Create Content Topics

Planning content is the core functionality of ContentPlanner. In this article, we explain how you can create new content topics.

But first, remember that ContentPlanner isn’t a text editor such as Google Docs or Microsoft Word (you will still use and need these tools). Instead, ContentPlanner is a complementary tool: it’s a dashboard from where you can manage, feed & plan your full content pipeline.

That being said, we will show you how to create your first content topic in ContentPlanner.

Opening your project dashboard

We assume you already created an account for ContentPlanner.

After logging in, you should see a screen with on the top left the home icon followed by your project name (see label 1 in the image below). Our example project is “Body & Health”:

If this is not the correct project, then select “Projects” in the top menu (label 2) and select the correct project.

Create a content topic

On the left side of your project dashboard, you have the Content card (label 3 in the above image). Or in more detail:

In this card you have different icon buttons:

1. The plus button: with this button, you can create new content topics
2. The other buttons are different views on your content. You can read more about this in the article: content views in ContentPlanner.

When we press the plus button, we see:

Provide the following info:

Topic

First, give a name for the new content. We create a new topic called ‘Healthy Eating Habits’ (some topic in the space of our ‘Body & Health’ demo project).

Don’t overthink the name of your new content topic, because:

• You can always change the topic name later
• The name of your topic doesn’t have to match the title of your topic. Choosing a good title takes some time & effort and will be done later in the process.

Channels

Select the channels where you want to publish your content. This can be, for instance, your website, your Instagram page, your Facebook page, etc.

Make sure you configure all your channels in your project settings. You can navigate to your project settings by:

1. first clicking on the colored bar with your project name: this brings you to the dashboard
2. and then clicking on the gear icon on the right side

Then you will see the project settings, now select the tab ‘Channels’:

Your website will be configured by default as a channel. But you will have to create all the other channels that you want to manage.

Content Type

Next, select the content type for the new topic, you have many options:

• Post
• Newsletter
• Survey
• Poll
• Video
• How to
• …

Tip: you can configure the default content type per channel. An example is:

Channel	Content Type
Website	Post
YouTube	Video
Instagram	Vlog

You can also configure this in the Channels tab of your Project Settings:

Publish on

The date you want to publish this content.

Workflow

ContentPlanner is using workflows to manage your content creation process. A workflow is a sequence of steps that must be executed to create quality content. Each step can contain multiple tasks.

You can create different workflows for different kinds of content, or per channel. Producing video content requires for instance a different workflow than creating blog posts.

Have a look at our article about workflow setup to learn more about workflows.

Workflow step

Every workflow starts by default with the first step. In our case, this is the ‘Idea’ stage. But, as explained in the previous section: you can fully customize this to your own needs.

Content details

Finally, you will arrive in the content details screen:

Notice that the Content detail screen is made up of different sections (only the first 3 sections are shown above):

• General
• Publishing & Optimization
• Links
• Audience
• Structure
• Details
• Notes & Research

If you want to edit one of these sections, you have to press the pen icon in the header of that section (on the right side).

You will see a lot of information that can be filled in for just 1 piece of content. Every input is important at a certain stage of the content creation process, but don’t be overwhelmed: you don’t have to fill it in all at once!

Summary

We illustrated how you can create content topics in ContentPlanner. But first, make sure you configured your project correctly: define all your channels and tune the workflow processes to your own needs!