Introduction
Ever feel like there just aren’t enough hours in the day to crank out high-quality content? Don’t sweat it—we’ve got your back!
In the latest episode of Content Universe, we’re diving deep into a game-changer: **Templates!** 🎉
Join Miguel Suárez, founder of Montanus, as he spills the beans on five killer templates that could totally transform your marketing strategy.
💡 **What’s Inside?**
– **Blogging hacks** with format templates
– Stunning **social media designs** at your fingertips
– Real-world insights from Nicholas Thompson at The Atlantic
– Smart **email templates** for signatures
– Building a **prompt library** for seamless AI support
Whether you’re part of a content team drowning in redundancy or a solo warrior aiming to level up your output, this episode serves up practical solutions to boost your workflow.
So, why stick to the old ways? Let’s template our way to efficiency!
Hit play now! 🎧 And don’t forget to share the wisdom with your team—turn your marketing department into a well-oiled machine! 🚀
What You’ll Learn
1. Discover five essential templates for streamlining content creation.
2. Learn how to maximize efficiency with format templates.
3. Explore creating impactful writing and design templates.
4. Uncover the potential of prompting templates for AI tools.
5. Enhance productivity with personalized email templates in Outlook.
Episode Transcript (AI Generated)
Hello and welcome to the Content Universe. Today we are going to talk about something that I use quite a lot and something that I really find I’m getting pretty useful and versatile and it’s just a very easy way of doing stuff really quickly. We’re gonna talk about templates, I have five different types of templates that I want to talk about that I really think that you should start implementing into your daily work, just because templates have a tendency to save you a lot of time, especially if its done right. Now, why do we want to save time? Obviously, we could talk about efficiency and all this, but in reality what I meet when I talk to content creators out there is a huge pressure for spitting out content really, really quick. There’s basically a need for, say, if you’re a global company, you might want to have an organic post on your social media for ever time zone within the day, so it’s a prime time in every timezone you sell to. So let’s just say that that’s 5 times, that’s going to be 5 posts a day that you can then that you then have to produce, and that’s just a lot. And the same goes of course with the whole stakeholder management, you know, all the e-mailing, all the BC, BCC, CC whatever it’s called. All the copying, all that, it just takes so much time and it just clutters everything up. So I have here five templates that I think you should start implementing today. All right let’s get into it. First of all, I’m Miguel Suárez, and I have the content company called Montanus. And we create content for high knowledge companies, so that would be engineering companies, someone who invented something really cool, it could be Green Transition, it could be like sustainability kind of people, all that kind of stuff. We do podcasts, we do articles, we do social media, we do all kinds of content. All right now, the five templates. Let’s start with number one, the Format template. The Format template in my mind is probably the most important template that you can create or that you can work with as a content creator. And a format template is basically a template that allows you to structure the content in specific format without having to re-invent the wheel. Let’s say you have, a typical format would be a listical, right, for a blog post, so ok, that could be you have a title, you have a sub-title, and then you have, say, a bit of body copy, and you want to go straight into let’s just say five different aspects of whatever it is you want to write about. Now that kind of format is crucial for having a lean ideation, a lean ideation process, and a lean, also, writing process. Because when you have that, beforehand, when you know what structure that it is that you want to work with, you can also pretty easily plot in keywords that go into every single one of those, let’s say if you have five different topics that you want to cover in your article, so you have five different keywords that go into the sub-headings of that, and then afterwards you start on building with more keywords and then eventually you want to start writing either by yourself, or with the use of AI, of course. So the format template is really important. I have another example of a format template that I really love. So I’m following Nicholas Thompson, who is now the CEO of the newspaper called The Atlantic, a US-based newspaper. It’s a brilliant newspaper and what’s even more brilliant is the fact that Nicholas Thompson is the one editing it, or heading it. He was the editor of Wired magazine before, so that’s why I confused it a little bit. Anyway, he’s got a daily, and I said a daily, he’s got a daily video talk about something cool that he discovered in technology. Of course, this is something that he started during his Wired days but he continues creating these videos and I think mostly because he thinks they’re really fun. And what I started noticing because I see more or less all of them on LinkedIn and really go follow him because they’re really brilliant and he’s really clever. So, what I started noticing is that he always keeps the same structure to what it is he’s talking about. So, he will start out by saying, for instance, not for instance, he always starts out by saying the most interesting thing in tech, because that’s the concept name of what his doing. The most interesting thing in tech, pause, and then he says what it is. So, that could be AGI or AGI at the conference that I’m at, blah, blah, blah, this. And then he starts by explaining what it is and afterwards he goes on to explaining why it’s interesting and then in the end he ends by explaining what complications this may have in the future or what he expects from this in the future. And then he ends off by saying, okay, that’s the most interesting thing in tech. It’s pretty hard to say when you’re not a native speaker, anyway, so he says that and then he says see you tomorrow. So that kind of structure, that format is a template that he uses and he’s been using, I guess, I’m guessing, that for many years now, so he knows it by heart and obviously I would suspect that he’s not even writing anything down, he’s just, like, speaking more or less from, in Danish we would say speaking directly from the liver. I don’t know if that’s an expression. But he speaks from the top of his mind, I think. Ok so that’s the first template I really urge you to implement. The second template is more, maybe a little bit more logical, it’s the design template. So having a design template in InDesign, in Illustrator, in Photoshop or I use Canva for the most, so having a strict set of templates that you can always use when you create new content is just going to help you so much. And it seems pretty trivial but I just see a lot of working with the design to make it new to make it more nuanced but the fact of the matter is when you look at, say, a try and go to New York Times, their template for posting out quick little quotes is basically a black background with white text on it, aligned to the left. That’s it. That’s it. So use design templates that are really easy to use that you can use for many and most purposes. That is the key to the design templates, I think. The next template I want to talk about is the writing template. I actually already mentioned this. The writing template for me is having a strict structure on what it is that you want to write. And like I mentioned, you can have this sort of writing template for using blog posts where you know that you need a header, you know you need a sub-header, you know you need a body copy here, and you know you need three or five sections or what it’s called, sections within each there will be, you know, three paragraphs, something like that, and then a summary or a conclusion at the end. That’s a writing template for a blog post. But you can use those kinds of writing templates also for short form, so say for social media. So you would have for instance, you know you have your kicker or your hook in your very first line of the of the template of the post. So you say okay, here’s a hook, it can be maximum this amount of or this number of characters and then you might have a re-hook because you want to kind of build more on that real estate on LinkedIn. It’s 3 lines, you have before people need to press read more. You want them to press read more, so you want to intrigue them with all 3 lines basically. And then afterwards you can again have a certain structure that you can apply for most of the posts that you use. And once you start working with these templates of course you can have more than one template you can have 10 templates if that’s what you want. It really just gets a lot easier for you to start writing because your brain doesn’t have to invent also the structure of what you’re doing. Imagine you want to play football and your brain has to reinvent how the course is lay out. All the lines and where the goals are. So you have to reinvent that all the time it just makes it so much harder to focus on playing ball. 4th template coming up. One that I use quite a lot it’s the prompting template. My prompting templates are quite substantial. So whatever I do, whenever I write something I will go first into my standard operating procedures. My SOPs in my management project system. What it’s called I will go into my SOPs and I will copy paste over into say chat GPT. I’ll copy paste some of the best practice stuff that I’v already used before. So if I want to write an article, I know that I have tested a lot of different ways of prompting. And a lot of different priorities of prompting. So what do I say first? What do I give? What do I give the AI next? And what then happens? And what then happens? I have that all structured in, so I can copy paste all that in, and just you know edit minuscule things, because that I know, is giving me better results. And what happens is that, if I find something, something that is suddenly giving me an even better result you know, if I change something, what I’ll do is I would just correct it, or I will edit it in the template as well, so I have it for the next time, I go prompt again. And you can use those prompting templates for all kinds of things that you do in your everyday work. So I would definitely recommend you having a prompt library. You can have a library somewhere where people can find it, have the library tagged, have it easy, easy to search through, just like you would in any SOP item that you have. Have a prompt library with prompts that you use on a daily basis. All right, fifth template that I want to mention because I just find this one especially nice and it just feels so good using this one, it’s the email template. And now hold on, an email template you’ve kinda heard before because it sounds like something when you send out newsletters you have an email template. Of course you have, but this is not the template I mean. The template I mean is when I have, when I’m inside my Outlook and for those of you who don’t use Outlook, when I’m inside my mail program – Alright you follow? When I’m inside Outlook, it happens so often that I write the same emails with miniscule details changed. So I would for instance, whenever we deliver you know a set of content to the client so that would be each month, we’ll have a whole pack of content you know with podcasts, with articles, with social media – all this kind of stuff. We’ll have all that packaged into a big pack. And of course it’s just a really heavy folder, because it contains a lot of gigabytes. I can’t just send this over email, so I have a link to a folder where they can go fetch it, and they can go download it. Now what I did is for each and every one of my clients I have a delivery email template, so I’ve written out – okay, hello blah, blah blah, here’s this month’s content pack. And here’s the link to download it. And that link always stays the same, so I don’t even have to change that. I have of course a specific link for each client, but I have different templates going into this. I’m just looking now through the templates that I have in my Outlook. So I have a template or a different kind of signature that is, an alto signature. I have a different signature for every client, because that link to their – we call it a delivery folder – so the link to the delivery folder is different for each client, and I don’t want to go fetch it all the time, so just have it preset inside a signature. I also have a template – it’s also a signature actually – but a template that writes out all the details I need to have when a podcast episode goes live. let me give you an example – so that template says, Hello, here’s some great news, your episode is now online – I hope you want to share it on your channel, maybe even in your newsletters – you can share the following posts that are attached to here – if you want to do something really cool, use some of the video clips and graphics and share it with your network. Here’s also the links to the podcast players, to the podcast apps that you can use, all of this. That is actually one of my templates, because this is one of the emails that I send really regularly. The way that I have these email templates, I have them only for myself – that makes it a little bit easier and that makes me able to do it this way. If you have to share with a team, you probably have to do something else. What I find really, really powerful is, instead of having a separate sheet with templates for your Outlook regular emails, just copy-paste, just create a signature – so an auto-signature, you know that office signature you have at the bottom of every email. Create a new one with the entire text that you need to send. So not just the from signature, but actually the entire text from the hello to every day detail, everything inside, and you can do that just by having it inside your signatures. And that means it’s really handy when you send an email because you just have to go up to Signatures, you have to choose which signature you want to use, so I could use this delivery folder, Tantec – ok, that’s one of my clients, that’s really cool – and then I know that it’ll just be on spot. Or I can send the signature called podcast Your First Episode is Online in English – ok, I know what that signature contains and contains all the details that you need to know. Alright, this has been quite a long 15 minutes episode but I really find that these 5 templates – the format template, the design template, the writing template, the prompting template or the prompting libraries, the email templates that are hidden inside your signatures in outlook – so these 5 types of templates are really powerful. Now what I want to say also, is just one last thing. When you have a content company, or when you have a department that produces your content, your marketing department, whoever does it, there’s always, and I see this everywhere, including in my own little shop, there’s always so much redundancy. And that is one thing that I would really try to cut down on because redundancy and having to inform everyone, that just kills content flow. So what I would probably recommend you do, after implementing these five different templates is sit yourselves down, map out, what do we actually do when we go from idea to finished and published piece of content? What happens? What are the steps? What needs to be done? Try and map it all out. Sit down and map it first, and then try and run through, an actual content production. So actually do it, and then update that map that you just did. And once you have that all mapped through, look at what you can delete from the map. Are there any redundancy, are there any way that you upload things to two different platforms just to make one person happy? Or is there someway you can kind of automate, whenever things upload to, say whenever things upload to YouTube, they should also automatically upload to Vimeo, or something like that. What can you do and where can you actually start looking at redundant tasks that you do and delete them all together? OK just a little bonus thing. So five templates, format template, design template, writing template, prompting template, e-mail templates and then of course deleting redundant tasks. That is the Content Universe for today. I hope you enjoyed it and if you did, share with your friends, family, colleagues I guess, share with someone who would like to be shared to, someone who would find it interesting and give me a like, give me a comment on what I can do better, what you would appreciate me doing in a different way or if there is anything that you want me to talk about or have an opinion on. Just let me know in the e-mail and you can find me at podcastsmontanus.co and that was montanus.co, so podcastsmontanus.co. All right that’s it for now, see you around.
