The owners of these corporate or personal brand blogs place special emphasis on SEO or value generation, but they seem to forget the most important thing: planning. This is the main germ of many blogs that start with great enthusiasm and publishing regularly and soon run out of ideas and abandon the activity. Consistency is essential for the development of an online brand ; if you do not create new content and post frequently enough, you will be forgotten by Google and lose the loyalty of users.
In addition, editorial calendars are a fundamental tool for visualizing our medium/long-term content strategy and being able to adapt it to our business objectives. They also help us select quality content and maintain a constant flow of work. In this guide we show you how to plan blog content using an effective calendar. What steps should you follow?
Investigate first
Before you start writing down post ideas and putting them into a calendar, it's important to look back and analyze the results of your blog posts so far. This way, you can find out what your audience's interests are and what type of users read your blog.
How to find this information?
Through Google Analytics you can discover all the relevant information to know the tastes of your audience. From the Behavior > Site content > All pages section, you can access gambling data usa phone number this list in which all the blog entries are sorted by views. Once you have analyzed this content, the ideal thing is to create a profile of the interests of the typical user of your blog and choose related topics for your content calendar. We recommend that you analyze at least the last 6 months.
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 analytics for 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 the link it contains has been clicked, among other parameters.
Have you just started your blog and don't have data from previous months? Don't worry, there are other ways to analyze your target audience.
Listen to social media and find out what users are talking about. To do this, you can monitor the conversations of your brand's followers and find out what their interests are. You can also carry out this analysis even if you already have a blog, since thanks to this active listening you will be able to discover potential content that you may not have considered and written about until now.
Set the objectives of your content campaign
Once all the previous analysis is finished, it is essential to set some objectives. Are you looking to attract new leads? Increase blog traffic? Improve your personal brand? What is your ultimate goal? In order to define objectives in a coherent way, it is important to carry out a previous analysis.
First of all, you need to be clear about the added value of your blog, what makes it different and what makes it read (or will be read) compared to the competition. Then, you need to know who it is going to be directed at (this question will be easy to answer thanks to all the previous analysis). And finally, you need to establish some keywords, which, although indicative, will mark the path of your posts for the moment. As time goes by, you will be able to check if these keywords are working and attracting users or if you need to change them.
Find inspiration in other blogs
Thanks to the previous analysis of audience interests, you will already have an idea of the themes of your content, but now it is time to look for specific topics to develop in your articles. It is not a question of copying, but of getting inspired and showing a vision of the topic adapted to the personality of your brand.
To speed up your search, you can use tools like Feedly or Buzzsumo , which help you find and capture ideas from quality references.
To avoid losing any of your references, create an Excel document and save all the links along with the source that will serve as inspiration and the provisional title for your blog.
Important : When choosing this content, take into account the previously established themes, as well as the Keywords and the user's purchasing cycle to ensure that you cover each of the phases (Discovery - Consideration - Conversion) with the chosen articles.
Create your calendar
It's time to plan the strategy!
You already know your objectives, your target audience and their interests, as well as the topics to be developed. All that's left is to put everything in order in an editorial calendar. To do this, you can create an Excel spreadsheet in Google Drive that allows you to work as a team, sharing and modifying the same document.
When creating this calendar, you should take into account which days have the most visits in order to post the articles that are most likely to go viral. You should also establish the best time to launch each type of content: summer, Christmas, back to school, etc.
You probably won't be the only one working with this document, so it's important to include all the information for each blog, such as: the title, the author, who it's addressed to, and the objective. This will make it easier and faster for the entire team to manage the blog.
We hope you have understood the importance of planning an editorial calendar to grow your company or personal brand and how to develop it.
On our blog you can also find other step-by-step tutorials to take your marketing strategies to the next level.
