4 steps to fire up your blog content calendar strategy

This article is for anyone who is about to launch a blog or wants instructions on how to reenergize their blog. Whether you’re starting from scratch or tweaking what you have, the principles for a blog content calendar and strategy are largely the same. And it’s all about making sure you have a solid foundation for your blog so you can easily create individual pieces of content that, when viewed as a whole, present a cohesive and thriving online presence.

Learn how to plan ahead for a flaming hot blog to engage your audience, drive consistent traffic, and meet your goals. Follow along for to discover four key steps to create a blog that draws in visitors and delights readers.

1. Define your blog goals

Your first step when creating your blog is to clearly state your blog theme. You’ll want to know your overall purpose and decide what topics are included in your strategy, and what is excluded.

Let’s use the example of a campfire. You love gathering at an outdoor fire pit, so you want to create a blog devoted to all things campfires. You decide to name your blog Curious Campfires, and your blog goals might look like this:

• Purpose: Curious Campfires will share my love for outdoor campfires to ignite a passion in others who enjoy visiting with friends around a crackling fire.

• Included topics: Building a campfire, trends in outdoor firepits, campfire safety, pictures of campfires around the world, grill and campfire combination products, best times of the year for campfires, etc.

• Excluded topics: Arson, home fires, wildfires, gas grills, indoor stoves

When you know your universe of possible topics, you can lay the foundation for your strategy. Later, when you create your content calendar you will be confident that every blog post you publish supports your core purpose.

2. Understand your audience

You’re now ready to move on to step two, knowing your audience. Readers are the heart of your blog. When you understand their needs, preferences, and behaviors it’s easier to craft content that resonates. In other words, when you know who you want to attract to your blog—and keep coming back for more—you can speak to them. When readers can see themselves in your articles, whether they are educational, inspirational, or promotional, they will feel connected to your messages. And that connection will lead to repeat visitors, subscribers, and eventually a community.

Define your ideal blog audience by considering:

• Tone. Be intentional about the voice and attitude you use to communicate with readers. If your intended readers are weekend campers and cabin owners, you will likely be successful when you write with a conversational, approachable, and collaborative tone. However, if you want to draw in business owners who sell campfire accessories, you may choose to write with an authoritative, technical, and more formal tone. When you write for what your audience wants to read you will have more success such as more traffic and higher engagement.

• Topics. In step one you outlined a universe of possible topic categories of what your blog could cover. Now this is where you select the specific topics that you will cover. And because you’ll be organized the subjects you write about and publish will closely align with your intended readers. Brainstorm a long list of ideas based on your own expertise, what your audience cares about, and keyword research. When you set your blog goals you noted you would write about trends in outdoor firepits. Articles connected to that theme could include: A beginner’s guide to building a backyard firepit; Our favorite outdoor fire tables; How to select the best spot for your outdoor firepit. And so on. This is where you can also list a variety of content types, from infographics and original research to interviews and how-to guides.

• Timing. Different audiences crave different cadences. Your blog publication timing is all about publishing content at a rate your readers enjoy. And the timing can vary from hourly to annually. Whatever publication timing you choose should match your ability to consistently create high quality content. For example, if your readers are the weekend campers and cabin owners mentioned earlier, you will delight them with weekly posts that publish every Thursday afternoon with good ideas and inspiration to carry them into the weekend. If you decided your audience is primarily business owners, you may decide to time your posts to launch multiple times a week in the morning. The timing you choose should match your audience.

3. Create a blog style guide

Now you’re ready to build a simple blog style guide. This ensures consistency across every piece of content you publish. Some style guides are very complex and include details on image specifications, fonts, colors, logo placement, and more. When you’re a beginning blogger, a simple style guide should suffice. And it should include:

• Language, including font selection, grammar, punctuation, and spelling

• Visuals, including guidelines for images and videos

• Formatting, including heading formats and article length

4. Develop a content calendar

• Pick a tool, like a spreadsheet or dedicated software, you’ll use to house your ideas for blog topics. At a minimum, the tool should allow you to track: topic, title, publish date, audience, keywords.

• Match your blog ideas to a yearly calendar. Some topics may clearly align with a time of year (seasonal) and others may be general enough to be categorized as evergreen (useful all year long, not tied to seasonality).

• Regularly update the content calendar so it becomes a living document. You’ll have an accurate list of everything you published, which will come in handy later if you need to update posts to adjust to changing trends or audience needs. 

Summarizing the basics of content calendar creation

Thank you for coming on this journey with me. You learned how to set your blog up for success with a content calendar and strategy—the perfect blend of creativity and organization. When you follow the four steps outlined above, you’re well on your way to enjoying a thriving blog because you defined your goals, know your target audience, and planned content that aligns with buying cycles, seasonality, and trends.

To see what a finished content calendar looks like, read the next post. If you need assistance building your blog content calendar, contact me. I’m here for a consultation or a full content calendar design.