If you’re a business owner or a freelance content writer, it’s important to have a content strategy. Without a solid content strategy, you end up wasting a lot of time managing your content.
By having a solid plan and sticking to it, you won’t have to spend time coming up with new ideas or scrambling to meet deadlines. One of the best ways to build a content strategy is to use a content planner.
A Sample Board to View
Whether you’re working alone or with a team, a good content planner can really boost your productivity. So, let’s see how this company uses a content planner to plan and publish its SEO content.
Click on this image to view this sample board, live!
A Free Template to Use
If you found this board interesting, here’s a free Template from Kerika that you can use to set up your own board in just seconds:
Click on this image to view the Template.
The rest of this article will walk you through the process of using this template:
Step 1: Gather resources
If you’re a serious content writer, you already know the importance of gathering resources before you start writing. After all, you need to have something to write about!
One of the best ways to manage your gathered resources is to use a Content Planner. A Content Planner can help you organize your thoughts and ideas, and it can also help you find new and relevant information to write about.
Step 2: Research Content Ideas
Before you start writing, you need to have an idea of what you want to write about. Make a list of content ideas that you think would be popular with your audience.
You can get content ideas by checking out your competitors, looking for news stories, looking for guest post ideas, and brainstorming ideas with your team.
Step 3: Drafting
Now it’s time to start writing your content. Keep your keywords in mind as you write and try to include them naturally in your text.
Step 4: Designing graphics content
Graphics in blogs capture your reader’s attention, communicate your message more clearly, and overall make your blog more visually appealing.
Once the article is ready, the next step is to add graphics to it. Graphics are important to capture your reader’s attention and make your blog more visually appealing.
Step 5: Integration/Schedule Content:
Once you’re finished writing, you need to integrate your content into your website. You can do this by adding a blog to your website or by scheduling your content to be published on your website later on.
Step 6: Promote Content
Finally, you need to promote your content. You can do this by sharing it on social media, writing guest posts on other blogs, or by paying for advertising.
Producing great video content is essential to a successful YouTube channel, but it can be a time-consuming task if you don’t have a proper process and workflow.
A very helpful tool for planning your content workflow is the Kanban board.
Kanban boards, like Kerika’s Task Boards, can help you plan and execute your video production process, ensuring that each step is completed in a timely and efficient manner.
In this article, we will show you how you can use Kerika to set up a great workflow and process for your YouTube video production.
A Workflow for You
This template will set you up with a good workflow. Each phase of this workflow is represented by a column; let’s take a look from left to right:
Click to view this Template
Resources
The cards in this column contain helpful resources for you to get started with. The first card, for example, helps you understand how to use video tags; the second card provides a guide for how to write a good video description. And so on.
Content Ideas
This is where you start to gather all your ideas for different videos. If you are having trouble coming up with ideas, take a look at the first card in this column.
Create Video Scripts
When you have decided a specific topic you want to work on, move its card from Content Ideas to this column and start writing your script. (And there’s a card in this column with some really useful tips on writing a template for a script.)
Record & Edit videos
Use this column to track the videos you are currently working on: once your script is ready, move the video’s card from the Create Video Script column to this column. This helps you keep track of the videos that are currently in production.
Review Videos
Once everything related to a particular is done, move its card to this column. This will help you track videos that are finished, but you haven’t published them yet.
Schedule / Publish Videos
When you have decided when to publish a video, move its card to this column. This way you and your teammates know which video is when going live. Kerika will remind you if you scheduled a video but forgot to publish it.
Promote Videos
Promoting videos is essential to growing your YouTube channel: once a video is published, move its card to this column and create a checklist of where your videos should be shared and promoted.
Best Practices of Great Teams
If you are working just by yourself, you are ready to go. But if you are working for an agency or the Marketing department of a company, there will be others you need to get involved in this project.
Set up your Team Members
Kerika makes it really easy to organize your team: if there are people who will be actively involved in the video production, e.g. photographers or content writers, add them as Team Members on this board.
They will be able to make changes to this board in real-time, as they get their pieces ready, and everything that they do will be instantly accessible for everyone else that’s on this board’s team.
Set up your Visitors
There are often people who need to be informed, but aren’t necessarily going to contribute in an active way. For example, there may be a product owner who needs to keep track of videos that are relevant to their product, or a senior manager who wants to be kept in the loop.
Add these stakeholders as Visitors to this board team: they will always have a real-time view of what’s going on, but they won’t be able to move any cards or make any changes (in other words, mess up with your careful workflow!) and you won’t have to keep giving status reports. That’s a double-win.
Understand the Workflow
In a Kerika board, every column represents a particular stage in a workflow, and every card represents a specific task (e.g. a video that needs to be produced).
Start at the top-left
Open the first card in the first column
Read the instructions inside
Check out any resources that are attached to the card
Take action.
Some tasks are best handled by you, and others should clearly be handed off to coworkers.
Update the cards as work gets done
A card can be assigned to one or more people, and this can change throughout the course of the project: something is initially assigned to you and then gets handed off to someone else.
As cards get worked upon, update the status of each card: start with READY, then IN PROGRESS, and so on. This makes it easy for everyone to always have a clear idea of where things stand.
Set due dates. This will help you make sure nothing slips.
Use Kerika’s chat instead of email: this will keep your communications quick and focused.
Move cards along the columns as the work progresses.
Get to Done
The team’s goal is to get all your cards all the way over to Done, on the right-end of the board.
Sometimes things that were initiated need to be discarded: maybe something turns out to be a bad idea? In that case, move the card to the Trash column. (If you change your mind later, you can always retrieve items from the Trash.)
Kerika gives you Resources
The Resources column, the first in this workflow, contains six cards to help you get started:
Kerika provides you with resources
Video Tags: Tags are important as they help YouTube algorithms understand what your video is about. This influences when your video appears in search results.
Video Description Template: one of the most important things you can do is create descriptive, keyword-rich video titles and descriptions. This will help your videos rank higher in search results and give your audience a better idea of what your video is actually about.
Video Thumbnail Template: Your thumbnail is what appears first on your YouTube channel and in the search results, so it needs to be eye-catching and representative of your video content.
How To Edit YouTube Videos Quickly: All successful YouTubers put a lot of time and effort into their editing because that is what helps them stand out from the crowd. This card has useful links, including some of the best video editing tools.
The Easiest Way To Write A Video Script: Writing a video script for YouTube can be as easy or as difficult as you make it. If you have a clear idea of what you want to say and how you want to say it, the process can be relatively straightforward.
10+ Places To Share Your Video For More Views: Sharing your videos on other platforms lets you borrow their audience and show your content to people who might not have found it otherwise. This helps get more views and subscribers on your channel, which leads to more success on YouTube.
Start Generating Content Ideas
The second column is Content Ideas and it contains five cards:
How to Generate Video Ideas: content ideas are the basis for your YouTube videos, and without a clear idea, it is hard to plan, make, and edit videos that are engaging and effective.
This card will help you generate good video ideas. It gives you useful resources and a list of content ideas that you can use for your videos.
Your Video Ideas: Use this card to keep a list of video content ideas. Remember, no idea is too specific or too vague! Refer to this card when you need a content idea to work on.
Example Video (DUPLICATE THIS): This card will come in handy while writing your video script: it contains a template for writing content that you can duplicate for each of your content ideas and a checklist that divides the script writing process into smaller tasks.
(Example) Video Idea: Latest Smartphone Review is an example of a video idea that discusses the latest smartphones. This video needs a script to educate the viewers about the pros and cons of the latest smartphones launched this year.
(Example) Video idea: How to create a successful advertising campaign is another example of a video with tips on how to create an advertising campaign:
Create Video Scripts
This column contains two cards:
Create Video Scripts
The first card will save you time by giving you a ready-made format for scripts. It offers a clear and consistent structure for you to follow, which can help organize your script ideas and ensure that you tell the story in the most compelling way possible.
The card also includes guidelines for things like video titles, introduction, body, conclusion, and call to action. It will help you follow industry-standard conventions and make it easy for you to read and follow later on.
The second card will help you write a script that keeps your audience interested and engaged in your content, and this card shares some of the most useful tips to help you with it.
Record & Edit Videos
This column contains two cards:
Record & Edit Videos
The first card helps you understand keyword optimization, which is an important aspect of creating and promoting YouTube videos.This will increase the number of views on your videos, ultimately leading to more engagement.
The second card has useful tips to improve the overall quality of your videos and make them more professional-looking.This will increase the chances that viewers will watch your videos all the way through and even share them with others. Overall, video editing is an important part of creating successful videos on YouTube.
Review Videos
As videos are ready, drag the video card here and assign them to the folks who will be reviewing them, and change the status of the card to NEEDS REVIEW. If you need feedback by a certain date, set the Due Date on this card so people understand its urgency relative to everything else that’s going on.
Schedule & Publish Videos
When a video is ready to be scheduled for publication, move its card here. This makes it easy for everyone to know what the publishing queue looks like.
Finally, Promote Your Video
When you promote your videos, you are essentially making people aware of its existence and inviting them to visit and subscribe. This can help attract more viewers and subscribers, which can in turn help your channel grow and become more successful.
We have some tips for you in this template.
Tips for Promoting Videos
Like what you just read?
Here’s the template: just one click, one the USE TEMPLATE button, will set you up with a new Kerika account and your first board, in just seconds.
Click to view this Template
You can try everything free, with your entire team, for 30 days.
With our latest update we have made it easy for you to ensure that someone on a board team always sees your chat message, even if they are not assigned to that card.
The old rule was that everyone who is currently assigned to a card would get new chat pushed to them as emails. Now, you can make sure someone gets that email notification right away, even if they aren’t assigned to a particular card:
Directed chat
Using this feature is simple: just type the letter “@” anywhere in your chat message and Kerika offers all the matching suggestions:
Sending new chat
“@All” lets you push your chat to every Board Admin and Team Member — something you should do only rarely to avoid annoying people!
Try this feature and let us know if we can improve it.
We have completely rebuilt Kerika’s search capabilities, both on the back end and on the user interface, to make it much easier to find tasks (cards) and documents across all your Kerika boards.
Search Task Results
Search results are organized into two tabs at the top: Tasks and Documents.
Within each tab, results are further segmented into two tabs: This Board, and Other Boards. This makes the most common use of Search even easier: most people want to find something that’s on a large board that they are viewing.
For each search result Kerika shows you what part of the task/card matched the query; in the example above, the search term showed up in 8 Board Chat messages.
Clicking on a search result gives you two action buttons: Open the task/card, or get a link to that task.
The search results are ranked by relevance; we spent weeks fine-tuning the algorithm based upon real-world usage and we think we have got it right now! But we know there will be times when you really need to narrow your search very specifically, and that’s handled by the Filter Results button which gives you so many options:
Task Filter
The Documents tab shows you all the content that matches your search results: we get this from Google, if you signed up using your Google ID or email, or from Box, if you signed up using your Box ID.
Search Results for Documents
Selecting a document result gives you two buttons: OPEN, which will open the document for you in a new browser tab (or in Google Apps or Box on a mobile device), and DOWNLOAD.
As with Tasks, there are numerous options to filter and narrow your search for documents:
We have done a bunch of things to help folks who need to work with multiple Kerika accounts: a common situation with consulting, outsourcing, or other professional services who need to work with clients who all have their own Kerika accounts.
It starts at the Home page, where we made it easier to filter you view of Boards and Templates to a subset of all the Kerika accounts you can access:
New Kerika Home
You can use the check boxes in the left navigation area to temporarily hide some accounts, if you want to narrow your view of boards and templates.
More importantly, you can now access boards from different Kerika accounts in the same session: you don’t need to log out of one account and log into another, to be able to quickly switch between boards from different accounts.
The Board Switcher, which shows all the boards you currently have open, across accounts:
Board Switcher
It’s also easy to set your preferences on a per-account basis:
Account Preferences
The Dashboard (previously labeled “Views”) has new capabilities so you can get a great overview of all your projects, across all your accounts:
View Settings
This makes it as easy to filter your Views on desktop as we had previously done for mobile users.
We have redesigned the Task/Card details dialog to provide a more space-efficient layout, so you can see more of what you need without having to scroll:
Task Details
What used to be vertical tabs for Details, Chat, etc., is now a compact horizontal tab; this frees up a lot of space to see the details of the tags.
The other big change we made is to make the Priority setting separate from other Tags:
Task Priority flag
Clicking on the star will bring up your task priority options:
If you have a engineering background, you will be comfortable calling the items that show up on Task Boards as “cards” — a term that originated with Kanban production lines in Japan, and then found its way to Scrum boards everywhere.
But for everyone else, “card” is a somewhat obscure, even baffling term, and we would often get asked a fundamental question: “what should I put on a card?
To make this clearer to folks, we are renaming cards as Tasks, because that’s what a Task/Card is: something your team needs to get done.
This is really a cosmetic change: wherever you had previously seen the word “card” you will now see either “task” or the more generic “item”. The ADD A CARD button, for example, is now ADD NEW TASK:
And what had previously been called “tasks within cards” (or sub-tasks), is now more simply called a Checklist:
Card Checklist
Again, this is a change in terminology, not a change in functionality, but we hope it will make Kerika easier for the wide variety of users we have across the world, ranging from companies and governments all the way down to schoolkids.
We are transitioning our Scrum Board users to Task Boards: the Scrum Boards are used only by a tiny portion of our user base, who overwhelmingly prefer using Task Boards and Whiteboards.
Background
For many years now we have offered both Task Boards and Scrum Boards, but the relative popularity (and implied usefulness) of these two are lopsidedly in favor of Task Boards.
The main difference between Task Boards and Scrum Boards has been the use of a shared Backlog: a column of cards that can be shared by several Scrum Boards at the same time.
In Scrum Boards, the Backlog appeared fixed in the leftmost column of the board, and like Done and Trash, it couldn’t be be moved, renamed or deleted.
The Backlog was “live” all the time in the sense that any change made by one attached Scrum Board to the Backlog was immediately reflected in every other Scrum Board that was attached to the same Backlog. If Scrum Board A added a card to a shared Backlog, it immediately showed up in the Backlog column when viewed by Scrum Board B and Scrum Board C.
The Problem
This wasn’t a good way to implement Scrum Boards, as we found out ourselves during our internal use of these boards. It’s principle weakness was it led to a proliferation of Scrum Boards, since each Sprint required a new Backlog. (Our own development team is currently on Sprint 180 so we experienced this proliferation early on.)
We though the general feature in Kerika that lets accounts archive old boards would help, but this just pushed the proliferation problem to another area; it didn’t really fix it.
The Solution
We are just going to have Task Boards (and Whiteboards) from now on. At some point in the future we may completely rethink, redesign, and rebuild a new kind of scrum boards, but it doesn’t make sense for us to continue offering the current version.
As a consequence, all existing Scrum Boards will be converted into Task Boards. Here’s how that would work:
Consider an existing set of boards that all use the same shared Backlog: Board A, Board B, and Board C.
Right now all three boards see the same Backlog, at the same time: if cards are added or moved away from the shared Backlog by any board, this view is immediately updated for all three boards.
When we transform Scrum Boards to Task Boards, each of Boards A, B, and C will have its own local copy of the Backlog.
From this point on, any changes made by any of these boards to their local copies of the Backlog will not affect the copies that were made for the other boards. Each board, then, becomes independent and can proceed on its own path, without affecting any other board since there is no longer a shared column of cards.
Questions?
We have already been in touch with active users of Scrum Boards and have not heard any concerns from them about this proposed change, so we are confident that we are making the right decision. If you do have any questions, please contact us at support@kerika.com.
We have been lax in updating this blog, sorry, but not lax at all in working on improving Kerika, especially for mobile browser users. We are also getting close to releasing our mobile app, which will contain the same functionality as you get today when you access Kerika on a phone, but it will be packaged as a traditional-looking app for folks that want an icon on their desktop.
Here’s a short list of things that have been improved and added in the past few months:
For mobile browsers
There’s more of the desktop functionality now available on phones as well, including:
Managing the columns on a board: adding new columns and changing existing columns so you can customize the workflow of each board.
Drag-and-drop to reorganize items within lists: the order of columns, the order of tasks and attachments within a card, etc.
The Home Page (which we will be calling the Explorer, in anticipation of other anchor pages that we will roll out soon) has more complete abilities to manage your boards, templates, archive and trash, including favoriting items.
The Contact Us (to get help) feature has been implemented.
The Manage Profile feature has been implemented, including changing your name, photo and password.
The My Preferences feature has been implemented, and redesigned for both the desktop and mobile to make this easier to use.
We have made performance improvements across the board, although we continue to push the boundary on this. (One of our own boards regularly has over 700 cards so we are our toughest users and testers.)
A bunch of styling tweaks to help improve usability and readability, and there’s always going to be more coming in the future.
For desktop users
A bug that caused Views to not be properly updated for some users has been fixed.
When you switch from your current board to another open board and then return to the first board, Kerika will remember the scroll position so you can pick up where you left off without any delay.
For both mobile and desktop
The Preferences section has been reorganized to make it easier to use.
We have made some tweaks to make it easier to sign up, change passwords, etc. (And there’s more coming on this front.)
Users who signed up after getting an invitation from someone else will start off just having access to the boards and accounts they were invited to; now they can create their own account as well if they want to use Kerika for private work using the same email address.
Fixed some issues with our billing system that caused us to be underpaid in a few instances. We are going to do a big overhaul of our billing system later this year (hopefully) to make it easier for both Kerika and our customers.
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