How to Easily Create Amazing Content for Audience Engagement
Creating consistently great content is every writer’s biggest challenge. It takes a lot of time and effort to develop content that informs and engages your audience. That makes keeping your editorial calendar full feel like an impossible task.
If you develop a well-planned blog schedule/calendar, you can make it easier to achieve and maintain your long-term goals. The key is to start small and build your effort while staying focused on your goals. In this post, that’s exactly what you’ll learn how I do it.
You See Why You Should Schedule Your Blog Posts
You’re comfortable writing your awesome blog posts. And you know how to write blog posts that drive traffic to your blog. Your next step, is to develop a blog schedule that will help you publish those awesome blog posts consistently to increase your:
- Increase your social media shares
- Social media subscribers
- Drive traffic to your Blog
- Get More newsletter subscribers
- Increase tour customer conversions
And do all that in a way that helps you reach your goals. Easy Peasy, right?
You Need to Start By Defining Your Blogs Goals
When I began blogging it was something new and scary for me to tackle. Initially I just wanted to write a monthly post to share what I had learned about customer service with others. Then I discovered that I really enjoyed writing.
That projected monthly customer service post has morphed into four different weekly posts, on three different topics. That makes me crazy busy. But I love it. Add in the 2 newsletters I’m currently developing and you can understand why a calendar was a good choice. I had to develop a calendar to help me just maintain my sanity.
Chances are, you want to blog because you feel that you have something to share. And that’s a great reason to blog. You’re not sure about creating a blog schedule. If you want to publish well written posts that engage and inform your audience, having a schedule will help keep you focused.
Using a blog schedule allows you to schedule your post publish dates to ensure that you build on your story from post to post. I currently have my posts scheduled to publish over the next two months. They’re not set in stone. I change things frequently. But using a schedule gives me the opportunity to visually move posts around to make the topic flow better for my audience.
You also might have heard that publishing consistently great content can help you grow your business. That’s all true and good reasons to blog! Actually by publishing consistent content, you’ll get as much as 30% more traffic for every post published, all while saving time on each post.
It makes your life a whole lot easier to look at a to look at a calendar full of blog post ideas instead of a blank slate and wondering, “What am I going to write today?”
However, defining your blog schedule or even planning to publish more content shouldn’t be your goal. You need to first establish parameters that’ll help you focus your efforts on the kinds of growth that you want for your blog.
The goals that you might want to start with is to increase your traffic, social media shares, social media subscribers, newsletter subscribers, and customer conversions. Before you even think about your optimal blog schedule, decide where would want these numbers to be?
How do Shares Drive Increasing Social Media Metrics?
It’s easy to understand how social media shares influence all of these metrics. iIncreasing activity in your social media community will cause growth in your customer conversions. 53% of our blog traffic comes from social media. You can see how all of these metrics are super important to us. These are good goals to have for your blog:
What you should do is essentially, think of 10x growth. This mindset is what drives every decision we make on how we use our time. It’s also a good model for you, too! When you add something to your plate, ask yourself, “Will this help us drive 10x growth, or is this just a nice-to-have?”
Train Your Blogging Goals to Be SMART
Your blogging goals must be: specific, measurable, actionable, realistic, and time sensitive. Chances are, you want to scale your content production. It’s important to do this while producing more blog posts over time. So, before you just jump in, let’s get your resources figured out to make executing your blog schedule that much easier once you get going.
You Need to Know How to Plan Your Blog Schedule
You could skip here. I work alone and had no one to help me plan my blog schedule.
You Need to Establish Your Optimal Publishing Frequency
It’s always helpful to understand your dream before you get started. How many posts would you like to publish every week? How about every month? My original plans were to publish bi-weekly or monthly. That visualization was a great place to start. You just have to understand that you can easily ramp up your efforts. To start, it’s best to start with a minimal posting frequency to build your momentum.
It’s Best to Begin Slowly and Expand as You are Comfortable
I’ve heard of folks starting their blog and publishing lots of content right off the bat. If you begin too aggressively there is lots of room for burnout by publishing too much content too quickly. Instead, in the first months especially, focus on publishing enough content to work through the awkward newness of blogging, without being overwhelmed.
After every post in your first months you need to analyze what went well, what you should do differently next time, and what you should stop doing entirely. Then, make your adjustments and continue to analyze your monthly results. At this point, as you’ve published more content, it’s a good time to measure your results to improve your content.
You Need to Measure Your Success as You Publish
You know what you hope to achieve. Review how an average post contributes to your goals. As you build a consistent blog schedule, looking at a week’s or even a month’s worth of measurements for your content and averaging the numbers. You need to understand how you’re doing. That way, you can figure out ways to improve all of the content you publish. This would also help you reach your goals.
You Need Your Publishing Frequency to Help Reach Your Goals
From the previous step, after you’ve figured out how an average post contributes to your goals to increase:
- Social media shares
- Social media subscribers
- Traffic
- Newsletter subscribers
- Customer conversions
From here, use those figures to determine the amount of posts you’d need to publish in your blog schedule to reach your goals.
You Need to Know That Your Publishing Frequency’s Achievable
When you consider this, some goals may require a lot more content than others. That’s fine. It’s just a tool to help you gauge how much content to publish to reach your goals. And keep in mind, this is only accurate if your posts don’t get more traction, which they all certainly will as you increase your publishing frequency and maintain consistency.
Now it’s time to take a hard look at your goals. Do you have the resources to create the content needed? It’s only then that you can actually determine an achievable publishing frequency.
Here’s what to look for:
- How much time does it take to write, design, publish, and promote a single post?
- Is it possible for you to scale to an level of content publishing that either hits your goals or is really close?
- What could you quit doing to dedicate more time to creating your awesome content?
- What improvements could you make in your content creation process to spend less time developing your content?
Finding efficiencies to publish content quicker will help you scale. However be wary of the saying, “Don’t sacrifice quality for quantity.”
Plan Content Improvements to Increase Success of Every Post
Chances are, you’re able to publish a decent amount of content that helps you nearly hit your goals. From here, some of the best ways to reach your goals are to improve every piece of content you publish. That way, every post delivers more results to your goals, which means you can get more results by publishing less content.
You Need to Increase Your Writing Efficiency
Considering our major goals, here are a few quick wins to increase your efficiency with each:
Social media shares.
- Write social media friendly content to help people want to share your content.
- Use social media buttons in your content in the best places to help people share your content.
- Plan a social media editorial calendar to boost your shares of your content to quadruple your traffic.
Social media subscribers.
- Curate content to share with your subscribers to bring them the best of the best from your niche.
- Encourage readers to subscribe to your social accounts to get the latest and greatest from your blog.
- Include a way for readers to follow you when they sign up for emails (an easy automatic opt-in in their settings works well).
Blog Traffic.
- Publish really useful, helpful, educational, or entertaining content worthy of sharing.
- Optimize your posts for search engines to get long-term traffic.
- Share your content on social media more than once.
Newsletter subscribers.
- Build an email list and community around your content.
- Build your email list and community by telling your subscribers exactly what they’ll get.
- Trade free content for email addresses.
Customer Conversions
- Map out your customers’ journey from a newbie to a veteran, and write content for all stages of the marketing funnel.
- Test different email templates, subject lines, and more while including calls to action to convert.
- Ask readers to purchase what you’re selling. You’re providing helpful content with the goal to convert readers into buyers. You need to include calls to action in appropriate places throughout your content.
You See How to Publish Your Optimal Blog Schedule
For example, if you decide to boost your blog schedule to publish two posts a week, you need to have a game plan to increase your blog schedule publishing for your next 6 months:
During the first two months you should determine the best times to publish your blog posts. That’s something you’ll do no matter if you’re looking to publish two posts a week or more.
Now it’s Time to Iterate and Try New Things
This is the fun part: Execute your plan. You just planned out your next three months blog schedule for your content!
Measure your goals, improve your content, and repeat, repeat, repeat. Congrats on setting up your annual blog schedule!
Now You Need to Go Rock Your Blogging Schedule
You’ve got the knowledge you need to plan an effective schedule for your blog. Now all that’s left is to put that plan into action. What does your future blog schedule look like?
