Scaling up your channel starts with leveling up your YouTube content planning.
YouTube’s algorithm rewards channels that upload frequently and consistently. That means you need to find a content creation rhythm you can actually sustain.
There are plenty of workflows you’ll have to map out carefully in advance: Brainstorming video ideas, doing research, creating video scripts, filming footage, editing videos, uploading them in an SEO-optimized format, promoting them across all your social media platforms, and more.
If you outsource video production, you’ll also need to coordinate your team – but you get capacity back. For that reason, most professional YouTube content creators have video editors, thumbnail artists, and YouTube channel managers at their back.
Luckily, there’s a wide range of tools out there that can help you. Here are the best content planning and scheduling tools for YouTubers.
Quick Facts
- Content planning and scheduling tools help you create more and better content, manage your team, automate workflows, and grow your channel.
- Our top picks for task management and scheduling are Notion, SEMrush, Asana, Sprout Social, and Loomly.
- Pricing for these tools ranges from free to around $200/month.
Keep reading for the full scoop!
Contents
Notion
To start with, there’s Notion, a note-taking and productivity platform.
At its base, Notion offers a completely customizable way of building workspaces and dashboards that include to-do lists, calendars, and sub-spaces for individual projects.
In Notion, you can log your goals, build a content strategy, track progress on your roadmap, collect all of your content ideas and scripts, and manage your videos from the pre-production stages to its performance analytics.
The best thing about Notion? It comes with a huge library of templates for creator dashboards. Many of them include handy databases, workflows for finding and coordinating sponsorships, and links to other tools and applications. Quite a few of these are free, but there are also people offering paid templates that come with a beautiful, user-friendly interface.
Want to give Notion a whirl? The basic plan is free (including an AI features trial). If you need more functionalities, such as team management and advanced analytics, you can opt for the Plus ($10/month and member) or Business ($20/member/month) plans.
The Business plan also includes Notion AI, which offers features like meeting notes. It also connects to most common team collab tools.
YouTuber Ali Abdaal explains his Notion setup.
SEMrush
Are you trying to plan out content but are strapped for video ideas? Need a little help with your latest video’s title? Then SEMrush may be your greatest ally.
SEMrush is a search engine optimization (SEO) tool that provides massive amounts of data on what people search for on Google (and what they ask gen AI tools like ChatGPT!). For creators on the hunt for content ideas, this is a goldmine of information.
On SEMrush, you can see what the most popular search terms are in your niche, and how many people search for them every month. Plus, you can check out how difficult it is to rank for each search term. That tells you how amazing your YouTube videos need to be to beat the competition.
SEMrush is, however, not cheap: Pricing starts at $117.33 per month. If you want to give it a spin, you can do a limited number of searches with a free account.
Our alternative pick for a SEO tool: Ahrefs.
Asana
When you’re scaling up your YouTube content production, team management becomes a critical task sooner rather than later. You’ll be coordinating professional video editors, thumbnail artists, channel managers, script writers, and outreach specialists – among others.
That’s where Asana comes in. It’s a specialized team collaboration and productivity platform that allows you to assign tasks, set deadlines, outline goals, and track project progress. That way, you’ll know at a glance where you stand on the edits for your latest video, the negotiations for a new sponsorship deal, and the research for upcoming content.
The basic version of Asana for personal use is free. To access team management features, pricing starts at $10.99 per month and user.
Heads up: If you opt for a video editing or channel management company rather than working with freelancers, you sometimes get access to a team management platform for free! Tasty Edits, for example, has its proprietary Video Order Management Application. This tool allows you to manage your team of video editors, thumbnail artists, and channel managers in a single place.
Marquis Murray walking us through an Asana setup in one of the most laborious tasks for creators – onboarding new team members.
Some alternative picks for PM tools: Trello is good for starters, Basecamp is more on Asana’s level.
Sprout Social
One way professional YouTubers map out and schedule their content is by using social media management tools. Not only do these tools allow you to batch-schedule content across multiple platforms. They also come with centralized analytics.
Sprout Social is one of the best social media schedulers out there. It lets you draft, queue, schedule, and publish posts, comes with a social content calendar, handles review management, and lets you monitor brand-level engagement. Plus, it gives you some in-depth analytics insights, including trend monitoring for keywords and hashtags. If you work with a team, you can also set up workflows and approval steps.
The one downside? Its powerful capabilities have a hefty price tag. Sprout’s Standard plan starts at $199 per month.
Chris giving us a quick rundown of Sprout Social’s capabilities and workflows.
Loomly
Looking for a cheaper scheduling alternative? Check out Loomly.
A budget-alternative to Sprout, it offers scheduling, post analytics, optimization tips, a hashtag manager, and approval workflows starting at $32 per month. You and your team can draft content and submit it for review, customize it for each platform, and keep up with analytics.
Another upside: Loomly also offers content inspiration through template posts and integrations with Canva, Unsplash, GIPHY, and Google Drive.
Chris from Minn Media has done a whole series on social media management tools. Here’s his peek at Loomly.
In terms of alternatives (in addition to SproutSocial) Chris in the video above also mentions two more SMM tools, HootSuite and Metricool.
FAQs
You can schedule your YouTube video either natively on the platform by selecting the publish time during your video upload. Or you can use an external social media scheduling tool, such as Sprout Social or Loomly.
Overall, Sprout Social is the most comprehensive social media scheduler for YouTube. Loomly is a great alternative at a lower price point.
Some of the best tools for YouTube content planning include Notion, SEMrush, Asana, Sprout Social, and Loomly.
To plan your YouTube content, you need to first set goals. How many videos do you want to upload over a certain time frame. How long do you want them to be? Once you’ve decided that, you need to brainstorm content ideas and then factor in how long it will take you to research, film, edit, and upload all of them.
Yes. Scheduling videos in advance has no impact on how well they perform. In fact, scheduling them for times when the majority of your audience is online can give your content an initial boost and win over the YouTube algorithm.
