The What, Why, and How of Using a Blog Calendar
Do you find it impossible to maintain any momentum in publishing blog posts for your business? Because business gets in the way, right?
Missing even a blog or two can destroy the hard work you’ve put into your inbound marketing strategy. Unless you maintain your content output, you’ll never achieve your blogging goals. You know this.
What you really need is a blog post planner.
What is a blog post planner?
A blog post content planner is a place where you manage all your blog planning, blog post ideas, and articles that are written and planned for publication. It acts as an editorial calendar and vision board, helping you from the moment you start a blog and as you develop your content strategy. Such a content calendar is invaluable to help you:
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Brainstorm and plan post ideas
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Decide on the type of content
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Maintain your keyword research
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Create, review, and edit blog posts
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Track the progress of your content creation
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Monitor your already published blogs
Why you should use a blog content planner
If you fail to plan, you plan to fail. A blog post planner helps you to succeed by:
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Keeping all your ideas and work in one place
No more hunting around different systems and software. Your team can collaborate more efficiently, with all ideas and work in a single, easy-to-access location.
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Easily prioritize your tasks
Whether using printable content planners or an online content planner, it’s going to help you and your team to prioritize tasks and ensure a methodical approach to your content creation and publication.
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Staying on top of your schedule
Never miss a deadline again! When you maintain a content calendar, it’s easy to fit in content planning and creation tasks with your other work – and this planning will help you stay on top of your schedule. No more emergencies or last-minute rush jobs.
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Keeping everyone on your team on the same page
From idea generation to setting deadlines and reminders, allocating tasks, and publishing and promoting a post, free blog planners help you to grow your blog by keeping all your team engaged in the process and on the same page.
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Ensuring your content aligns with your goals and your audience
It’s crucial that the content you publish engages your target audience throughout the customer journey, and that it aligns with your business. When you manage content with a blog planner, the visibility this provides will help you keep on track with your strategic business goals, and ensures you produce content that your audience wants to read.
How to use a content planner to create a successful strategy for your blog
There are some great blog content planners available, but to maximize the benefits of whichever you choose you should follow a strategic approach:
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Plan your themes and topics for the month/quarter/year
As you begin to consider what content to produce, you should make sure to align it with themes and topics that:
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Support seasonal content opportunities (think New Year, Christmas, Black Friday, trade fairs, product launches, etc.)
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Are relevant to the stages that your audience travels through in the sales funnel
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Align to the different categories that make up your business
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Brainstorm ideas for your themes and topics
Brainstorming is the process of generating ideas for your themes and topics. Brainstorming techniques are not just limited to paper and pen, they also include digital methods such as using mind mapping software, or using a whiteboard to generate ideas collaboratively. The best content planning tools incorporate brainstorming capabilities.
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Lay and organize your ideas using a content calendar
As you develop your content plan, use a content calendar to layout a publishing timetable that distributes across different categories and types of content (for example, listicles, step-by-step guides, reviews, etc.) across your calendar.
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Develop a consistent process or checklist to produce your content
A checklist process will help you to remain on track with your tasks and ensure that nothing is missed. A typical checklist might include:
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Content ideation
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Outline creation
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First draft production
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Review
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Revision and editing
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Publication
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Schedule your posts and their corresponding promotion material
The final step is to schedule your blog posts for publishing. Map your blog post publication dates, and don’t forget to include social media posts and email campaigns to support your blogs.
This can be labor-intensive, so we recommend using software that automates the publishing process.
3 Powerful tools you can use to plan and schedule your blog posts
Luckily, there are several tools that you can use to plan, schedule, and execute your blog posts. Here are three of the most powerful:
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Hubspot is an all-in-one marketing tool that helps you create content, manage your blog, create landing pages and generate leads. It has a built-in blogging tool that allows you to publish content in real-time. There are also tools for social media management, tracking of keywords, and lead generation. This marketing platform integrates with other tools like Salesforce, Google Analytics, etc., so it’s easy to get insights from different sources for better decision making.
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CoSchedule integrates with other content management systems, allowing you to plan, schedule, draft and publish your blog posts easily. Brainstorm your ideas direct into CoSchedule, prioritize your tasks, create your posts, and include your social promotion.
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BlabberJax is a tool that you can use to plan and schedule your blog posts, social media, and email campaigns. It helps you manage your content from generating ideas, topics, and titles for blog posts, to writing drafts and collaborating with the team as you perfect the content. It also helps in tracking the performance of your blog posts by giving insights into how many visits they have had, how many shares they got on social media, and how many leads they generated.
The bottom line
As a business owner, you know how important it is to keep up with content. But it can be hard to stay organized and keep up with deadlines and other people’s contributions if you don’t have a system in place. A blog post planner can help solve this problem by providing an easy way to organize your content and stay on top of deadlines.
To learn more about how BlabberJax can help to transform your blogpost production, click here to book a live demo of BlabberJax in action.