Great tips for planning your online content, by Kim Morrison
As a business owner, you know that content is one of the best tools you have. It drives traffic. It provides your audience with the value and information they seek. It also helps you market your business, products or services. Content is essential for online marketing success. You can achieve even greater success if you take the time to plan your content.
What is content planning?
Content planning is simply the process of taking a look at your calendar and deciding what to write and where to publish it. Content planning involves a few primary criteria:
When will you publish the content?
Where will you publish it?
What will you write about?
What’s the purpose of the content?
What are your keywords?
How can you repurpose the content?
You’ll also want to consider how far ahead you want to plan. Many business owners take a tiered approach. They plan large content projects for the entire year. For example, they may publish a report each month. They also take a look at their content on a quarterly or monthly level.
If you don’t plan your content or are struggling to plan it effectively, consider the following tips:
Use a calendar
This gives you a big picture and you can write on. A paper desk calendar is a great planning tool. You can write your content ideas in pencil for easy modifications. Or, if you prefer paperless organisation, you can use your Outlook or Google calendar or there are lots of e-calendars you can download. I use an e-calendar which I then share with my team on Google Drive.
Integrate your marketing strategy
Plan how you’ll integrate your content into your marketing strategy. For example, you could decide that in March you’re going to guest blog on a specialist website. You’ll also want to make sure this content ties into any season or holiday.
You’ll also want to ensure it supports any new products or services. Make sure your content has a purpose. It may be simply to drive traffic to your website. Or it may be to drive traffic to a sales page or increase your opt-ins.
Leave room for change
The best content plans leave room for inspiration. The greatest ideas often come out of the blue. If you’re a stickler for your plan and don’t allow room to add your content inspiration into the mix, then you’re missing out.
Repurpose your content
Finally, don’t forget to take a look at how you can repurpose your content. It’s not only a great way to get the most return on investment, it can help fill content gaps.
When you your content, make sure you’re looking at both the macro and micro picture. Make sure you look ahead and take the entire year into consideration. At the same time, plan your content right down to the keywords and topics.
Planning your content for the entire year may take a day or two to accomplish but it’ll save you tons of time down the road. Instead of wondering what you’re going to write on, you’ll have the answers all worked out. Best of all, your content will fit with your other marketing efforts to create a comprehensive business growth plan.
Breaking news on social media
Facebook News, Facebook’s curated and personalised news tab in the native app, has officially launched in the UK.
Facebook has referred its decision to ban the account of former US President Donald Trump to its recently activated Oversight Board.
Google has announced a new deal to share revenue with French publishers while avoiding more complex regulation on the same.
Instagram is rolling out a new ‘Professional Dashboard’ to make it easier for creators to access relevant tools to help maximize their performance.
Instagram is also testing out a new toggle that would give users the option to hide like counts on their posts.
LinkedIn has added some new control features which enable users to restrict who can reply to their posts, and what they see in their feed.
Snapchat has confirmed that it is testing a new Dark Mode option with some users.
TikTok has launched a new set of education resources for creators in order to provide guidance on how to build an effective platform presence.
