How to Use Trello to Create Kick-Ass Content

in this video I'm going to show you one thing I always do when I'm preparing any kind of piece of content so if my goal is to create a really effective sales pitch or an awesome presentation or write a blog post or make a video whatever it is there's one thing that's really key to making that work and it might surprise you what it is hello I'm Shane black from active growth and for me the key to creating a great piece of content or presentation or whatever it is is what I actually do before I start writing before I start recording it is in creating a good outline for what I'm about to do I'm gonna show you this outlining process that I use and how to do it really effectively using Trello but actually before we go over there and look at how to use Trello how to use the tools in tech to create an outline let me talk about briefly about why is creating an outline so important to the quality of the end product well it's basically about structure and about clarity of communication by creating a clear outline you can put clear structure into what you're saying and if you look at basically boring content whether it's a boring article or you know someone rambling on and on you know death by PowerPoint type presentation this kind of thing is always suffers from a lack of structure and the lack of clarity so creating an outline like this is your remedy against that make sure that before you even start creating content you already have an outline and structure in your mind one way to think of this is think about a stream there's a large stream and your job is to cross that stream and what most people do is they just like jump in and then flail about wildly hoping to get to the other side somehow while they're being torn about by the currents this is kind of stream-of-consciousness communicating right you just say whatever comes to your mind when it comes to your mind and you're all over the place well creating an outline like I'm going to show you is basically like placing stepping stones in that stream and planning okay I'm going to go here then I'm gonna go there don't go out there and that way you can get across the stream much more cleanly much more fish simply and it makes for great communication so I'm going to show you how to use Trello to write down the main points you want to hit and also to be able to move them around to reorganize them because one of the things an outline allows you to do is you can look over it and say oh you know here is a good way to explain this or maybe I should insert this part before that other part maybe I can open a little story here and close it at the end and all this only happens and is only possible if you have this outline in front of you and you plan ahead of time right because if you're doing the if you just start writing or you just start recording you will maybe as you're talking or as you're writing you go there was a bit of better way to say that and then you have to go back and kind of reorganize stuff if you're writing you can do it but it's inefficient if you're talking it's basically too late at that point right so that is why the outline makes such a big difference the quality of the content you produce so now we're ready to look at how to actually do this using Trello so here we've got the Trello board and let's say I'm writing a blog post I would give the card I create a new card for this task for this project of writing the blog post and I call it so let's say blog post something the title then I maybe do my shortcut stuff you can watch my previous video for that and then there are three levels to creating an outline I'm going to show you the simplest one the medium one and then the most complex one the first is you just create a checklist right here hit enter to start the checklist and you start writing down your ideas generally write your ideas as short bullet points so I'm gonna go okay you know point one enter point to enter and so on and here's a card that I've already filled out with a possible outline for a blog post so this would be how to grow your mailing list blog post and I've made a quick checklist with some of the points I would want to hit in this post so the way I think about it is this is my outline this is my structure and as I put this together I'm thinking what are the main points I want to hit whether the priority is how do I put this together to make a really effective post now one of the great things about this is that I can reorganize it so as I'm going through this I might see that I'm talking about I had this idea I want to mention how to make a good opt-in form and how it performs better than a poorly designed opt-in form but maybe I should do this here when I after I talk about or actually before I talk about the different opt-in form types right so I simply drag and drop this element in the list and then maybe there's another one here where I talk about these quality that may be actually that should be like right after the intro or yeah before I start talking about what a good opt-in offer is this is where this belongs there might be other stuff where I go you know this is too much cutting out right cutting content is very important exercise in making your content better and there you can just go here hit delete and clean up your list and this way this is one of the most important things is that you can work with your content you can work with your notes rearrange them and plan out how you're going to go through these points you can add more structure you can add a second level of structure here by using my level two strategy so here if I create a new bullet point if I go like this it creates a bold entry and so this can be like a chapter heading so this is my intro that's just a very simple structure I've got my intro I've got my content and then I've got my call to action at the end so if I'm creating a more complex or larger piece of content amount of multiple chapters in there and I can use these bold headings in my outline to help me see the structure that the content is gonna have as I'm writing out my notes this can be taken even further so for even more complex topics or even more epic content you can use multiple checklists so let's say I create a checklist and I call it intro / hook and in here I'm going to write all the stuff that is about okay how am I going to win people over in the first place so all of this is about my intro and hook and you can drag and drop an entire checklist so then this is my you know this is my first chapter let's say this is chapter one then maybe I have another chapter chapter two and I have my own have a checklist in here and then I have a final one which is the call to action and so on but the main point is that first of all you can basically the more notes you have the more stuff comes together for one presentation or piece of content the more the higher level you should use right so level one just a simple checklist is for content that you know like a five-minute video back done level two is for a medium-sized blog post level three is for like a longer presentation a longer video maybe some webinar content so you can put a lot of content in this card with a very clear structure and you can move entire chunks of the card around right you can move entire checklists around you can also move any item from any checklist into another checklist right you can just drag and drop like that so you can very easily move stuff around like this and this gives you an overview of your content lets you organize you know what what do I want to maybe open in the intro and then call back somewhere in the middle and then close off at the end of my presentation or something like that now I want to show you an example of such a structure that I made for this very video you're watching right now so this is what my checklist looked like as you can see I used level two strategy here with bolded headings and I have my intro hook some notes about that then I have the aside or I basically switch to a different location to explain why outlining and structure is so important then my three levels that we went to through just now then show this example this is where we are right now and then there's going to be a call to action which is I can use my notes here right away now that you've seen this try this out as with everything with a tutorial like this now go to Trello if you don't use Trello yet sign up for an account totally free and try this out try out using the checklists like this and create an outline for the next piece of content you create and remember that this is something to work with right you're not supposed to create the perfect outline you're supposed to put down some notes move them around delete stuff change stuff and after just a bit of work once you get used to this you have a really crisp outline for what you're gonna talk about so that's it go check out Trello and give it a try and let me know how it goes also if you want to know more about how to think like this in the first place like how to come up with structures in the first place listen the podcast episode about bento-box thinking if you're watching this on youtube check the link in the description to get more details if you're watching this on my site links to that podcast and to Trello and everything else are below the video so thanks for watching I hope you enjoyed this and leave a comment letting me know what your thoughts or questions about this hour

Channel: ActiveGrowth

Views: 11,812

Keywords: trello, productivity, presentation, content marketing, writing, outlining, content structure, blogging, video creation, communication skills, bento box thinking

Id: 9R4OSNtZTzw

Length: 9min 38sec (578 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 29 2018