Plan Your Content for a Year at a Time!

Planning ahead is an essential element of effective blogging, especially for businesses. It is a great tool to link up with clients and potential customers. This calls for a publishing strategy that is devised around a consistent schedule. When blogging for business purposes, it is imperative that the blogger creates and posts on a regular schedule. Current and potential clients will expect to read new content on a regular basis.

Scheduling blog posts is a big part of the business and personal blogging. It is easier to schedule content when you plan ahead by creating a calendar to get you through an entire year. It takes away the worry or failure to post when you originally planned to do so.

Here are a few things to consider when planning your editorial calendar for a year of blogging.

Be a Goal Setter

Don’t only set those goals but achieve them. Take a close look at your business plan and goals. Consider what desires you have to achieve these goals and expand your brand. Will it take bringing more awareness to your brand, increased engagement from your target audience or followers, or establishing a deeper level of loyalty from followers? The goals of your blog should be aligned with the goals of your business.

Identify Your Audience and Their Interests

To maximize the content of your blog, it is essential to identify your audience and their interests. You will be able to create quality content that results in higher or increased traffic. Take into consideration the diversity of your audience and how their interests are similar but different at the same time. By creating an interesting mural of your target audience, you allow yourself to schedule content that will continuously intrigue and engage your readers. Add content, images, and links to resourceful information that your audience can and will use.

Calendar Creation

Now that your goals are listed, an audience is identified, and their interests are outlined, it’s time to create a calendar to get those blogs scheduled. This is a simple task that doesn’t require a sophisticated software or program. Instead, open Google Sheets or perhaps you prefer Excel to get you going. You want to add your plans for your content to the first tab. Remember to be creative with the types of content and mix things up a bit. Consider blogging about products, creating how-to directives, listicles, podcasts, case studies, and more. Include the variety of types of content you wish to include with your blogs. Color-coding is a great idea as it makes the calendar easy to read and follow. Add these things to complete the calendar.

• Twelve sheets for each month of the year to simplify the organization process
• Consider adding six months per sheet if only posting a few times weekly
• Add columns to the sheet to include publishing date, draft deadlines, blog headline, author, content type, keywords if applicable, call to action, image content, and additional space for jotting down notes

Create Blog Topic Ideas

Now that the border of your calendar is in place, it’s time to create ideas for your blog. It may seem overwhelming to come up with a year’s worth of topics for the calendar but think about all the time it will save you in the future. Consider the interests of your audience and your business and blog goals when creating these topics. Utilize a strategy when developing content.

Follow these steps to come up with fresh and engaging topics:

• Consult your niche to discover the most popular and engaging content
• Utilize resource tools to find out what content is searched most often based on the preferred keywords
• Take advantage of keyword tools that help with brainstorming for blog ideas that will key in on SEO effectiveness
• Approach popular titles from a different perspective
• Use your social media platforms for inspiration by choosing topics that focus on your best performing posts

These steps will lead you to the creation of a quality calendar for your next year of blogging and help to eliminate a little stress. Blogging should be fun, exciting, and rewarding. A calendar contributes to all these because it removes a lot of the stress that comes along with trying to find content and think of topics for your next blogs.

Many bloggers spend days trying to think of what to blog about and what type of content to include. If you create a calendar, you only need to consult the calendar and move forward with creating content around what you have listed for any given day.

Learn how to automate your blog posts and to share them throughout your social network with a blog network syndication.

This article was originally posted on Mom Marketing Coach

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