. This is this is the journey that I want our customers to go through this year, and this is what I'm thinking.

This is the broadest broadest breakdown of what it is that we're gonna do this year and how somebody might feel by the end of the year. I think there's a really good there's a really good way of commune I I think this communicates things in a way that makes it easier for noncontent people to understand. Just my thought. I'm biased, though. Okay. Once we have each act, we're gonna then break each act even further down into sequences. Right? So what are the smaller steps to the completing the goal of the act? So to make this work, we have to think about something called a plot and b plot. So an a plot is an it's the main narrative that drives the primary actions and conflicts, and then the b plot is a secondary storyline adding emotional depth, in character development.

So, I'll use Toy Story as an example. I'm just coming up with this off the top of my head, but Toy Story is a great example of this where the a plot is Buzz and Woody trying to get back to Andy, and the b plot is the story of what all the other toys are doing, as as Woody and or as, Woody and Buzz are going through their story. It's the other half of the story. Right? We can do this. When when I start thinking about the a plot and the b plot for our content purposes, I wanna think about it in 2 ways. Right? I'm thinking about it as tactical steps and personal development. Now there are other things that you can incorporate. There are c plots, d plots.

There's many different plots as you wanna put out there, but, and depending on what you have the resources to do, you might wanna think about these, differently. But for me, in this particular calendar and this particular example that we're trying to go after right now, my a plot's gonna be the tactical steps that you need to take to do that, right, to to take to achieve the goal. And then the b plot's gonna be the things that we can work on internally, to help position ourselves as strategic leaders and to show not only do we know how to do the job, but we also know how to do that soft skill part, of of leadership as well. Right? So I need to know these things because when I break down my sequences, right, if I look at act 1 as building a foundation, well, there are 3 parts that can go into building that foundation. Right? And in this case, we're gonna say if the focus is to teach readers how to build a content calendar that takes control of their time and resources, and we want to help readers master the basics of content planning to save time, reduce stress, and feel more in control, well, then we're gonna do this in 3 phases. Right? We're gonna do we're gonna lay down the groundwork in January. We're gonna get tactical in February, and we're gonna talk about iteration and refinement in March. Right? We can do this again, you know, April, May, and June.

Right? We start mapping out those, those sequences, those months to see how they match up with the overall acts. We'll do it in, act 3. We'll do it in act 4. Now once we have our plots in mind, right, and these plots, we're gonna start looking at the conflicts that happen within those plots. So with act 1, our aplot objective is gonna be to teach readers how to build the foundational structure of a content calendar or foundational structure of an effective content calendar that aligns with strategic goals. The conflicts that we have, these conflicts are gonna govern all of the different pieces that we put into that plot. And, hopefully, this is gonna make sense in just a little bit make a little bit more sense once we start getting into the individual topics. But these are things that we're gonna weave throughout each of the topics to keep a sense of cohesion between disparate topics.

Right? The idea is that when somebody comes in, if they are coming in in the middle of a story, we're giving them a sense of something has happened before that we're probably trying to build off of and that we're working towards a much larger goal here instead of this being one self contained self contained piece. One of the things that's really challenging with content marketing, in general and blogging, but anything that's, you know, any individual piece of content is that it can often feel disconnected from a much larger whole body of work, and so we're reactively, and retroactively linking to other things that we've done in the past, but there's no real sense of glue that brings these pieces together. And what this is when we start thinking about the conflicts that govern an entire sequence, now we have that glue that brings people that connects pieces to each other and go, hey. We're we're trying to overcome this particular thing. And even if you don't get all of that right here in this piece, that we'll check out this piece that came before it because now we're building off of this body of knowledge that we're building over this, you know, these next handful of pieces that we're working on together. I hope that makes sense. I have other examples of that that, like, we talk about that in the content theory course. But, hopefully, that makes sense where this having these conflicts defined in advance that govern the sequence and the plot line that you're building over the course of a number of different topics, that's the thing that gets it so people feel there's more to it than just this one individual piece.

That's kind of an like, the the thing that makes it so pieces feel connected, that's the conflict. Okay. And then we'll look at the b plot objective here too. Right? And remember with the the b plot here is personal, development. What we're gonna look at if if the goal is to teach readers how to build a content calendar that takes control of their time and resources, and they wanna master content planning to save time and reduce session, feel more in control. Well, the b plot is gonna be about shifting their mindset from reactive to proactive. Right? And the way that I'm thinking about aplot and bplot here, by the way, which I don't think I've mentioned already, is that these are literally mapped to days of the week. So aplot would be this the post that we talk about on Mondays.

B plot would be the thing that we talk about on Thursdays. Right? Say I only have the ability to publish twice a week. My a plot's gonna be Mondays. My b plot's gonna be Thursdays. Now we have, 2 cohesive sort of stories that are running congruently. They play into each other quite well, but one is focused primarily on personal development. The other one is focused primarily on skill development. And that way, we can start to combine it all.

And if our reader's reading everything that we're creating in order, there's gonna be a a much stronger sense of, like there's there's gonna be a much greater reward and have higher return rates on their part. K? And, again, if the b plot objective is shifting mindset from reactive to proactive, then our conflicts that govern that might be last minute requests, department heads, and lack of confidence. So, again, we can start to build out these, sense of cohesion between the individual topics that were being discussed. And that way, we give people that reason to, like, again, go back, read more, click deeper, see what they've missed, etcetera. From the reader's perspective, they might not even know that this is happening. It might it it doesn't even necessarily if you pull this off well, it does not feel conscious, but that's the goal. My goal as a content creator is to get you to open 15 tabs by the time you're done with a single blog post because I want you to keep coming back to my site. I want to return more.

I want you to click deeper. This is how I believe we can do that. And, again, we can do this for February. Right? So February is about getting tactical. Our a plot objective is to implement a content calendar by establishing efficient workflows. Right? The conflicts that come up with that are unpredictable demands from other teams. Specific, colleagues wouldn't teams give misaligned expectations, and internal fear is fear of failing execution. Right? Be plot objective, build trust with leadership and effectively communicate the value and goals of, content calendar.

Conflicts, your external conflicts, noise in the market, leadership's dismissal of content is fluff, and your internal fear is fear of failure. Right? March, we can do the same thing. Right? Adapt and optimize content calendar for greater effectiveness. Right? We have unforeseen changes in technology, algorithms, or disrupt the planning strategies. Personal, conflicts might be stakeholders keep changing priorities, and your internal conflict as you start thinking about, you know, if March's theme is around iteration and refinement is your own personal ability to or inability to adapt to change. That might be a very interesting, conflict that can govern a series of topics. Right? And in this case, you're, and then you might also have develop resilience and confidence through normalizing, iteration as strength and negative, setbacks effectively. Right? And, again, you have these three conflicts right here, that would govern that.

So unpredictable industry trends, receiving criticism and self doubt about the ability to lead and adapt and change effectively. So once we have that, right, now we have a pretty strong idea of what the goal of the overall act is. We have a pretty strong sense of what the sequences are within that act, those 3, like, subthemes that are gonna go into those acts. And then when we start thinking about the a plot and the b plot, what are the things that are gonna, what are the challenges that are gonna face a lot of the topics that we're gonna talk about on this particular plot? Now we can start breaking it out into individual episodes. Now I call these episodes because I like to think of each blog post or piece of content, not just, you know, not just blog post. We'll say a a blog post, a social media post, a newsletter, whatever, what have you. Right? If we're trying to build a narrative, the blog post itself or the the the topic itself almost doesn't matter if we're able to align what we're trying to do to the the overall narrative. Take a step back here.

We'll get through this, and then I'll get back to this. Alright. So, we're gonna break each sequence into episodes. So how many episodes you have is determined by how often you want to publish, what format you're leveraging, and what you have the resources to support. So let's say you have as part of your content marketing mix, you have blog posts, you have ebooks, you have podcasts, and you have videos that you're doing. Right? Once we have this broader narrative that we're trying to create or that we know we're going to create and the topics that we wanna cover, what guests we book on our podcast can be aligned with the topic that we're trying to cover, not necessarily whatever that podcast guest wants to talk about that day. Right? If we have an ebook that's coming out, that can become a culmination of the stuff that we've talked about before in previous formats. If we have a video that we wanna do, maybe that is slotted somewhere into the narrative that we're creating overall, and we have that narrative defined before we talk about the formats that we're gonna talk, like, the formats and how we which the formats of how we which deliver our content or our message.

Right? I think that's really the important part here is if we're thinking about the foundation. Right? We'll go back over to here. We'll just get into it. Right? If the January's theme is around laying the groundwork and our a plot is about teaching readers to build the foundational structure of content or effective calendar that aligns with strategic goals, and the b plot is about shifting mindset from reactive to proactive, we know that the conflicts there are gonna be time, bosses, and inexperience. Right? Well, now we start looking at okay. So the a plot, we'll look at the tactical side. We'll focus on just this right now. Right? Now these topics can be why content calendar is the first step to strategic leadership, how to align your content calendar with leadership's business goals, the core components of an effective content calendar, 5 types of content that your calendar needs to balance strategy and creativity, tools and templates to save time for building your content calendar.

Right? There is topic by topic, there's a flow here. The it it's you can see how one would lead into the other, but now you have the conflicts that are binding these things together. And then let's say you have multiple formats that you work with. You know, we'll say the core components of an effective content calendar, you know, that might be, instead of a blog post like you would normally talk about, maybe that's a a interview that you do with someone. Right? And if that's the case, then we can build out this sort of ecosystem where wherever somebody's tuned in, they're going to be tuned in to a narrative that is compelling across all touch points. It's not necessarily specific to that one video. It's not just that one thing that they're trying to do or that one podcast that they're listening to. It's it's hinting that it's part of a much larger whole because you've got the conflicts that are tying them together, but also the topics sequentially feel like they align with each other.

Does that make sense? I I hope that makes sense. Alright? If not, let me know, and we'll talk about that just a little bit more. But again, here, be be be plot topics. Right? So if the personal challenges would be, you know, if we go back and we say that the the personal challenges are around shifting mindset from reactive to proactive. Right? Well, now we have overcoming overwhelm, how to regain regain control of your workflow, why strategic leaders focus on planning, not doing, how to break the habit of saying yes to every request, confidence through clarity, the emotional benefits of a content calendar. Right? There now becomes, again, a logical step a step by step from topic to topic on how these things would align. But, again, we'll get into the conflicts that each one of these are going after. These conflicts are gonna be the thing that govern it and tie everything all together.

Right? And because all of these are ultimately ultimately aligning to a giant super goal or a super objective in a central conflict, there's a much tighter sense of cohesion between all of the pieces of content that are created in this calendar. Right? February, getting tactical. Right? We wanna implement a content calendar by establishing efficient workflows. The challenges with that would be unpredictable demands from other teams, specific colleagues from different teams with model aligned, misaligned expectations. Internal's got a feel of failing execution. Now we can talk about breaking down big goals into actionable monthly themes, batch of plan batch planning, incorporating campaigns into evergreen content. Right? 3 ways to use analytics to validate your content calendar choices. Again, we have topics that can be, flowing into each other, but then we have these conflicts that are, aligning them all and keeping them all kind of bound internally as well.

K? And then let's say at the end of every quarter, right, we wanna we wanna transition into the next quarter of things that we've been talking about. Maybe part of my resources is to have a webinar at the end of each quarter. Right? And in this case, we'd say from chaos to clarity, mastering content calendar planning for strategic leadership. We're gonna bring together the topics that we've talked about in the last 3 months. We're gonna bring them together in here, and then we're gonna set up the next phase of our content calendar, or we're gonna set up the next phase of our content, with this webinar. We're gonna address everything. We're gonna set it up the next way, and then we'll take it, you know, from there. Right? And we can see here we've got act 2.

Right? And we keep doing these quarter end webinars. So if this one's from Chaos Clarity Mastering Content Planning for Strategic Leadership, the next one is scaling content with confidence. After that, becoming a strategic content leader and connecting your vision to action and then negotiate negotiating your way to the C suite. So, ideally, in this particular example, we have a way We have 4 we have 4 webinars that are gonna show our people how to do this how to become a strategic leader in the next year, but we also, have different formats and different topics that are connecting to each other, all building on each other sequentially so we can get to that ultimate goal of negotiating their way to becoming a sweet, becoming a C suite executive. So to recap, we're gonna define the super objective first. We're going to identify the central conflicts. We're going to structure our acts. We're gonna divide those acts into monthly sequences.

We're gonna develop a a and b plots. We're gonna determine the antagonistic forces. We're gonna outline the key episodes, and then we're gonna bridge each acts with a climax. And, and then we're gonna help people see their ultimate goal by the end of the year. That is the whole point of the narrative content calendar planning. I've seen firsthand how this approach can work. I've seen it when we were implementing it when I was at Shopify. We had return visitor rates, up until about 60 60% return visitors.

We increased pages per visit per session. You are driving more email sign ups because the readers don't wanna lose out, and it shortens time to sale because if people are returning more frequently and reading more per session, then they're having the time they're doubling the exposure to your content, which halves the time to, fix the problem. Intuitively, that makes sense. It is only a small part of the story, though. Right? I do teach something called content theory. This uses principles from filmmaking, from, game theory, from behavioral psychology, and a number of other fields and brings them together on how we can make this work effectively for content marketing. And it's to really stand out wherever we stand up. Right? It teaches the science, philosophy, and psychology behind category dominating content programs so we can do the same.

You can build those practices into your own company. In the program, we talk about the 8 layer market research framework. We also have a rhetorical competitive analysis. So I use, Aristotle's logos, pathos, and ethos as a lens to dissect other competitors and what else is going on in the market and how they are appealing to our customers' or people in markets' sense of logic, authority, and emotions. If we can pull that stuff apart and we can reconstruct it into creating something of our own, we can have a much better sense of how we're gonna communicate with the market. We also have the code, which is a, will craft a manifesto using that information that aligns our customer facing teams and governs all of our communication. We talk about the ghost, the truth, and the lies, so we under so we can understand our readers' mental state and beliefs that are holding them back. We talk about the levels of motivation even deeper than what we did today, so we can guide them towards autonomy.

These are just some of the nice things that people have said about the program. So Sarah Schur was in cohort 1, and she said this is the underpinning of how the industry wide conversation needs to be. Harris Spotschik says, everything I thought I knew about creating differentiated content and all the advice I hear daily now feels weak, unconvincing, and basic. Zachary says he doesn't doubt in 5 to 10 years he'll be seeing this as a turning point. You can see what Emily says here as well. If you indulge me, I'll give you just a quick testimonial. I'll share a little bit more of an in-depth testimonial of what, Sarah had said in the first cohort.

Now that we've been with Google for, what, 25 plus years developing content, I mean, there has to be a better way. This is, like, the underpinning of, like, how this industry wide conversation really needs to be. So, like, anybody who comes in as a content manager, frankly, this should be the standard going forward for the next 25 years. No one is talking about it in this way. I was looking to receive a sort of end to end crash course and a reliable bankable framework, from someone who is a veteran in the industry who I could learn from, take some of those theoretical, ideas and maybe adapt and apply them. I came out with a lot more than that. So for me, my biggest moment had to be on day 1, right when we jumped into customer research. The moment we jumped in, we hit the ground running with some of the most dense ideas and topics and pieces of information.

And, of course, you've structured it in such a way that everything builds really beautifully, on itself. So it's like the broad, big, chunky stuff, and then it gets narrower and narrower as you move towards application, which is not to say there still isn't theory across all, 4 or 5 days, but just that, we get an opportunity to apply some of that theory and then move on and and, create a new, set of, like, understanding and learning when we're applying it. And now that I'm done, I'm looking forward to a part 2, quite frankly. I'm looking forward to taking some of the frameworks that you've actually provided for us and applying it to our teams. You've started me off in such a good spot. Now how can I I add some of that creativity and and make it even more robust? Look. Everyone says a lot of buzzwords, you know, and as marketers, we prone to we're we're we tend to be after a certain amount of time kinda jaded by it. If you're looking for the quick wins, you're looking for the, you know, moments, you're looking for workable frameworks, You're looking for guided knowledge.

All that stuff is in this course. But what you'll really receive is a is something I think you almost can't there it's it's invaluable. You it's so difficult to put a true value to it because it's a feeling, and the feeling is believing in your craft again. Get into this course. Get into this course, because it'll provide you everything it's promising. But it will help you look at content in the way that content, frankly, deserves to be looking. But when you come out of it, you'll realize it is b to b's moment. I'm feeling refreshed again.

I'm feeling like this industry is possible. Like, we're not just selling, you know, degrees of differentiation. When you walk out of this, you'll be well positioned to start being really excited again about telling your brand and product stories, because I promise you, they're there. You just don't yet know how to look for them. And then once you look for them, how to actually develop stuff around them, and then how to talk about that. The differences that I've observed, from frameworks of storytelling within the within your course And, when I compare it to what's out there in the industry is specificity, and it has to be specificity. If you're trying to create content at scale, you need something that's really specific, really use yeah, really usable, adaptable across a number of content types. I can take these ideas and apply them to email marketing.

I can take these ideas and apply them to case studies, lead magnets. Like, the the format doesn't matter, but what's being said, how to say it, how to dig in and find those hidden messages, and then actually giving you the techniques, again, giving you the techniques for editorial storytelling, that's just not happening. That is something that your course does, is it doesn't just leave you with the high level stuff, and it doesn't denigrate the high level stuff either. It takes storytelling as a broad idea. It then, supports that with really unique and and that, frankly, I haven't seen people talking about it in this way, wrapping up copywriting principles with storytelling. And then it goes further down and says, okay. Now here are these, you know, precepts and and tenants of storytelling. Here's what it looks like in action.

So here's kind of the prep work that you're gonna have to do to develop that story and find those ideas and generate those ideas. Okay. And now let's take it a step further. Nobody's taking it to the 3rd step, let alone the 4th step. That 4th step of what does this mean for your content creators? What does this mean for your editorial team? Right? How do you take all of that stuff and drill it down to individuals who need to use it? You are going to come away with, like, real resources, real assets, again, that you can immediately throw to your editorial team and then start to develop from there and see, again, what works, what doesn't, what are your clients like, what do they not. Nobody is giving you the actual techniques, around editorial storytelling. They'll just throw that around and they'll even maybe support you with the theory around that. But how does it get done at scale? Forget answering that.

No one's actually giving you that. That's what this course gives you.

So I mean, that's pretty powerful stuff. Yeah. We have our next cohort that is starting on January 27th. It goes from January 27th to 31st. If you have attended this lightning lesson, then you have access to a $250 discount. Right now, between now and the end of the year, the course is still its current price of $1500, so you can apply that now and get it for way less money. Or you could apply it next year, and the course will be the double the price at $3,000. We're putting a lot of extra effort and stuff into it.

We're revamping quite a bit of it, but you can still have that $250 discount just for showing up to this. But, yeah, your next chapter starts here. You've taken the first step here with narrative content planning. Let's go deeper and unlock your full potential. I cannot wait to run this next cohort of content theory, and I cannot wait for us to work together. So if you have any questions, please feel free to email me, tommy@thecontentstudio.com. Thank you so much for your time, and I look forward to seeing you soon.