How to Create Your Content Marketing System in 2018
Guest blog by Monica Miller
If you’re planning on upgrading your content, you need to know a few things about it. Rule Number One: Create a Plan for Your Content.
“Failing to plan is planning to fail.” ~Benjamin Franklin
As the CEO of your company, you need to have a plan for your content marketing campaigns, just like any other planning you do. You wouldn’t create your speech without a plan, now would you? No!
Did you know that CEOs and professional marketers make plans of action for their content? Once they have a plan, they implement them. After a time, they come back and review, revise and tweak the plan to perfect it.
When it comes to planning your content, it all begins with a content calendar.
During this series, I am going to walk you through creating a content calendar for your business, and how to begin marketing yourself in 90 day chunks.
I’ll even share my own free content calendar templates you can use to create your own content calendar, along with some concrete examples. We’ll also cover how to make sure your content calendar is aligned with your promotional activities, so you can get the absolute best results from your blogging efforts.
Are you ready to get started? First, let’s briefly cover the basics…
What is a content calendar?
A content calendar (a.k.a. “editorial calendar”) is the process of creating content, from idea through writing and publication. An individual or small business might have this publishing process: Brainstorm content ideas to publish, where to publish, and when to publish.
A good content calendar answers three questions:
What kind of content will you publish?
Where will it be distributed?
When will it be published?
Having a content calendar takes out all the guess work. No more asking yourself, “What shall I write about today?”, or creating content that you hope will gain the attention of your ideal audience. The purpose of your content calendar is to tell you exactly what to publish on your blog, social media, or email newsletters to get real results for your business.
There are several other big benefits to having a content calendar:
- It helps you stick to a consistent publishing schedule.
- It helps you to maintain a good balance of topics.
- It allows you to coordinate your content around product launches and promotions.
- It gives you a bird’s eye view of what’s working and what’s not working in your content marketing campaigns.
The most beautiful thing about a content calendar is that nothing is set in stone. If you want to readjust, you can!
For example, if you’re writing a series of blog posts on how you decluttered your house, and are seeing an increase in your traffic, then you can adjust your plan to include more content within that topic.
If you’re getting excited about all the possibilities a content calendar can bring to your company, then there’s one very important ingredient you need to have before you begin to create your own content calendar plan and that is the marketing piece.
Creating a Content Marketing Strategy that Works
The secret to a content calendar is to make sure you have a marketing plan that gets real results for your business by choosing the right topics for your content.
You could have an entire year’s worth of blog posts filled out in your content calendar, but if the topics don’t attract your ideal audience, then your calendar will do nothing for your business. And that would stink, right?
If you want to have a successful year ahead, you’ll need to plan your content around the actual needs of your ideal audience.
You may be saying right about now, “But I don’t have any blog post ideas!”
Or on the other end of the spectrum, you may be saying, “But I have so many ideas, I don’t know what to even focus on!”
Don’t worry. In the next post, I’ll show you how to find the right topics to fill your content calendar easily and effortlessly, even if you don’t have a clue what to write about, or you don’t know what to focus on.
Want to get started with your own content calendar planning? Download my Ultimate Content Calendar where it will tell you exactly how to plan, organize and review your content over a period of 30 days!
Click here to download now and get your content planning on!
Author Bio: Monica Miller is an International Speaker and Writer, Author and Coach. She lives in Cheyenne, Wyoming, with her husband, Nathan, and their son, Anthony. Coaches, Speakers, and Authors hire Monica Miller to articulate their message into profitable content because she has found that many are at a loss on where to begin so they end up stuck and stagnant in their content. Learn more about her at www.monicawrites.com.
