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I'm Sarah DeShaw. I have a minimalist's heart  and a business mind.
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Instagram Content Clarity Series | Step 5: Create Your Brand’s Repeatable Topics

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You’ve finally arrived at the final part of my five-post Instagram Content Clarity Series! You’ve put in a lot of hard work already, and it all pays off today when I teach you the final steps to gaining insight and clarity into the content creation process for your brand. If you haven’t checked out the other posts, I invite you to look at them here:

Step 1: Instagram Content Clarity Series | Step 1: Decide on Your Ultimate Instagram Goal
Step 2: Instagram Content Clarity Series | Step 2: Get Clear on Who You’re Posting For
Step 3: Instagram Content Clarity Series | Step 3: Discover and Utilize Your Unique Influencer Personality
Step 4: Instagram Content Clarity Series | Step 4: Establish Your Brand’s Content Pillars

You may even want to review them to ensure you’ve completed all the previous steps before we get into our last subject below.

In today’s post, we’re going to take the previous lessons learned, and use them to create specific, repeatable topics for your brand. These topics can be thought of as the subcategories to your brand’s content pillars:

If your pillars are holding up the main structure of your brand content, these topics are each chunk of marble that makes up the pillar itself.

For this, you’ll want to sit down and brainstorm 4-5 topics under each pillar. You want to keep them general enough that you can repeatedly create lots of content in that topic, but not so general that the content will feel general or inconsistent. Specific topics will help your content stay focused, on-brand, and will make it easier to regularly provide value to your followers.

For example, one of your brand’s content pillars may be Health and Fitness Tips. Under that pillar, your topics may be Nutrition Information, Diet Plans, 30 Minute Exercise Plans, and Fitness Products. You can see how topics such as these will help you brainstorm lots of great content ideas!

Have a great brand topic? I’d love to hear about it in the comments below!

By the way, if you’d like other examples of repeatable topics, or you need more help creating your content pillars, you can sign up for my Instagram Content Clarity Workbook using the form at the bottom of this post. It has all the information that you need, as well as plenty of space to take notes and keep track of your pillars and topics when you create content in the future.

Even better, the workbook is an excerpt from my Instagram Planning 101 Guide, so if you like the workbook you’ll also find a lot of value in the Guide. I’m running a special offer for this month, if you buy the Guide, you also get my Master Your Instagram Aesthetic e-course for free!

It’s natural to struggle with coming up with your topics at the beginning of this process. You may not be able to just look at your pillars and instantly know what your topics will be. In that case, you may want to refer back to your Instagram influencer personality from Step 3 of this series, and then answer the following questions:

If you were the…

  • Inspirer: What topics or in what ways do you hope to inspire people, related to each of your content pillars? 

  • Educator: What areas would you like to give tips or insight, related to each of your content pillars? 

  • Connector: How could you connect people or resources within each of your content pillars?

  • Entertainer: How do you see yourself entertaining your audience within each of your content pillars? 

Once you answer these questions, revisit your pillars and brainstorm 4-5 topics for each pillar. Write them down somewhere you can easily refer back to (like in the free Workbook) when you’re planning your content in the future. These topics will not only help you come up with content ideas, they can be used on a regular, rotating basis as part of your post schedule to provide original and fresh content to your followers. And if you’d like more help planning out your content schedule, you can find a whole section on it if you purchase the Instagram Planning Guide!

Don’t get discouraged if you find your topics slowly changing, or if you need to come up with new ones as your pillars change over time. Your brand will grow with you, and sometimes that’s going to require refining your content creation process, as you learn more about who you are as a content creator and how you best bring value to people. Just remember, you can always come back to my blog and work through these five steps to gain clarity again. Thank you for joining me on this journey to content clarity! Let me know your biggest takeaway in the comments area below!

Aubrey MooreComment