Your blog serves as a platform where you can connect with your audience. It is also a great tool for sharing educational information, tutorials, and other helpful content related to your niche.
Not to mention, a blog is a critical component for increasing your website’s SEO (search engine optimization). As with any other major project, getting started is always the most intimidating part.
Whether you can sit at your keyboard and wax poetic for hours or dread the idea of writing, your website needs a blog. And even more importantly, you need an efficient content strategy.
Before launching your digital marketing campaign, it’s time to get organized.
Planning & Organizing Your Digital Marketing Strategy
Where to Begin
Having a running list of ideas is great — but if there’s no method to the madness, your running list is doing more harm than good.
Rather than having a document as long as your arm, it’s more efficient to organize your ideas within a spreadsheet. This allows you to create columns for the blog title, description, category, and publication date. It also lets you mark off whether they’ve been edited and published.
Spreadsheets aren’t just for crunching numbers. They are also a highly condensed way to store, gather, and share non-numerical information.
Within your content calendar, you can have several tabs in the same spreadsheet to help coordinate your social media and blog content together.
How to Use a Content Calendar
Brainstorming
Content calendars are designed to help you quickly jot down your ideas. However, they’re also an efficient tool for collaborating and gathering feedback from other team members.
If you’re working on your blog content strategy as a team, we recommend sharing and updating the content calendar regularly with your coworkers. You can update your content calendar during weekly strategy meetings or work on it together asynchronously.
Even if you’re working on the blog content alone, it’s still an effective way to visualize all your ideas in one place. While putting together your content calendar, you can effortlessly identify how to cross-market your blog articles or create social media content that promotes your blog articles.
Treating the Content Calendar like a Living Document
Content calendars aren’t just a static tool for getting organized before you launch your blog. Rather, they are designed to grow alongside you and keep you organized throughout your digital marketing journey.
The beauty of a content calendar is it serves a dual purpose as a content inventory. At a glance, you can see what articles you’ve already brainstormed and published to avoid duplicate content on your website.
Your content calendar is your best friend — it helps you stay on task and encourages you to keep putting out fresh, innovative ideas.
Conclusion
Launching a blog can feel like climbing a mountain. Though, once you’ve already started brainstorming and organizing your ideas, you’re halfway through the climb. From there, it’s only a matter of time before you’re coasting down the other side of the mountain.
Even so, Rome wasn’t built in a day — and it certainly wasn’t built alone. Fortunately, we’re more than happy to provide you with additional support. We’re here to create solutions for you wherever you are in your business venture.
For more information about our business, financial, and website consulting services, please contact us.