In the world of writing, authors are often categorized as being a pantser or a plotter or a combination of both. In the world of blogging it’s no different. You’re either creating your content on the fly and in the moment, or you’re planning it out in advance.
But one of the most important aspects of creating a successful blog is consistency, and that can be hard to achieve without a plan. In this workshop we explored the options for how to create a content plan and calendar that will set you up for success.
You can watch the replay below!
Many people think of content planning as being more about when than what, but it’s actually a combination of both. Sometimes the when will inspire the what. Sometimes the what will dictate the when. Either way, the two are often intrinsically linked, other times it matters not.
There’s no right or wrong approach to this, it’s more a matter of keeping it in mind.
Below are the key points we discussed in the workshop:
- Decide on a consistent frequency that is realistically sustainable for you long term.
- When we talk about consistency, it’s not so much a matter of publishing at the exact same time on the same days of the week – though that often makes it an easier schedule for us to follow for ourselves. But rather, consistency means whether you are posting daily, weekly or monthly. What you don’t want to do is post daily for a couple of weeks and then post nothing at all for months. You can, however, change your schedule as you figure out what works for you and your audience. There is as much risk in posting too often as there is in not posting often enough.
- Think about the time of year, align your content with the seasons, special occasions, current events to keep your content fresh and relevant.
- Research the competition
- Regardless of the topic or purpose of your blog, someone, somewhere has created a similar one. Find them to gain ideas and inspiration for your own.
- Make lists
- Every blog niche has a wide range of direct and indirect related topics. Make a list of them to provide inspiration.
- Create a calendar – whether digital or on paper – map out the dates and topics for each post you’re going to create.
- For some blogs this will be easy to do for an entire year. For others it’s something you’ll want to do monthly or quarterly. But always have a plan for what you will be doing in advance.
- This plan can be as vague or as detailed as you need it to be. It can simply be a prompt that you’ll figure out the details for when the time comes. It can be very specific with an outline of the points you want to cover.
- Schedule your posts in advance
- To avoid forgetting when your next post will publish, and to avoid cluster posting, schedule your posts as you write them for the dates you’ve outlined in your content calendar.
- Be sure to monitor your scheduled posts, sometimes sites with low traffic will run into missed schedule issues. Keep an eye on things.
We also had some extra time to cover some bonus tips around switching themes and working a Full Site Editing (FSE) a little bit, and we had some great questions asked as well!