So if your New Year’s resolution is to be more organized, efficient, or successful, then this post is for you!

Click here on on the image at the end of the post to download our free content calendar template

Strategize Your Game Plan

One of the greatest blogging challenges is not actually the writing itself, but brainstorming insightful topics, producing content that will resonate with the right audience, and optimizing posts so they can be found.

Think of your editorial calendar as a path, with each topic as a stepping stone to your end goal (which could be to reach a certain number of followers, website traffic or new leads). The easiest way to make your path flow is to see it all laid out before you pour the concrete. Some topics may enhance the ones before or after it, or may be best put together in a series. Figure out a way to have your topics build off of each other, so that it’s easy to integrate social media updates, newsletters or videos, and have a sensible flow to reach your audience and business goals.

It’s also smart to take advantage of a content calendar if you business is seasonal, has specific product launch dates, or participates in conventions or conferences. For example, book-end your upcoming conference dates with your best and most marketable content, and publish as often as possible leading up to them. This will help to generate more interest and buzz right when you need it most.

Roll With The Flow

If current events present the perfect topic opportunity into your lap (which happens often!), don’t waste it! And don’t stress about it messing with your schedule. Simply rearrange your calendar by a post or two, and squeeze the new topic in. Even though you are planning your topics or themes in advance, it’s still very important to stay active in current events so that you can generate relevant content when your audience is most interested.

Plan Around Keywords

You should be planning your content strategy around keywords that your audience are searching for. As you work on writing your monthly content, incorporate these keywords into your posts, titles and meta descriptions as much as possible. If you can write with SEO optimization in mind, you should start seeing more traffic making its way to your blog, website and social media accounts.

Where to Start?

There’s no need to reinvent the wheel. We’ve created a calendar that we use ourselves for our own monthly content planning. This calendar is designed to keep you on track with your strategy as you develop content that your prospects, customers and fans will love. 

You can use this calendar to:

Don’t hesitate; download a copy of our free content calendar so you can start planning your 2018 content marketing strategy right away. It may take a bit to get the hang of at first, but please feel free to contact us and we can help get you started on the right track.