How to Create a Content Calendar
Creating articles without a definite plan will not generate a good user experience. It is much more efficient to organize your content. With a well-structured calendar, you will predict which content you should publish. Also, you will organize the order they should align with.
Calendars show holidays, so you will be able to plan your articles about these holidays. It will further help your marketing effort to be both educative and entertaining.
1) Start with your existing articles
It is not time to start researching new article topics, but time to look inwards. In a bid to create new content all the time we leave a lot of value content lying on our desk. Take note of all your existing articles, see those you can remix and those you can repurpose. This should include both published and unpublished articles.
Talking about repurposing articles, you can take a look at your old articles. It can be to make minor adjustments and also adding new information. Another thing you can do with your old content is content atomization
Repurposing takes away the headache of creating a new set of content. It also helps fill in the gap of someplace where you do not have fresh content.
2) Plan, Schedule, Publish, Promote, and review.
Proper planning prevents poor performance, is a regular saying. To do well with your content calendar you must take planning as a priority. You should carry out this exercise as often as possible, it can be weekly, monthly, or even quarterly. It all depends on you.
During planning, you should schedule content in a time frame that you know is real and achievable. It should support both your email and social media marketing campaign.
Your planning should include reviews of engagement and revenue from previous periods. This will help access the articles that performed best.
Your team members that took part in content creation should be involved.
This is an interesting subject. I think though there is a mixture of planning and organic growth and process that takes place. I am experiencing this now. I see more and more a need for planned content, whereas up to now I have been building out my site in a fairly organic manner. Now I need to pause, review, reorganize the categories and menus on my site and sort out the avenues through which I need to build more content. So a mixture of continued organic development, responding to reactions and feedback, opportunistically building on low hanging fruit keywords, and organized planning.
Thanks for another thought-provoking article.
Best regards
Andy