Make your Blogging easy with an Editorial Calendar
Make your Blogging easy with an Editorial Calendar
You need to get traffic to your business website and one of the main ways we advise doing that is via a Blog!!
While some people hate the sound of the word blog, the purposes of having one on your business website are now fairly well understood in the business world. You need content on your website to keep your customers engaged, and Google needs to see that you are making an effort to add useful, relevant material to your website to add value for your web visitors.
However the main piece of advice you will hear around blogging is to do it consistently! Whether daily, weekly or monthly, it’s a good idea to plan it all out so you keep to a schedule and are not struggling to come up with topics in your head when it’s time to blog again.
Planning is the Answer
Planning your blog posts schedule ensures you maintain a flow, plan your articles, edit and check for gaps in the content. Use of an Editorial Calendar will help you to manage all of this and while you could start an excel spreadsheet you could also use an online editorial calendar.
The benefits of using an Editorial Calendar:
1. Consistent Schedule – consistency is so important for successful blogging. An editorial calendar will help you see the schedule and know what to add, and when.
2. Plan Topics for Writing – using an editorial calendar encourages you to come up with toils before you need to write the posts. You can record ideas and set deadlines for them giving yourself enough time to research and plan your posts.
3. Organised Content – Using a calendar gives you a wider view of your contact strategy – you can schedule holiday posts, notable business dates, seasonal blog posts and important milestones.
Blogging Basics
Blogging is highly strategic – you need to understand your customer so that you can create highly relevant content for them. Find out what motivates them, what is worrying them and provide answers to their questions and problems.
Know why you are creating blog content – is it mainly to drive traffic to your website, is it to generate leads, increase brand awareness?
Be aware of what other channels you can use to publish your blog – e.g. Facebook, email, other blog sites. Content can be ’repurposed’ for a range of different channels adding great value to your online visibility.
Include Images – visuals can add huge value to your blog as it makes it more interesting and breaks up the page for the reader.
Check out the Content Marketing Institute – they have miles of resources to use!