How to plan your content calendar

Creating a blog for your business is ever demanding work, and creating the content calendar for the blog can be hard work – especially as it usually falls down to one person.

But on the bright side, content marketing is becoming an ever more powerful tool – and an increasing powerful form of marketing. So even though it seems like hard work – you’re getting just as many benefits from this, which should help drive you (if only a little).

Good content attracts new visitors, increases social shares – and even helps with your page rank and SEO. Not bad for a blog, hey? Planning ahead means you can ensure you’re let all these things falls into place, and means you’re not rushing or skimping on content because it’s last minute. So follow these tips and ensure you’re planning your content calendar in a way that will benefit you the most:

Look at monthly dates and events

Take a look through your calendar and look at any significant dates that fall. Any good dates (New Year, Valentines day, St Patrick’s Day, Easter, Summer, Christmas, Halloween, Thanks Giving…) may be a good inspiration to write a post and pull in a bit of traffic. So make sure you’ve made a note of them and you’ve decided the title you want to write well in advance.

Look for personal events

Whilst worldwide important dates are one thing – personal dates are also important. If you’re a university planning the universities content calendar – then you may want to schedule a post for the beginning of exam season, or for the beginning of Fresher’s week. If you’re a finance company and you know you’ll be moving offices in 2 months – you may want to note that date down and create some content for then. Another example: If you’re a company who organizes conferences or events and you have a particularly big one approaching, this would the perfect time to schedule some content promoting it. These personal events are content triggers – so make sure you’ve got something planned for any relevant ones.

Take a (close) look at your industry and competitors

Look through approaching months and look at what is going on in your industry. For example if you know a special piece of research is being released – try and create a round-up of this, or if there is an awards ceremony within your industry – plan something around this too. Also take a look at your competitors, and see if they have anything special planned. If they do? You need to schedule something just as good (or just as interesting) to distract attention back to your own business!

Realize you’re not an octopus

Writing all the above content would be enough to keep anyone busy – so try and unload the pressure a little by inviting guest bloggers to your site. You can use websites like My Blog Guest to do this really easily. Let guest bloggers approach you with post ideas, and then schedule those posts ahead of time. It means you can have lots of good content scheduled for weeks in advance – that you didn’t even have to write.

Opportunities await

One last thing you can write content about of course – are any opportunities you may have within your company. These kinds of posts are great and get shared a lot – after all, people are always looking to get hired! Make sure you schedule a post explaining your vacancies when they arise and occur. The same applies to any campaigns or contents you’re running. Make sure your readers know about these opportunities!