Increasingly, a successful website necessitates an active blog. Fresh content on your blog improves your SEO, and helps you share authentic thoughts about industry topics. Let’s explore How to Create a Content Schedule for Business Blogging Success.
But simply adding a blogging feature to your website is not enough. To be successful, your blog needs to be updated with new content on a regular basis, without the quality of posts dropping as a result. In fact, blogging at least twice per week has been shown to result in the most possible visits.
To accomplish that feat, you need a content calendar. This schedule allows you to plan ahead and strategically plan your content marketing output to create a more consistent and successful business blogging presence.
Ultimately, a content calendar will be beneficial for your blogs, social media efforts, and email newsletter. For the purposes of this post, we will focus on creating one that enhances your blog. But ultimately, the lessons are applicable to your other content efforts as well. In fact, they should be integrated to ensure consistent content distribution across marketing channels.
Here’s how you can create a content schedule that enhances your blogging success.
6 Steps to Creating an Effective Business Blogging Schedule
1) Examine Your Capabilities
First, you need to understand just what you can stand up in terms of a blogging presence. Who will be responsible for writing the posts, do you need an editor to perform quality control, and how often will you be able to write?
2) Define Your Goals
Based on your business blogging capabilities, set your blogging goals. This will range widely, from the types of posts you’re looking to publish along with their frequency all the way to the amount of traffic you expect to get from your efforts. This post offers a great resource that helps your goal-setting efforts.
3) Distribute Responsibilities
Determining your goals and capabilities is time to work with your blogging team to determine responsibilities. Who will write the posts, who will look them over and publish, who will post them on social media, and who will monitor the comments? It may all be the same person, but establishing clear expectations helps in setting up your schedule.
4) Brainstorm Topics
Next, begin looking for potential topics to write. Again, this part will be driven by the goals you set in step 2. Industry insights, customer testimonials, FAQ-based articles, and tutorials on unexpected uses of your product are all potential posts that could resonate with your audience.
After finding general topics, drill down to the concept of individual blog posts. Each category has an unlimited number of potential angles, which you can explore through your blog. Finding these angles before beginning your efforts allows you to keep your quality and frequency equally high.
5) Write it Down
Now that you know your topics and angles, it’s time for the actual schedule. Using a template like this one allows you to create an effective calendar that incorporates all of the above steps. Build it out as far as possible, giving yourself a structured plan for months to come.
Of course, you should build flexibility into your calendar. Covering timely topics, such as industry news or a product update, may push some of your content back to a date later than anticipated. But too much content is never a bad thing; it merely means that your blog is covered for a longer amount of time.
6) Monitor and Evaluate
Finally, your calendar can only maximise its efficiency for your business blogging if you can use it to evaluate your progress towards your goals. That means including columns for how individual blog posts performed in metrics like visits, time on page, bounce rate, and conversions, which you can then use to make more informed decisions about future topics and angles most likely to succeed.
You can strategically create a successful business blogging presence using these six steps. Now, all you need is to incorporate it into your website and overall content marketing efforts. That’s where we come in! Contact us today to get started, and optimise your blogging success.
Further Reading
What are Personalised URLs (PURLs) and Why You Should Be Using Them
Using Inbound Marketing to Create Valuable Leads
Small Business Tips: Getting Started With Social Media
Digital Marketing Partnership Success: How to Make the Most of Yours
The Importance of Direction in Web Design
