How to create a blog calendar

Most successful companies have a blog or content page on their website today. Blogging is a great way of engaging and communicating with customers and an inexpensive way of driving traffic to your website.

However, coming up with innovative and interesting blogs daily, weekly, monthly can be an arduous task, not to mention a full-time job. If you have the money to invest in a content writer, it is certainly money well spent. But for those businesses that can’t justify the investment in a content strategy, there are a few tips to help make the content gathering and writing process easier. The most important one in my mind is creating a blog calendar.

Blog calendars are a great way of planning your blog content strategy ahead of time so that when you get busy you don’t miss writing a blog because you don’t have the time to come up with fresh ideas. It is also a basis from which to amend and adapt, and something you can share with your team.

Blogging once a week is a good barometer to aim for, which is roughly four blogs a month depending on how the month falls. And a good place to start is to pick four themes a month that you continue to follow each month.

Top tips and how to’s are a good place to start and for these you can get the ideas from your audience. What are they interested in and what do they want to know about? Your blogs could answer the most interesting questions you get from your customers when you engage with them.

Interview blogs are also an interesting addition to your blog calendar. As a society we are interested in other people and what they have to say, their opinions and tips. Pick a person you think would be of interest to your readers each month and carry out a small question and answer session with them. Alternatively ask them to write a guest blog on a particular topic.

From Walk your Dog Month to National Spaghetti Day, there is an awareness day for most topics right now. Do some research into the year’s awareness days and pick the ones that relate to your business and write a blog to coincide with them.

Lastly, newsjacking is another great way of creating blog content. If there is a big news story that you are passionate about or that could be of interest to your customers and links to your sector, why not use the news story to create a blog on your opinions or to put it to the attention of your audience.

Successful content strategies take time and research. At the Wordsmith Partnership we work with clients to create a content strategy and then put it into action. If you need help with creating content contact us today.