Five steps to creating an effective online content schedule

For regular readers, you will know that I recently completed Nikki Pilkington’s 30 day blog challenge, which helped me in setting up this blog and offered guidance in how to keep it going and grow both its readership and its usefulness.

Now that I am settled in my new blog home, having had fun playing with the technology and the tools, it is time to crunch down and make the blog content interesting and relevant to readers and at the same time make it a manageable process for me to continue to blog two or three times a week. It prompted me to think about how best to get organised and efficient in content creation.

The best way to do this is to work with a content schedule, and to spend time planning out what you will be blogging about over the next few months will take away the blogging-day pain of ‘oh what do I write about today?’ whilst waiting for inspiration to strike.

Here’s a five-step summary of how you can get organised:

1. Make a thorough audit of any content you might have already or that you are producing now – it might be case studies, customer reviews, how to guides etc. If content you already have doesn’t meet your current objectives, then ditch or archive it – you need a current consistent message that reflects what you are doing right now.
2. Focus on what your readers want to know. ‘Listen’ to them – in real life, on Twitter, Facebook or other places where they hang out. Ask them what they would like to see, and from this identify some good points of interest, developing your blog around topics that are of real relevance to them. Getting involved in conversations with your readers and also joining in with conversations elsewhere will spark further ideas for fresh content.
3. Introduce your personality – it’s all great technology but it needs an authentic voice to make it unique to you and what you can offer. By showing some of your personality you will connect more readily with your readers, and differentiate what you can offer to them – and why they should keep on reading or follow your calls to action.
4. Where you can, create content in advance and schedule it, making sure that you identify who will be creating the content you plan, when they will be doing it and whether this is really achievable in the context of other duties – your plan should be realistic and should be something you are proud to meet. And leave some flexibility in your schedule for those days when you really do wake up inspired and eager to write about a particular topic that is in the news, for example. Keeping a track of your schedule in a format that is workable for you will help to reinforce you progress.
5. What content is reusable and where can it be used/cross promoted. If you have a twitter feed think about how often and how you alert your followers to new content; for facebook followers what will you share with them that is linked from your blog or what is created just for that platform. For all your content, make sure that you offer clear calls to action for what you want your readers to do next.

Which leads me on to my next task for the day; I just signed up for Nikki Pilkington’s 30 day Facebook challenge – am off to work on that one now.

If you would like any more tips or help on how to set up and maintain your own robust content schedule, please contact me for further information.