How to plan your blog content

Every time I talk to a company or individual they all seem to know the importance of having a blog and include it in the content marketing strategy. However, the vast majority do not have an editorial calendar to follow.

The owners of these corporate or personal brand blogs place special emphasis on SEO or value generation, but seem to forget the most important thing, planning. This is the main germ of many blogs that start out eagerly and publish regularly and soon run out of ideas and abandon the activity. Consistency is essential for the development of an online brand, if you don't create new content and post quite often Google will forget you and lose the loyalty of users.

In addition, editorial calendars are a fundamental tool for visualizing our medium/long-term content strategy and adapting it to our business objectives. It also helps us select quality content and maintain a constant workflow. In this guide we show you how to plan your blog content using an effective calendar. What steps should you take?

Research first

Before starting to write ideas about posts and translate them into a calendar, it is important to look back, analyze the results of blog publications so far. In this way we can find out what the interests of the audience are and what kind of users read the blog.

How to find this information?

1. Through Google Analytics you can discover all the relevant information to know the tastes of your audience. From the section Behavior > Site content > All pages, you can access this list in which all blog entries are sorted by visualizations. Once you have analyzed this content, the ideal is to create a profile of the interests of the user type of your blog and choose related topics for your content calendar. We recommend that you at least analyze the last 6 months.

2. Reports generated after sending a newsletter can be another way to discover your audience's preferences. If you use Mailchimp you can access very detailed analyses of each of your campaigns that can shed light on your research, such as the number of times it has been opened or how many times they have clicked on the link it contains, among other parameters.

Did you just open the blog and you don't have data from previous months? Don't worry, there are other ways to analyze your target.

Listen to social networks and find out what users are talking about. To do this you can monitor the conversations of the followers of your brand and thus find out their interests. You can also carry out this analysis even if you already had a blog because thanks to this active listening you will be able to discover potential content that perhaps until now you have not taken into account and have not written about it.

Set goals for your content campaign

Once all the previous analysis has been completed, it is essential to set objectives. Are you looking to attract new leads? Increase blog traffic? Improve your personal brand? What is your ultimate goal? In order to be able to define objectives in a coherent way, it is important to carry out a previous analysis.

First of all, you must be clear about what the added value of our blog is, what makes it different and what makes it different from the competition. Then you have to know who it is going to be addressed to (this question will be easy to answer thanks to all the previous analysis). And finally, you have to establish some keywords, which although orientative, will mark the route of our post at the moment. As time goes by, you will be able to check if these keywords are working and attracting users or you should change them.

Look for inspiration in other blogs

Thanks to the previous analyses carried out on the interests of the audiences you will already have an idea of the themes of your contents, but now it is time to look for specific themes to develop in your articles. It is not a question of copying, but of inspiring and showing a vision of the theme adapted to the personality of your brand.

To speed up your search you can use tools such as Feedly or Buzzsumo, which help you find and capture ideas of quality references.

In order not to lose any of the references, create an Excel document and save all the links together with the source that will serve as inspiration and the provisional title for your blog.

Important: When choosing this content take into account the topics previously set, as well as the Keywords and the user's purchase cycle to ensure that you cover each of the phases (Discovery - Consideration - Conversion) with the articles chosen.

Create your calendar

It's time to plan the strategy!

You already know your objectives, the target audience and their interests, as well as the topics to be developed, all you have to do is put everything in order in an editorial calendar. To do this, you can create an Excel sheet on Google Drive that allows you to work in teams, sharing and modifying the same document.

When creating this calendar you must take into account which are the days with more visits to post the articles with more chances of becoming viralized. You must also establish the best time to launch each type of content: summer, Christmas, going back to school.

You're probably not the only one working with this document so it's important that you include all the information from each blog, such as: the title, the author, who it's aimed at and the objective. This will make it easier and faster for the whole team to manage the blog.

We hope that you have understood the importance of planning an editorial calendar in order to grow your company or personal brand and how to develop it. 

In our blog you can also find other step-by-step tutorials to take your marketing strategies to the next level. 

Fotografía principal: Insung Yoon