How to Create a 90-day Content Calendar for Your Blog

Is planning your content creation for 90 days really possible? 

I know right now you might be thinking, "Absolutely not. It is a goal. It is an aspiration, but I'm barely doing 30 days." 

So we are going to remove the overwhelm, remove the mystery, and talk about the system to have in place to plan out your content for 90 days.

This question comes up a lot from my free community all the way to my paying clients who are constantly like, "How the heck do you create content?" 

It all starts with a plan. 

This blog (and video if you want to watch it here) is perfect timing.

I got this idea in June of 2021 that I really wanted to test my willpower and see how powerful my planning really was and I wanted to batch create 90 days worth of content within a two-week period so that I could thoroughly enjoy myself in Greece. Not to mention wifi is very unreliable and I didn't want to deal with that. I learned a lot living in an RV.

Now, I'm not recommending that that's where you start. No way am I recommending that you just start planning and creating 90 days worth of content right out of the gate, but I want to share with you how I'm able to do it. 

It's the exact same system that I've used to create weekly content, 30 days’ worth of content and now 90 days’ worth of content.

It all comes back to this plan and this system so you can use it to get your content out into the world.

90-Day Content Creation Plan

STEP ONE: Create Your Repurposing Plan

Step number one is to create your repurposing plan. 

Now, if you didn't already know this about us over here at Brandmerry, we are big fans of repurposing. It has also floated around with my clients that I should change my name to Repurposing Queen because I'm so obsessed with it. 

This need for repurposing came out of building my business while working a nine-to-five, being at home with my son, and then trying to be this whole entrepreneur thing. I realized I could not create fresh content every single day, but I did want to show up every single day. 

So that really introduced me to the art of repurposing, something I talk about in-depth in this video right here, where I actually break down the entire planning process of your repurposing workflow. If you don't know what I'm talking about, this video is going to support you in building your plan. 

So the base of your content system is your weekly workflow or repurposing plan. 

What I mean by that is: What is your core piece of content? You need to know this in order to plan out 90 days worth of content. 

For instance, for a really long time, my core piece of content was a live video that I did on Facebook and Instagram. I would go live every Monday, I would take that content, turn it into a blog post, I would push that out on Pinterest, I would share it in my Insta Stories, I would create an IGTV, and then I would create various posts throughout the week that talked about the same topic that I talked about on Monday. 

That's the art of repurposing. Think of it like a web and all of these other platforms coming out of that.

As my business grew, I started creating pre-recorded content that we could do 30 days in advance. We would repurpose that, transcribe that into a blog post, put it out on Instagram, put it on Facebook, put it out on Pinterest, all the things to where we are today. 

I've really mastered the art of repurposing so that I now have two core pieces of content. I have a weekly YouTube video and a podcast, both with completely different content ideas. So I have two new ideas every single week for 90 days. That's a lot. I get it. You do not have to start there. 

I recommend just starting with one. When you really think about it, all you're planning for 90 days is one idea every week. Doesn't that make it a lot less overwhelming than thinking about it every seven days? I know it does for me. 

The first thing you want to do is determine what your custom repurposing plan looks like. Again, watch this video because that's going to go through the entire process.

STEP TWO: Brainstorm Ideas

Step two is a brain dump of sorts. It's really a brainstorming session that happens every 90 days where you are just dumping ideas for content creation. We're not going to stop here, there's way more strategy involved, but you've got to get the juices flowing. 

At this stage, what I recommend is having a very simple spreadsheet where you're just listing out all the different ideas that you can create for your core piece of content.

Now, you want to start to think about launches. Is there anything that you're going to be promoting within the next 90 days? Is there something new that you're going to be offering? 

You want to think about any events that are coming up, whether that's within your own business or outside of your business. Think holidays, Black Friday, end-of-the-year sales, those different things. 

You also want to start to think about some of the top questions your audience has really been asking you. If there's something you've noticed that people are asking you over and over and over again, it's probably time to deliver some information around that. So you want to use this as a brain dump.

This is also really helpful if you want to conduct some fresh market research, which I talked about in this video right here, where you can take some fresh market research that you've done and put that into your spreadsheet. 

You're not thinking too analytical about this process, you're just getting the information out there, and you're letting the juices flow. 

At this stage, I also recommend thinking of any content that you could use from live events that you've done. Maybe you did a podcast interview and you haven't shared that out with your community. Think of ways that you could repurpose content that you haven't repurposed. This is really going to help you so it doesn't feel like you're constantly creating fresh content. 

In fact, for my podcast, The Brandmerry Podcast, I repurpose live videos that I do on Instagram. I release those recordings weeks later on my podcast and that really helps me because I don't have to just constantly be creating fresh content.

STEP THREE: Plan Your Content

Then the final step, if you haven't done this already, is to put that information on a spreadsheet with your dates and if you want to, you can absolutely start putting this in a task management software. 

I personally like to organize my entire spreadsheet before I add it to the task manager because it just saves a lot of time back and forth. The task management software that we love to use is called ClickUp. 

At this stage, we are focused on getting the information inside of the spreadsheet. It doesn’t have to be anything fancy, a simple spreadsheet will do.

**If you want to watch this entire process as a screen share, I recommend hopping off of the blog and over to my Youtube channel to watch this video explanation. You can watch this video here. 

In the first column you want to have your release dates. So, I release a new Youtube video and blog every Monday. Then again, I release a podcast episode and blog every Thursday.

In the second column you can create a drop down menu with different status of the project. This is just for my end. I'm the main person who uses this spreadsheet. Once everything feels final to me, that's when I upload it or add the information to ClickUp. 

At this stage we’re just organizing your spreadsheet with your content ideas you’ve finalized. 

We've got the release date. 

We have statuses drop down. I just have very, very simple things here: Research, ready for notes, recording, editing, workflow initiated, and posted. 

"Workflow initiated" just means that we've input it into ClickUp and it's started its process. 

At this stage, I’m also adding the title once it’s been finalized. This is the big piece of the puzzle. 

This is the piece of the puzzle that people forget about. I recommend conducting your SEO research at this stage. A lot of people will teach you to wait until you’ve recorded or written your content. But, I recommend figuring it outright at the beginning. 

This information is going to help you finalize titles, which is going to play a role in formatting your blog, it's going to play a role in your thumbnails, it's going to play a role in everything. 

It'll allow you to finalize your title based on SEO and it's going to allow you to understand what keywords are going to help you, which will also help you in formatting your content as well.

There are two platforms that I prefer to use for SEO research. 

The first is called Ubersuggest. I've talked about it multiple times on this blog. You can use a paid version of that, which is what I use, or you can do a few free searches every single day. So you'd have to be really strategic in that week when you're planning it out. 

Ubersuggest is a fantastic platform that will allow you to type in the main content idea and then determine, "Hey, what is the search volume? Is it really difficult for me to rank for that?"

You'll see that I have two columns here for that: Search Volume and SEO Difficulty

I don't use these in my business for the podcast and the blog specifically because I've been doing this enough that I know, but a lot of my clients love to put in how much is the search volume and what's the SEO difficulty when they're in that initial stage of modifying their title. 

This information can be found using the Ubersuggest tool I mentioned previously.

But you're going to want to do this research to find out if people are actually searching for this. You want to play with your title quite a bit.

For example, I have a podcast titled “Your Brand Values.” For podcast titles, I like to keep the title shorter, but you'll see after I did my SEO research, the title for my blog modified to, “What Are Brand Values and Why Are They Important in Personal Branding?”

Because by doing my SEO research, I was able to find that this was a great combo. "What are brand values?" was a top question that people are asking on Google. Then the keywords of "personal branding" are ones that I always want to rank for, so I added that and made a long-tail keyword.

You'll see how doing the SEO research is incredibly helpful. We know what the podcast titles are going to be. We also know what the blog title is going to be and then I also write my SEO description based on the keywords.

Then you can use this research to also write out your SEO Description. 

For the brand values, one we did "Clear brand values are essential as an online brand in 2021 and beyond," and "over to the blog to learn more about what brand values are important and how to find yours." Your SEO description is just more enticing. If someone saw this title on Google, what could you say to them that would get them to click through on your blog?

This research is so important because if you're going to take all the time and the energy to create your content, you want to make sure that people are actually finding it. 

Another tool is called Keywords Everywhere. I've talked about that platform before. That's another helpful tool. If you're doing your content on YouTube, the tool that I also love to use is called TubeBuddy.

For podcasting specifically, I won't do a ton of SEO research for the podcast title. That's for my warm audience. I will use Ubersuggest to finalize the blog title. 

For YouTube, I will finalize the YouTube title based on the research that I find on TubeBuddy. TubeBuddy is just a tool that you can use that integrates with your YouTube search engine and will help you figure out what you're most likely to rank for based on search volume and competition. 

For instance, this six-month planning step-by-step, I think originally my title was “How to Plan Six Months in Your Business”, but it was not giving me a great score, so I played around with it and ended up with “Six-Month Planning Step-by-Step Business Calendar.” 

We don't know what we don't know. Let the data tell you what you should name your content. That's why it's important to brain dump all your stuff into a spreadsheet and then go through each of these and finalize the title.

So all in all your spreadsheet will contain the following columns:

• Release date

• Status (if you want to track this on your end)

• Final title (Youtube, podcast, blog, etc) depending on your repurpose plan

• SEO Title (if different)

• SEO Description

• Tags or keywords (tags are used on Youtube)

• OPTIONAL: Search Volume and SEO Difficulty

This stage is going to take you a little bit of time in the beginning, but it is 100% worth it because you're putting the pieces in place to make sure that your content is actually discovered. 

Again, at this stage, you want to finalize your spreadsheet, finalize your dates, finalize your titles, finalize your SEO, keywords, your descriptions, your titles for your blog, have it all done, because it will help you plan out how you actually create it.

Once you've finished the spreadsheet, then we can move into the next step.

STEP FOUR: Add To Your Task Management Tool

ClickUp is the task management software that we prefer to use. You could also use something like Asana, another very, very popular one with entrepreneurs. 

With the weekly workflow, I obviously have a team, so I’m cosigning a lot of different stages of the workflow to my team. However, in the beginning, I too was doing this by myself and I have just found that organizing it in a weekly workflow is incredibly helpful for making sure that things are moving along.

As I've mentioned before, we are repeating our workflow every week. Nothing is changing. Whether you're creating new content every week based on your 90 days of planned content or you're batching it all together, what we're doing for each piece of content stays the same. 

Inside of ClickUp, we've created some automation and some templates that we can use. 

What I do is dump all of the final titles in the first column. So I'll just pull directly from my spreadsheet, put them all in here as a new task. Then I go through and I pull them either into YouTube or podcast, depending on what they are.

I would do this for each of the pieces of content that I'm going to create. Once I've done that, then I'll pull it to its corresponding piece. My automation will start pulling in the checklist that I have designed and it will also pull in all of our notes and different things like that.

The statuses that we have are:

• Idea Dump

• Youtube Schedule (this is when the automation kicks in)

• Podcast Schedule (this is when the automation kicks in)

• Research and Notes

• Recording

• Editing

• Ready for Blog

• Youtube + Blog Scheduled

• Podcast + Blog Scheduled

• Complete

Each of the pieces of content I’m creating becomes a new task and moves through the statuses.

ORGANIZING MY CONTENT

I highly suggest watching this screen share video to see how each task is broken down into a specific workflow.

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CONCLUSION

I just gotta tell you, being in it where I'm bulking 90 days worth of content, it is absolutely amazing and will save you so much time and energy.

When you have a system in place, it just makes it that much easier. 

Now, the first time that you do this, the process might take a little bit longer. Maybe you're not five years into your business and know your ideal customer like the back of your hand. 

Maybe you're just starting out. You're going to get in a rhythm. It's going to start saving you time. But I promise you, if you get into the habit of planning this out 90 days at a time, it's actually going to save you time and energy. If you're trying to come up with topic ideas every single week, you're going to find that you're wasting time. 

Do all of your research at once, add it all into a spreadsheet, add it to your task management, and then the final piece of the puzzle is actually scheduling a time when you're going to create the content.

Now, we're focused on planning content right now. I'm not recommending that you sit down and record all your videos in one week. That might be a faraway dream for you, but at least get it on your calendar. 

Tell yourself and your Google calendar when you're going to record those podcasts. When are you going to record those videos? When are you going to write those blogs?

When I first started, I did this every Monday. So I knew what I was talking about for 90 days. 

Then every Monday I would sit down and I would say either write a blog or I would record my video or I would go live, whatever my core content was at the time, and then I would transcribe and get it on the blog and all of those different things.

I just refined that practice week after week. Then I moved into batch recording for 30 days. Then I moved into 90 days. That became a lot easier when I had a team and we used platforms like rev.com to transcribe. I dive into so much more about repurposing in this video. 

I mean, I know I've told you like six times to watch it, but if you haven't, you got to watch it. All this will make sense when you do.

In next week’s video, I’m releasing my first vlog where I document the process of creating all of the content I had planned.

Make sure you head over to the Brandmerry Youtube channel and subscribe so you don’t miss it. 

And remember this is just one piece of a solid marketing strategy. So if you’re ready to elevate your marketing strategy and really master the art of online marketing, then check out my free training.

P.S. Planning and creating your content doesn't have to be a constant struggle. There is a better way to research, plan, and create your content as an entrepreneur and it's all inside the Content Planning Blueprint!

The Content Planning Blueprint is perfect for online business owners who know the power of content creation but are tired of spending all of their time coming up with ideas, organizing their content, and wondering what will attract their dream clients.

In just a few hours, you'll have 90 days of content planned, a repeatable workflow to save you hours on creating and distributing your content every week, and content topics that will keep performing for your brand for years to come! Get your blueprint now >>

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MEET MICHELLE

Hey there, I'm Michelle Knight and I an online branding and marketing consultant for female entrepreneurs.

I believe in the power of storytelling and using that superpower to brand and market yourself online...oh and to set yourself free.

I'm obsessed with living a life of freedom, so much so, that my family and I now travel full-time while running my business from the road.

This blog serves as a home base for all things branding, marketing, content creation and more.

Market Research: How to Perform Better Research for Your Brand

Prefer to watch this blog content instead of reading it? Head here to watch it on the Brandmerry channel.

I'm going to make a pretty big claim right now and say that ideal customer work can make or break the success of your business. And there are a lot of different reasons for that. I'm going to cover those in today's blog and I'm also going to share with you how to conduct better market research. 

We no longer needed to get on the phone with individual people every 90 days. We don't always have the time and the capacity for that. Now I'm not saying that that's not a good strategy, but there are other more effective ways to do ideal customer research that is actually going to help you in the long run with your marketing. 

There are two things that we do really well over here at Brandmerry and that is helping you build a personal brand around you and your story and teaching you how to market very effectively, to have incoming leads for brand awareness, and ultimately converting them to paying clients. More income, more impact. That is our goal. 

And both of those categories rely on ideal customer research. 

I know you've heard about the ideal customer avatar. You might even be at a place where you're like I'm so sick of this work. I get it. And I hope that at the end of this blog, you're feeling revamped, re-energized, and you have a new strategy to get the feedback and the information that you need to totally elevate your branding and your marketing. 

So why is ideal customer work so important?

Well, at the end of the day, you have a business. You're selling to someone and you better know who the heck they are or they're not going to buy from you. As I've mentioned, ideal customer work plays a role in both branding and marketing. 

So from a branding side, we want to focus on ideal customer work to really understand who your customer is at their core. Understanding what their big problems are, their struggles, their goals, their aspirations is incredible information.

You can even use ideal customer work to find out what social media platforms they're hanging out on, where they get most of their information and other people that they look to for advice in your industry.

The branding work and ideal customer work can help you set a very strong foundation for your brand and your business moving forward.

Once you know who your ideal customer is, it's much easier to craft your offer to serve them at the highest level.

You can craft better messaging, which has got to play a role in your website copy and your marketing. You're also able to better understand emotional branding, which I talk about in this video right here, where I share a little bit more on how we make our audience feel and the connection that we create. 

In addition to that, one of the things that play a huge role in branding is the art of storytelling. And in order to tell great stories as a business owner, you've got to know who you're telling those stories to. It's not enough to just share stories to share stories. We want to share stories that are going to motivate our audience to take action, aka buy our product or our service.

So from a branding perspective, ideal customer research is so important because it's going to set the foundation for everything that you're going to create in your business. 

From a marketing perspective, it's all about content. 

When you're thinking of content, you want to make sure that you're thinking of content that not only attracts new people to your community but also moves them through the client buying journey. 

I talk about that entire journey, that entire process in this video right here. 

It's really important that you understand that your content is there to not only let people know who you are, build that brand awareness, pull them in and attract them, but ultimately connect with them, leading to the sale. 

It's so important to understand who you're talking to and ultimately who your business is for.

KEY ELEMENTS TO UNDERSTAND ABOUT YOUR IDEAL CUSTOMER

I want to share with you some updated strategies for doing your ideal customer work. But before I do that, let's talk about some of the key elements that you need to understand about your ideal customer. 

TIP #1: IDENTIFY DEMOGRAPHICS

I recommend that you start broad and then narrow it down a bit as you go. 

So this stage is all about the demographic. These are the things that you know about the person that you ultimately want to work with or who your product and service are ultimately for. Depending on where you're at in your business, you might have more information about this individual or you might have nothing. 

At this stage you want to think about the individual people who AREN’T the right fit for your brand, ultimately starting to narrow it down.

One of the ways to do this is to focus on things like demographics. 

What do we know about this person? 
Is this person just graduating from college? 
Is this person a working mother? 
Who is this person?

And I'm not recommending that you have to focus on men or women or mothers or not mothers, but those are some of the things to start considering.

What do you know about the individual that you want to work with? The offer that you're ultimately creating, who is it really designed for? 

This information is going to help you narrow it down from everyone, which is not an ideal customer, to getting a little bit more specific. 

TIP #2: ANSWER THE TOP QUESTIONS

Then the next thing you want to do is answer a few top questions.

• What is the problem they are facing now?

Every single business has to solve a problem. This is actually part of the niching down process.

If you don't solve a problem, you're going to have a really hard time selling anything. And just so we're clear every product, every service can solve a problem. It's your job to figure out what that problem is and narrow it down really specific to your ideal customer.

So let's say that my target market is new moms and I sell a program that teaches you how to tidy up your house. The problem is that new moms don't have a lot of time in their schedules. They're tired of a messy house. It's overwhelming. It's weighing on their shoulders, not speaking from experience at all. And they want to understand better strategies to keep it maintained if you will. Keep their sanity. 

So the problem is that they want to be able to tidy up their home in a limited amount of time. And they don't understand exactly how to do that. 

Every single thing comes down to a problem. 
What is the problem that your ideal customer is facing?

• What are their struggles with that problem?

How are they feeling about that problem? Where are they now? 

This is incredibly helpful with marketing because it allows you to connect with your ideal customer and allows them to feel seen, heard and understood. 

• Where do they want to be?

So they've got these current struggles, they've got these pain points, they have this problem. What do they ultimately want? 

If they resolve this problem, what does life look like for them? Do they suddenly get to make their eggs in 10 seconds and stop cursing every morning at their pan that keeps sticking? 

You want to understand what the core problem is, where they are now, and what those pain points and struggles are. 

How would they describe that to you and where do they ultimately want to be?

• What are the specific obstacles in their way?

Why haven't they solved the problem yet? Why haven't they done it on their own or with another product or service? What are some of the things that they're specifically looking for that they haven't found? 

Another thing that you can start to explore is the objections. 

I find that these are incredibly helpful for service-based entrepreneurs. If someone hasn't solved their problem just yet, they probably have some obstacles standing in their way. 

What are some mindset pieces that they have? Maybe they think they don't have enough time to do the work. Maybe they think that they don't have the energy or the capacity to take on something else. 

What are those objections? These are incredibly helpful when it comes to selling your product or your service. If you can understand these obstacles and the objections your ideal customer is going through, then you can use that in your marketing.

So these are just some questions that you can start to organize the research that I'm about to give you my favorite tools for, into these little categories. 

This is going to help you with your branding and your marketing overall. 

MARKET RESEARCH STRATEGIES

So let's now talk about some of my favorite ways to do market research. 

Number one is a free tool that not enough people know about that is incredibly powerful. When you think about your own life and your own customer journey with different products and services, where do you turn when you need something? Google. 

We all go to Google. It is a database of information.

And the free tool that we love to use is called Answer The Public. 

Answer the Public

What Answer The Public does is it takes the information from Google and it categorizes it into questions and into sub-categories. So you can go on to Answer The Public and type in an ideal customer that you know you want to work with. 

You can type in a core problem. 
You can type in your industry. 
So you can start as broad as you want. And then it will divide it up into a bunch of different webs. 

Let's say I type in brand photography. I am a photographer and I want to sell brand photography and I want to better understand my ideal customer and what they're looking for when it comes to brand photography. 

I can type in brand photography and then it's going to show me all of the top questions and searches related to brand photography.

With each of those, you can actually click and it'll open up another tab and show you the Google searches. It'll show you the most popular blog posts, the most popular websites. And you can start to do a little bit of research. You can get as granular with it as you want, but what this is really offering you is information on what your audience is asking. 

This can go back to what they are struggling with? 
How are they phrasing their problem?
What outcomes do they ultimately want? 

Answer The Public is an incredible, helpful tool and it's free with a few searches every single month. So you can definitely use it to your advantage.

YouTube

YouTube is a search engine platform meaning that people are turning to the platform to look for solutions to their problems. 

You can use YouTube's basic function by typing in brand photography. We'll just run with this topic, brand photography, and see what YouTube is suggesting auto-populates.

This can be incredibly helpful for finding some of the top searches within your industry. 

Further than that, you can start to explore some of the top videos and look at the comments section, see what people are asking and if it's a really popular video and you're seeing that it has tons and tons of views, that's probably a top struggle that your ideal customer is dealing with. 

So not only looking at the topic for the video that has a bunch of views and saying, “Wow, okay, this must be something that my ideal customer is struggling with if everyone's watching this,” but also exploring the comment section. 

This can be incredibly valuable for grabbing specific language that your audience is using.

Pinterest

To piggyback off of YouTube, another search engine platform that we like coming in at number three is Pinterest. 

Oh, I just love Pinterest so much. As a marketer, it's a freaking goldmine. 

Pinterest uses a very, very similar feature because it's a search engine where it will auto-populate with the most popular searches. 

So if you're going in for brand photography, you type brand photography in the search bar, Pinterest will help you out and tell you the top searches for brand photography.

It'll just kind of fill in those keywords. Again, another incredibly helpful way for you to start to get content ideas and information from your audience.

Amazon

The next one uses another popular platform that we're all familiar with and that is Amazon. 

Look, no matter how you feel about Amazon, it is where people are buying their books. So one of the things that I started doing really early on in my business was starting to explore book reviews. 

Finding books that were related to my industry. Now I totally understand this might not work for everyone. With all of these, take the ones that will best serve you and your industry and run with them. You don't have to use all of them, but this is a really helpful one especially if your industry typically has very specific topics and books related to what you do. 

So let's say I am focused on marketing. I can go to Amazon, type in marketing, and choose the book option from the dropdown.

This is going to show me all the top marketing books. I'm going to look for the ones that have the most reviews because that's where the information lies. 

I can then go to that book, I can read a little bit about it. 

What was the general idea of the book, scroll down and start reading the reviews. Now the positive reviews are nice, but what you really want to focus on are the negative reviews. 

What did people say? 
Did they say it was too simple? 
Did they say that it didn't answer this question? 
Did they not like it because of X, Y and Z? 

This is going to give you more information about what your audience is looking for and a possible gap that you can fill in your content creation.

Community Forums

The next one is all about community forums. Now I'll be honest with you, I don't use this one very often, but I've had a lot of clients who find success and use them for themselves. 

The community forums, Reddit is a great example of this, where you can go type in a specific topic, whether it's a specific problem that you've identified for your ideal customer, your industry as a whole, or something that you specifically do. 

Personal branding would be a great example for my business. Type that in and see what people are talking about. See what types of questions individuals are asking. This is a really helpful tool for getting very specific language for your ideal customer. 

In addition to that, and one of the platforms that I'm a little bit more familiar with and comfortable with is Facebook groups. 

Now, I am not suggesting that you go into every Facebook group and you just start asking random questions. Exhausting, outdated. We don't need to do that anymore.

Facebook has a search function, so you don't have to do all of the outward postings and choosing a cute pic for attention. We just get to go into the Facebook group that we know is full of our ideal customers, go to the search bar, and start typing in very specific keywords related to the things that you offer, your industry, your problems and see what questions come up. 

Whether that's a single post or actually in the comments. I have found gold mines in Facebook groups before.

In fact, and I'm going to be sharing with you, how I map out 90 days worth of content, that video is actually coming out next week. One of my favorite places to find content ideas are Facebook groups. 

Survey Your Audience

The last one I'm going to share with you is really helpful if you already have an audience. Now, you don't have to have a huge audience. You don't have to have thousands of email subscribers or fans on Instagram or whatever you use to classify an audience for your business. Although I recommend that that's your email list. You can have 10, 15, 100 people. It doesn't matter. 

This tool is really helpful for getting really specific information from people who've already said yes to your brand. And those are surveys.

Every 90 days-ish, I will put together a survey for my audience and ask very specific questions like:

What are you struggling with right now?
What is the number one problem that you're facing?
What are you looking to do within the next 90 days?
What would you love from me?
If I could create one piece of content that would help you, what would that piece of content be? 

And that's incredibly helpful for getting specific feedback from your audience, making open-ended questions so you can get very specific language and then using that to create your content moving forward. 

Conclusion

So no matter which one of these options you choose, I hope that you see that there is so much information waiting for you on the internet. 

The biggest thing I want you to remember is that we’re focused on getting specific language from our ideal customer. 

It's not enough to assume what our audience is saying. We really want to use the words that they are using to describe their current struggles, to describe their problem, to describe where they ultimately want to be. 

That is going to help you with your marketing. 
It's going to help you with your messaging. 
It's going to help you with your consistent income as a business owner. 

---

- FREE GIFTS YOU'LL LOVE -

DISCOVER YOUR BRAND STORY IN UNDER 5 MINUTES

START HERE ↠

LEARN HOW TO WRITE AN ‘ABOUT ME’ PAGE THAT CONVERTS

START HERE ↠

MAP OUT 30 DAYS OF CONTENT IN UNDER AN HOUR

START HERE ↠

---

- READ THE LATEST POSTS -

---

MEET MICHELLE

Hey there, I'm Michelle Knight and I an online branding and marketing consultant for female entrepreneurs.

I believe in the power of storytelling and using that superpower to brand and market yourself online...oh and to set yourself free.

I'm obsessed with living a life of freedom, so much so, that my family and I now travel full-time while running my business from the road.

This blog serves as a home base for all things branding, marketing, content creation and more.

6 Tips For Finding New Clients Online

BY MICHELLE KNIGHT

Here at Brandmerry, we focus on personal branding and marketing strategies to help you create more income and impact. 

And one of the ways to create more income and impact is serving more clients. 

So I thought what better way to support you in doing that than to share six of my favorite ways that you can start implementing to sign new consistent clients in your business.

Before I dive into the six tips, I have two little disclaimers that I need to share with you. 

These tips are not going to work if you don't know who your ideal customer is. In fact, you're going to have a really hard time signing clients if you don't know who you really want to work with. 

So it's incredibly important that you do the ideal customer work so that you know how you're showing up and what you're saying to those clients. 

In addition to that, your messaging needs to be very clear. 

Ideal customer and messaging are both core parts of the personal branding process. In fact, they are just two of the elements that I teach inside of my course You! Branded. 

And if you want to get a sneak peek, you can watch the Build a Better Brand Method on-demand training all about personal branding. Sign up at betterbrandmethod.com to watch it on demand. 

So make sure you take the time to learn more about your ideal customer and messaging. 

6 WAYS TO SIGN NEW CLIENTS

METHOD #1 TO SIGN NEW CLIENTS:
Create High-Value Content

My number one way to attract new service-based clients is to create high-value educational content. 

Now, educational content can be a slew of different things depending on what you sell in your business. But if you're a service-based business owner, chances are you’ve got a lot of cool information up your sleeve that you can teach your audience. 

Now, why do I say high value? 

Because if you can really position yourself as an expert from the start, from that initial piece of content that they consume from you, whether that is on a blog or a video on YouTube or a live stream or a freaking Instagram Reel, then you're going to build that trust right from the beginning, and that is really important.

Create high-value content, put it out there, show up, invite individuals to join your community, join your email list, sign up for your service, and watch as you build momentum and brand awareness and those clients keep coming in. 

So again, I'm going to stress here, it's not just about consistent content, it's not just about posting to post on social media. It's high-value, quality content. 

What is your audience searching for? 
What questions are keeping them up at night? 
Why are they coming to you to solve their problem? 

Help them through that process and watch as your gap between the new ideal customer and signing that customer gets a lot shorter.

METHOD #2 TO SIGN NEW CLIENTS:
Host a Live Event

This is one of my favorite ways to sign new clients. With a product launch, a course, and a group program, but specifically for one-on-one service-based clients. 

Sometimes we think, “All right, I've got this one-on-one service and it's always available, someone can sign up at any time.” Well, that might actually be hurting you. 

And I'm not suggesting that you're constantly opening and closing and opening and closing the doors or changing things around, but adding in frequent live events, maybe quarterly, maybe monthly, where you get to share your expertise, give incredible value, and then ultimately pitch your service can be incredibly helpful.

So these live events could look like a video series on social media, you could host a challenge inside of a pop-up Facebook group, you could host a webinar or a workshop, some sort of training for your audience. 

Essentially you have something that everyone signs up for about a topic that is super important to your audience and then you get to pitch your products and service as a solution to that problem. 

If you have a service that's always open, you're always accepting new clients, it can sometimes cause your audience to say, “I'll sign up later, I'll do this later.” 

Having these live events can be incredibly helpful and moving your ideal customer through the buying process, getting them really excited, helping them solve a problem, and then offering up your service as the solution.

METHOD #3 TO SIGN NEW CLIENTS:
Share Your Free Gift with your Community

Now, tip number three might not work for all of you, but I think it's important to know. Because I'm hoping that we'll also get the juices flowing in your brain around growing your community. 

Tip number three is all about sharing your free gift with your network. In the beginning, you might not have a huge network to tap into. I didn't have anybody in my network that I could sell my services. 

But I have a lot of clients who do. And by realizing that they have this network, we have to get really creative with how we tell them about our new venture. 

How do we tell them about our services without feeling like we're bombarding them or overwhelming them? 

One of the best ways to do that is to create some sort of freebie or lead magnet for your audience. You need this anyways, you need this regardless because it's a great way to build your email list, which is going to help you sign consistent clients.

When you create that, a great thing to do if you have the network available to you is to share it with them. 

Reach out to them and say, "Hey, I have this new freebie. If you're interested, this is what it does." Or, "I know that you have a network of people who might be interested in this, would you mind sharing this?" 

If you have a connection with other people in your industry that maybe have a similar audience or maybe they've changed gears and now they work with a different audience, reach out to them and say, "Hey, I know that you used to do this, I know you used to be in career coaching and you're not anymore. Would you mind sharing my new freebie that I have on resume building with your existing audience?" 

Tying into those connections that you already have and those networks can be incredibly helpful. But this is my favorite way to do it from a really authentic place so it doesn't feel like you're like, "Oh, I got this new offer, here's where you click to buy."

It will get people on your email list where they will hear about your services.

METHOD #4 TO SIGN NEW CLIENTS:
Build Brand Authority

Tip number four, and one of my other favorite ways, is to build brand authority. 

Now, we talked in tip number one about high-value content, about how it's important to build your expertise and showcase your expertise from the beginning. 

Because, the reality is there are going to be people who are looking for your products and services online that may be further along in the buying process and they're looking for that moment of trust, of “this is my person.” 

So having that high-value content is incredibly helpful. 

But another thing that's going to help you sign consistent clients is going to be your brand authority. People want to know that you know what you're talking about. 

A few great ways to do this, and two of my favorites, are through pitching your personal brand and through the power of search engine optimization.

When it comes to pitching your personal brand, this is a fantastic way to get in front of a new audience. I have my degree in public relations and it is one of the trainings that we teach inside of Brandmerry Academy, my marketing membership because we understand that it's a fantastic way to get all eyes on your brand. 

When you do this, you're getting invited to come onto a platform with credibility. Now, maybe you're not going to get into Forbes the very first time you pitch but think about those smaller podcasts that your audience loves, that they listen to regularly, that they have a lot of trust and respect for the host. 

That host is inviting you in to share your expertise. Your authority level is already elevated. 

So rather than shooting a paper airplane in the dark of social media and hoping it lands on your ideal customer, you're getting in front of your ideal customer already elevating your brand authority through the power of pitching your expertise.

On the other side of that, we've got SEO. Now, this isn't an “or” situation, this is an “and” situation. Because pitching and getting featured in publications, on podcasts, on TV will also help you boost your SEO because it helps drive traffic to your website.

SEO is an incredible way to increase your brand authority because of your ranking on Google.

So I'll give you an example. If you go to Google and type in brand coach, I am going to show up at the very top, if not in the top three. If I'm a consumer and I'm looking for a brand coach and I go to Google and I see that the top person without paid ads is Brandmerry, immediately the authority is high. 

So using the power of SEO, and site-wide SEO specifically to rank for your industry can also help increase your brand authority. 

SEO, search engine optimization, is something that we teach again inside of Brandmerry Academy, which is my marketing membership. And you can learn more at brandmerryacademy.com.

METHOD #5 TO SIGN NEW CLIENTS:
Offer Assessments

Tip number five is all about offering assessments. 

Now, I wanted to make sure that in covering these six ways, that you had something that would work for you no matter where you're at in your business. So the assessment works really well if you have a small audience or you're just getting started. 

You could absolutely do it if you're further along in your business and you've got a huge email list, but just know that you're going to need a lot more time blocked off to handle all of these assessments. 

Now, assessments do require your time and energy, but in the beginning, it's incredibly worth it if you are looking to create consistent income through your service-based business.

So what an assessment essentially is, is honing in on one area of your expertise, offering free assessments by application for someone to get your knowledge dumped into their lap. So I'll give you an example of what I did in the beginning of my business. 

I offered brand messaging assessments. 

I would promote them on social media, I would promote them in my email list, I would promote them on my website and my blog, and back in the day when I used Facebook groups, I would promote them there as well. 

Essentially, in conjunction with awesome benefit-driven messaging, I would say…

I'm offering five of these this week, here's the link to sign up. When you sign up, you are going to fill out a short questionnaire, we're going to hop on the phone for 20 minutes, you're going to share a little bit about your business with me, and then I'm going to give you three ways to improve your brand messaging at the end of the 20 minutes.

So super actionable, they knew exactly what they were getting, it was focusing on one specific area. 

I found that the assessments really served me better than offering a free call or a discovery call. Because those are incredibly vague and someone might not know exactly what they're going to get on that call so they might be hesitant to sign up for it. 

Think about two to three things that you could really focus on that are key to your entire framework as a service-based entrepreneur, create really strong marketing materials to promote those assessments, and offer a limited-time opportunity to get in the door.

Don't always have these assessments open. Say you're offering two or three a week, maybe you do this every month, maybe you have it on the back end of your freebie or in your email funnel. 

No matter how you want to work it in or promote it, these can be incredibly helpful with getting your customer on the phone with you showcasing your expertise, solving a problem, and then at the end of the assessment you can say something along the lines of, “If this was helpful for you, do you want to have a conversation on how we can continue to work together?”

Then you can move into the sales conversation - and just for the record I never had someone tell me no!

METHOD #6 TO SIGN NEW CLIENTS:
Storytelling

If you don't already know, my expertise over here at Brandmerry is serving my clients through personal branding and marketing strategies, but it's all based on the art of storytelling. 

If you're not familiar with the art of storytelling, you can watch this video right here, where I share more about the importance of storytelling and some of my top tips. Ultimately, if you want to show up, you want to build connections, you want to build trust, get in the habit of sharing your story.

When I first started out and I wasn't signing any clients in my business, I was doing all the things. I was showing up, I was even at the beginning offering some assessments, but nothing was really registering with my audience. 

I had a small list of about 10 people that grew from 20 to 30 to 40 or 50, and still, I wasn't signing consistent clients. 

When I started to focus on emotional branding and the connection with my audience and showing up and sharing stories about why I do what I do, my values, my mission, those same people started buying from me. 

And they weren't new to me, I'd been showing up, I had been delivering value, but suddenly there was that connection piece. So one of the best things that you can do for your business, especially as service-based entrepreneurs, especially as someone who's building a personal brand, is getting into the habit of sharing stories.

Now, I talk about the art of storytelling all the time on my podcast, The Brandmerry Podcast. 

You can also check out the Brand Storytelling Guide on the Brandmerry Blog.

Storytelling truly is an art. And you want to make sure that when you're sharing these stories, that you're not just talking to a wall or talking to anyone, that you're speaking directly to your ideal customer, the same ideal customer that's going to buy your one-on-one package or the custom package that you are offering. 

So get in the habit of incorporating a story into everything that you create, and that includes your emails and your social media posts and your blogs and on your website and in your videos because it's going to help you sign consistent clients in your business.

All right, there you have it, six ways to sign new clients as service-based entrepreneurs.

Don't forget to catch the free on-demand training, the Build a Better Brand Method.
You can go to betterbrandmethod.com to learn more about my signature six-part method.

You're going to learn more about elevating your messaging. I've got a trick in there on doing the ideal customer research that you're not going to want to miss where I’m talking about telling your brand story. 

You can also check out youbrandedcourse.com to learn more about my paid branding course. This is truly where you get the step-by-step system for building a strong brand foundation rooted in story, understanding your ideal customer and mastering your messaging.

---

- FREE GIFTS YOU'LL LOVE -

DISCOVER YOUR BRAND STORY IN UNDER 5 MINUTES

START HERE ↠

LEARN HOW TO WRITE AN ‘ABOUT ME’ PAGE THAT CONVERTS

START HERE ↠

MAP OUT 30 DAYS OF CONTENT IN UNDER AN HOUR

START HERE ↠

---

- READ THE LATEST POSTS -

---

MEET MICHELLE

Hey there, I'm Michelle Knight and I an online branding and marketing consultant for female entrepreneurs.

I believe in the power of storytelling and using that superpower to brand and market yourself online...oh and to set yourself free.

I'm obsessed with living a life of freedom, so much so, that my family and I now travel full-time while running my business from the road.

This blog serves as a home base for all things branding, marketing, content creation and more.

3 Moves That Made Me A 6-Figure Business Owner

3 Moves That Made Me A 6-Figure Business Owner

BY MICHELLE KNIGHT

I know why you're here. You saw that title, six figures, and my guess is that you are really close to it or you have a goal to reach in a short amount of time. 

I'm so excited and honored to talk to you about the three moves, and ultimately shifts, that led me to create a six-figure business within one year of signing my first client. 

First, I want to make one thing clear: you are not going to learn about some strategy that's going to turn you into a six-figure business owner overnight. I am not about that 10K-in-10-days life for new entrepreneurs who need to do the work. 

The things that I'm going to teach you today are going to require energy on your part and they're going to require some work. But guess what? If you want to create a sustainable and scalable business as an online entrepreneur, you've got to be in it for the long haul. 

I know so many entrepreneurs are right there at the cusp of it. Or you're sitting there at your desk and you've got a post-it in front of you that says SIX-FIGURE BUSINESS, in all caps! 

I'm not saying that six-figures is the end all be all. I want you to, and I hope that you want to, continue to scale your business past six figures, but this, for many of us, is the very first hurdle. 

I know that was true for me.

MY JOURNEY TO SIX-FIGURES

I started my business in 2016 after the birth of my son. I was working a nine-to-five at the time and I got this crazy idea that I wanted to start my own business. 

I'm not an entrepreneur by trade, I don't come from a family of entrepreneurs, so this kind of came out of left field. 

As I began to expand and grow my business and invest in different things, I learned very, very quickly that there were three major shifts that needed to happen in order for me to actually sign clients and create revenue.

I went eight months without signing clients in my business, but after I signed that first client and these shifts started rolling out, I hit six figures in just one year. 

It is my goal to support you in getting to that milestone and then continuing to use these shifts that are going to serve you for years and years to come.

1. MASTER MY MINDSET

The first move that I made in my business was to get in true alignment with my goal. 

No one told me that being an entrepreneur was a fast track in personal development work. But you quickly realize that as the CEO, in the beginning as pretty much the only person on your team and a one-person show, that you've really got to have your head in the game. 

If your head's not in the game, the strategies won't work. All the things that you're doing just won't work. 

That's one of our beliefs over here at Brandmerry, that you have got to have strategy and mindset in order for both of them to complement one another. 

But I didn't know that in the beginning and since strategy comes very, very easy to me, it took me a little bit longer to get my mindset to match. 

There were two specific areas that I had to focus on when it came to mindset. 

Number one was my money mindset, and number two was my mindset or my belief around perfectionism. 

MONEY MINDSET

Now, when it came to my money mindset, there were two pieces that I needed to focus on. One was looking at the past beliefs and stories and chapters that I had gone through that were contributing to my current beliefs around money. 

This belief was that people who made money were bad people. 

There was a lot of work that I had to do to ultimately redefine what success and having money meant to me. I quickly realized that by having more money, I could ultimately contribute more. 

I could hire a team and support a team, I could support my family, I could have more of an impact in the world. It's taken a few years for me to really get to this place of feeling really confident in saying that to you.

In order to get here, one of the first things that I had to do was go back and journal on my beliefs. I specifically asked myself three questions.

What are the beliefs that I'm carrying around money? 
What was I taught as a child? 
What did my teachers say to me about money? 

I grew up in the nonprofit sector. I worked in the nonprofit sector for a very long time, and the work we did was amazing, but ultimately the pay was not. I was carrying some of those beliefs with me as I began to grow my business. 

One of the beautiful things about being an entrepreneur, but also one of the hardest, is that there's no ceiling. We can ultimately make as much money as we want because we are fully in control of bringing that money in with the right marketing strategies and mindset. 

I really had to shift into that place so that I could have more of that expansive energy. In an episode I did on my lifestyle podcast, The Beautiful Climb, I go more in depth with my money story and some of the specific things that I did to help me shift. Listen to the episode here.

PERFECTIONISM

The second thing that I needed to do was release the beliefs that I had around perfectionism. 

I grew up as a die-hard perfectionist and I am still in the process of recovering from this. Thank you, Brene Brown, for all of your amazing work. I don't know if I would be here without you. 

I loved Daring Greatly by Brene Brown, but any book by Brene Brown is truly incredible if you struggle with perfectionism. I also talked about perfectionism in this video and how detrimental it can be to entrepreneurs.

When I was starting out, I would wait to post a video, I would wait to send emails, I would sit and edit my website over and over and over and over again. 

But as an entrepreneur, you have to be visible. 

If I wasn't showing up, I wasn't bringing in community members and I wasn't making any money. 

This is why it took me eight months to sign a client. I had to really start working on this idea of perfectionism and start peeling back the layers.

The number one thing that I did was just hit the button. 

I remember that first email, after days of agonizing over the process, I was like, "Oh my gosh, they don't even care. I'm just going to hit the button." I hit it and I was like, "Oh, okay. This is fine. If I just keep doing that over and over again, eventually it will become super easy," and that's where I am today. 

There was a lot of internal work that I had to do in order to make money in my business, and those were two of the main areas that I had to begin with and really dive into.

ACTION STEP: Think about your relationship with money and the negative feelings you are carrying around.

2. BUILD A SOLID FOUNDATION

The second move that I needed to accomplish before I could hit six figures was building a solid brand foundation. 

Because of this experience and my success, I now have an entire course called You! Branded. I also teach this inside of my free class, Build a Better Brand Method. 

But when I started, I skipped the entire process. That's why I'm so passionate about it. 

I watch entrepreneurs skip their brand all of the time. 

I thought that if I could just glaze over it, that I would know who my ideal customer was and I would understand what a brand really meant and I would have clear messaging.

It turns out that by skipping over it or even skimming it just a bit, you don't build a solid foundation and there’s nowhere to scale.

When you're thinking of building your business, I want you to think about building an actual building. You're setting a strong foundation at the base, that's your brand. Then as you continue to scale, add offers, new marketing strategies, all of that stuff, you're supported because you've taken the time and the energy to build a solid foundation. 

I skipped this crucial piece and so for eight months I didn't make any money, but as soon as I got into the nitty-gritty, as soon as I really solidified and got specific with my niche, I understood my story and my brand story and how that played a role, I got super clear on who I was speaking to, I understood how to create consistent messaging, and I tapped into my emotional branding, that is when my existing community started to respond. 

Those first clients that I signed weren't new to me, they'd been around for months, but suddenly I was speaking so clearly and connecting with them on such a deep level that they were ready to invest.

I created a video for you right here on emotional branding that I definitely want you to check out. 

It's going to be really beneficial for you in your journey. 

ACTION STEP: If you don't know what a solid brand foundation looks like, I do have a free class for you, it's called the Build a Better Brand Method. You can sign up for that at betterbrandmethod.com.

3. BUILD OUT SYSTEMS

The final move that I made, when it came to building a six-figure business, was getting my systems in place. 

I'm kind of nuts about this now, it's one of the things that I teach inside of Brandmerry Academy because I recognized very, very quickly how much time I got back by having my systems in place. 

Sometimes we postpone putting our systems in place, I'm talking about your content creation system, your client onboarding system, your SOPs for behind the scenes on how you launch a new podcast or launch a new product, for example. 

We wait to do that because it does take some time commitment and a little bit of work, but the long haul and how much time you actually save yourself months and months down the line is incredible.

One of the systems that I put in place really early on in my business was my content creation workflow. I've really embraced the art of repurposing. 

I started mastering my weekly workflow early on because, as I mentioned, I was working a nine-to-five, I had a new baby, and then I was also trying to scale this business. 

I understood that I needed to just show up and get visible and create content so that people could find me, but I only had this much time, so I wanted to make the most out of that time. 

I put together this repurposing workflow, this system for my business, and I've continued to use it and scale it even today. This video that I'm recording is one of three that I'm recording in a one-hour time increment because I'm bulk scheduling, which is part of my process.

Five years later, I'm still using the same content workflow system as when I first started. 

When I first started implementing these systems in my business, not only did I find myself working more efficiently, but I had way more time to do the things that I love to do. 

ACTION STEP: Download my Repurposing Guide to learn how to create your weekly content workflow and set up one of your most important systems.

CONCLUSION

One of the things I don't think is talked about a lot is as you're growing your business, especially to the six-figure mark, is that it's going to take a lot of time and energy. 

Anywhere where you can free up pockets of time, you can actually have fun and enjoy the journey, is going to mean so much to you. 

So when you look back, you don't want to say, “Oh my gosh, I never slept, I never ate, it was horrible." 

You want to look back and say, "Dang, I did that and I'm really, really proud of what I did because I also had the capacity to enjoy life," which is always the goal, right? 

Why have a successful business, if you can't also enjoy the rewards, reap the rewards and enjoy the life that comes with that?

Those are the three moves that I had to make in my business to hit 6-figures and I continue to use them today as I move to new income goals and growth.

Make sure that you watch the Build a Better Brand Method masterclass. It is so important, no matter where you're at in your business, that you make sure that all of those little spots are filled in because it will have an impact on your scalability moving forward. 

Remember, it's not just about hitting the first six figures, it's about continuing to do that over and over again and scaling to the million-dollar mark and it starts with your brand.

---

- FREE GIFTS YOU'LL LOVE -

DISCOVER YOUR BRAND STORY IN UNDER 5 MINUTES

START HERE ↠

LEARN HOW TO WRITE AN ‘ABOUT ME’ PAGE THAT CONVERTS

START HERE ↠

MAP OUT 30 DAYS OF CONTENT IN UNDER AN HOUR

START HERE ↠

---

- READ THE LATEST POSTS -

---

MEET MICHELLE

Hey there, I'm Michelle Knight and I an online branding and marketing consultant for female entrepreneurs.

I believe in the power of storytelling and using that superpower to brand and market yourself online...oh and to set yourself free.

I'm obsessed with living a life of freedom, so much so, that my family and I now travel full-time while running my business from the road.

This blog serves as a home base for all things branding, marketing, content creation and more.