Creating Blog Content Using a Calendar

When you invest time in creating content for a blog, you should target your efforts towards specific writing goals. It’s less about achieving your total word count and more about being purposeful when writing. With a blog calendar, you can use the blog as a powerful storytelling medium, sharing regular posts with readers to reinforce your brand story. A story is an ongoing way of helping people to understand the company culture and ways of doing business. A story makes them want to learn more and stay in touch with the brand. Each writer who composes content for your blog should assume a storytelling perspective even if the tidbits to be shared are mostly factual in nature.  In this post, we explain how creating blog content with a calendar helps business owners and their writers generate more effective text for blog readers.

The Background

Copywriters can only effectively represent your brand if they can understand the business culture, the essential products and services and how these bring value to customers, and what your brand represents in terms of social values. However, a business owner may not have the experience or the time to write down all of this information and share it with writers. A good compromise is when the business owner and the writer can at least establish a voice for the brand with certain guidelines and develop a blog calendar. A calendar breaks each month or week into a set of topics on which the blog readers will be informed.

Learn What Audiences Expect

When you visit the website of any major brand, you will find a blog that uses an informal style of writing to share information about its products or services. Some blog content also focuses on topics that relate to the company’s same industry or market. When you write a blog calendar, you give the writer a topic area for which to shape content each month. For example, an accounting firm might designate January through April as federal tax topics, May through August as small business accounts receivable management, and September through December as benefits administration. With this general blog calendar, a writer can create his or her own topics and then connect them back to the company that owns the blog. When you review content that your writer has generated for your blog calendar, be sure to ask if each piece fits the topic calendar and will help the reader to satisfy specific needs or wants.

Analyze Current Blog Text

Think like a digital video marketer for a moment who’s concerned with key performance indicators. She studies whether targeted consumers will view a video ad within a specific timeframe, which is a frequency measure. One way to know if it’s time to update your blog calendar is to study which posts are getting the most hits. Look at the number of hits that each post has gained over the last year. If you find a number of pieces that were hit with the most hits during the same month, then that month’s topic should be added to your upcoming blog calendar. You can also note blog topics that underperformed and cut them from future blog calendars.

Reminders

• Don’t add blog topics to the calendar that would interest you but would not affect customers.
• Don’t keep underperforming topics on the calendar. If you have a whole month of posts scheduled on the same topic area and people aren’t reading the first few posts, create a new topic for the remainder of that period.
• Don’t assign blog topics to employees who lack sufficient writing experience. Instead, give them to an expert copywriter.

For more details on building better blog content using a calendar, please contact us today.