You will produce your content pillars and a backlog of specific post ideas ready to script.
It is Sunday evening, you have promised yourself a post tomorrow, and you open your phone to plan it. Nothing comes. You scroll other accounts for inspiration, lose forty minutes, and post a photo of your product with "Happy Monday" as the caption.
This exercise exists so that never happens again. By the end you will have a short list of pillars and a backlog of at least twenty specific ideas, enough for well over a month of posts, kept somewhere you can open on a bad day and pick from.
Take the themes you grouped in lesson 2.2, Find pillars in the questions customers already ask, and choose three to five that will become your pillars. Choose the groups with the most real customer material in them, and check against lesson 2.3 that your set covers teaching, proof and the people.
Give each pillar a plain name you would say out loud. "Party planning help" beats "Celebration solutions". You are the only one who sees these names, so make them obvious to you.
Then write a one-line purpose for each pillar, from the buyer's side. The purpose says what the buyer gets. Mei Ling's set, as an example, read like this.
Party planning help: so parents feel in control of the cake part of the party, weeks before the day. In the kitchen: so people see the care and the process that goes into each cake. Customer cakes: so people considering an order can see real cakes for real parties. Before you order: so the common questions about timing, flavours and delivery are answered before anyone has to ask.
This is where most backlogs go wrong. A list of topics looks like a plan and gives you nothing to film. "Cake sizes" is a topic. "How to work out what size of cake feeds 20 children, and what to order if you are unsure" is an idea. You could write the hook for it right now.
Every idea in your backlog should be a specific claim, a question in the buyer's words, or a specific story. Test each one by asking whether you know exactly what the video would show. If you would still have to decide what to say, it is still a topic.
Here is what Mei Ling turned some of her topics into. "Cracks" became "Why our cakes used to crack on top and the one change that fixed it". "Delivery" became "What happens to a cream cake in a car with no aircon for 40 minutes". "Booking" became "The two weeks before a party: when to order, when to confirm, when to collect". "Our story" became "The first cake I sold, and what I charged for it". Each one comes with a picture in your head.
Write at least five ideas under each pillar. With four pillars that gives you twenty, which is the minimum for this exercise. More is better, because some ideas will turn out to be weaker than they looked, and some weeks you will not feel like filming the one at the top of the list.
If one pillar struggles to reach five, that tells you something. Either your customers do not ask much about it, which suggests it may not be a real pillar, or you have not collected enough material yet. Go back to your messages and reviews before you give up on it.
If one pillar has twenty ideas and the others have three, that tells you something too. Your buyers care a lot about that subject, and it may deserve to be split into two pillars.
The best backlog is the one you will open on your phone in a spare five minutes. That might be a notes app, a shared spreadsheet, or a board in a project tool. It does not matter which, as long as it is one place, and it is not spread across three apps and a notebook.
If you use a sheet, give it these columns: the idea written as a claim or question, the pillar, the job (teach, prove, people or objection), where the idea came from, such as a customer message or a review, and a status column for idea, scripted, filmed and posted. Add a new row every time a customer asks a question you have not covered. After a few months, the backlog fills itself.
A finished version has three to five pillars, each with a plain name and a one-line purpose written from the buyer's side, and at least twenty ideas tagged by pillar, every one specific enough that you could write its hook straight away. It lives in one place you open often.
You will use this backlog in every module that follows. Module three takes ideas from it and writes hooks for them. Module six spreads it across a 30-day calendar.
Now write your own: three to five pillars with a purpose line each, then at least twenty specific post ideas, each tagged with its pillar.
Write three to five pillars with a purpose line each, then list at least twenty specific post ideas tagged by pillar.
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