How to turn your content calendar strategy into a useful living document
The last post walked through the four essential steps to creating a blog content calendar strategy. Now you can put everything you learned into practice.
What does a content calendar look like?
As a quick review, the four must-have elements of a blog content calendar strategy are:
Define your blog goals
Understand your audience
Create a blog style guide
Develop a content calendar
First, create a simple document with your key points and decisions. Here’s a sample document based on our campfire blog example.
The next step is to operationalize this guiding document by creating a tool you can update as you blog. Many people use a spreadsheet, but for this purpose I used a simple table so you can see how to create a row for each blog post.
Now you see how the planning comes together. The above sample content calendar is a clear format to align your blog goals with your audience needs. You have a variety of posts to delight readers throughout the year. This will help you plan ahead and stay organized.
Your content calendar can be a test and learn.
One of the best things about blogging is the flexibility. After you publish a few posts and gain subscribers you can use analytics tools to monitor performance, gather insights on audience behavior, and refine your approach. (This is a big topic, so we’ll cover that in a separate post). If the campfire safety infographic generated a lot of engagement, like clicks and shares, you could add additional infographic ideas to your calendar. And, from a tactical perspective, when you building your content calendar in a spreadsheet, it’s easy to add or delete columns once you determine the type of information you want to see in your calendar.
Summarizing the basics of content calendar creation
When you take the time to carefully plan your blog content throughout the year, your blog will stand out as a valuable resource. And readers will grow to trust the consistently amazing content. Not to mention the fact you’ll never worry about what to write about again. Your plan will be right there to guide you.
Need help building your own blog content calendar? Contact me. StrategicStories is here to help you set your blog up for success.
