A content calendar is a strategic road map for your blog’s content it includes your target audience’s interest, what time of year you’re expecting to publish new posts, and the types of articles you’ll be releasing.
A content calendar also helps you identify gaps in your content strategy and plan accordingly, creating a content calendar can help you identify where new posts will come from, for example, if you’re currently publishing three articles per month, a content calendar can show you where to create more content.
You can also use a content calendar to create a schedule for your social media posts, a content calendar can help you avoid publishing multiple posts in a single day or week, which can quickly overwhelm your audience.
How to Create a Content Calendar
Before creating your content calendar, it’s important to understand your audience, and get to know your customers and prospects better by creating personas and a buyer persona, the information you collect from these exercises will help you create more content that resonates with your audience.
Once you’ve got a better sense of who your audience is, start by collecting the data for your posts and publish dates. Next, identify your main topics and categories, these categories will help you organize your content and make it easier to find relevant posts.
Break down a blog post into its subtopics, and add the topics under which you’d like to publish new posts, from here, you can also add other relevant topics to your blogs, such as industry news and social media trends.
Once you’ve created your categories, you can use a content calendar to identify your seasonal trends, for example, summer is typically a hot season for content, you can also use your calendar to identify specific holidays that may impact content creation.
Test your Content Calendar
Once you’ve created your content calendar, it’s a good idea to run a content calendar test this can help you identify possible issues with your content calendar and make adjustments as needed.
To test your content calendar, monitor your social media posts and blog content, if you notice any gaps in your content calendar, you can make adjustments before publishing new posts and if you find your calendar is being over-or underwhelmed by your team’s attention, consider hiring a content marketing consultant.
Alternatively, you can also use tools such as HootSuite to manage your social media posts and blog content another way to test your content calendar is by tracking your blog analytics, this can help you identify any issues with your content, such as low traffic, poor readability or low engagement.
Use a Best Practices Checklist
When it comes to content marketing, it’s easy to get lost in the details be sure to follow a handful of best practices to ensure your posts reach their full potential.
Make sure your blog posts are relevant to your audience, be sure your content is SEO-friendly and optimized for readability, and find the right balance between length and readability.
Create posts that are clear and concise, and include authoritative sources, keep your audience in mind when creating your posts, and if your content calendar indicates that you’ll be posting on a topic that your audience is already interested in, create a secondary post instead.
When creating your audio and video content, think about how your audience will consume it, do your research to find out what platforms your audience prefers to consume content on, and create for those platforms.
