This, however, is only a primer. There’s a lot more that goes into planning blog content and we’ll cover it in this article. But, first, we need to understand why blog planning matters in the first place.
Blog planning has many benefits. For instance, it helps to maintain:
But that last point raises a good question. How far ahead should you plan your content?
Quarterly planning is easily the most popular choice. It’s far enough out to help you stay on track or ahead on content, but not so far that you can’t adjust when needed. Yet, there are good arguments for all sorts of planning. That goes for annual, bi-annual, quarterly, monthly, or a mix of these.
For example, Christoph Trappe of Voxpopme creates a high-level plan for the year. But Cristoph determines exact topics on a rolling basis, explaining:
Will Whitham of CMO Alliance, takes a different approach.
Do you see the common thread here? Though some plan further ahead than others, content marketers agree that flexibility is essential. As a general rule of thumb, the further out you plan, the more wiggle room you need to allow.
But there’s another perspective worth considering. According to Stephen Jeske of MarketMuse:
What’s the takeaway when considering how far out to plan? Don’t just think about preference or the general advantages of one timeframe over another. Think about:
Accounting for your unique circumstances and needs will help you plan at an appropriate cadence. But we’ve got many more tips to help with your planning.
Many guides try to distill the blog planning process into just a handful of steps or tips. However, they leave out many details and steps you need to know to build an actionable plan for your blog.
In contrast, we’ve put together an in-depth list of 16 best practices. Whether or not you follow them can make or break the success of your blogging strategy. So, without further delay, let’s dig in.
First things first, set SMART goals. These goals are:
Simply setting goals is never enough. You need a plan to achieve them. You should write down how you’ll do so. For instance, in the example above, notice that the SMART goal was anchored to an action—creating downloadable assets.
Buy sat you’ve chosen annual planning. Since planning for the entire year can be overwhelming, create quarterly to-do lists. You might plan to produce quarterly downloadable ebooks to boost email subscribers. From there, chop each quarterly to-do list into monthly to-do lists. (Of course, the same principle applies if you’ve decided to create biannual or quarterly plans.)
Create a list of tools you need for optimizing your content production.
Need a new plugin or keyword research tool, for example? Add it to your resource list. Will you need to outsource content production to meet your content goals for the year? Add ‘find new freelancers’ to your list.
You’ll also want to add a blog content planner to this list. Or invest in a content operations platform such as GatherContent. This tool can double as your blog post planner while providing you a place to:
See also: Check out a comparison of the top 5 document collaboration tools.
It's pointless to plan content that simply regurgitates what’s already out there.
Ask yourself: how can we take a unique angle? And, specifically, a unique angle that provides additional value to readers? Some ways to do this include:
Ensure your blog plan includes a healthy mix of content types, such as:
Just be sure to choose content types based on what your readers prefer to consume, not what you prefer to create.
Refresh your buyer persona and customer journey map
Never limit yourself to one source for your blog post ideas. Diversify your search for winning ideas by:
Not all the ideas in your blog content plan are going to be home runs. Every experienced blogger and content manager can agree with this. So, how do you spot the needles in your haystack of ideas?
For each idea, ask yourself two questions:
A good content topic idea aligns with both your readers’ and brand’s interests. (This is another reason why it's wise to collaborate with your customer-facing teams. It ensures the content you create is relevant to prospects and customers.)
See also: Planning contextual content for users
As you source and sift through ideas, ensure that you’re planning content for all funnel stages. This way, your content marketing plan (and each blog post) will:
If you don’t already have a plan for publishing content, create one. Decide how many:
Creating a posting schedule will help you identify gaps in your blog planning. You’ll see at which points you’d start to run out of each content type based on your chosen publishing cadence.
Scheduling is also helpful for identifying opportunities to repurpose content. It makes content distribution and promotion easier. In fact, you could bake repurposing into your process from the start.
For example, your quarterly ebook could become eight blog posts. Those eight blog posts could become 16 emails. And you could pull snippets from both the blog posts and emails to create dozens of social media posts. Or you could put the process in reverse and combine smaller, existing pieces of content on a topic into larger pieces.
Many marketers and content creators treat editorial and style guides as optional resources. In reality, they’re essential for maintaining high quality standards and consistency across your blog. Both remove friction for readers.
Provide thoughtful guidelines for your team’s sake. And for that of any agencies or freelancers you work with. These can include details such as:
Then, consider how to keep these guidelines top of mind for everyone creating content. In GatherContent, you can embed style guidance into the content creation environment. This way, writers and reviewers have them on hand at all times.
Look at Google Analytics and pinpoint any decaying content. In other words, pieces that were performing well but that have a reduced inflow of traffic lately. (This happens naturally as content ages or becomes dated or irrelevant.)
Create a list of these posts and add them to your content refresh list. From there, follow these steps to freshen up your content:
Interviewing your readership is essential for sourcing blog post ideas. It’s also a great way to understand:
This is one area where your email list can come in handy. Do you promote your latest blog posts via your email newsletter? If so, you can also ask for your blog readers’ feedback via that channel. It’s a simple way to reach your most active readers and understand what you could do better in the upcoming quarter.
Outline the steps to take your content from ideation to production. If you don’t already have a content workflow, that is.
Make sure you add content distribution to this workflow as well. Why? Your content marketing and blogging strategies will fall short of their potential if you don’t promote your content. So, create a detailed distribution plan, including the channels you’ll use and the cadence at which you’ll promote your content. Then, schedule it on your calendar to help you follow through.
Creating new content shouldn’t be the only focus as you develop your blog strategy. Look for as many opportunities as possible to repurpose content.
This could mean changing the format of a piece, combining content, or deconstructing it. In any case, repurposing can:
💡Learn more: A complete guide to repurposing content [including 9 real-life examples of repurposed content]
Now, prepare your content calendar based on your decided publishing frequency. Set a realistic schedule, factoring in content production, design, and publishing time.
Also, mark important holidays in your calendar. This way, you can plan relevant content when those dates are around the corner.
If there’s anything the pandemic has taught us, it’s that you shouldn’t plan everything down to a tee. Leave room for flexibility in your calendar.
A good rule of thumb: Plan 75% of your content for each month or quarter. Leave the remaining 25% for ad hoc requests or timely pieces.
So far, we’ve covered general best practices and steps for blog planning. But there are also a few things you should keep in mind when planning for 2023 specifically.
Each new year brings with it the risk of losing traffic to otherwise effective pages. The cause? Pages being dated with the previous year!
You wouldn’t want potential readers—or worse, potential leads—thinking your content is outdated or irrelevant. So, what should you do?
Update any time-sensitive content as soon as possible (and certainly before we get months into the new year).
Next, it’s important to be mindful of events and concerns that could impact your audience. Will Whitham explains why.
Finally, according to Shayla Price of PrimoStats:
This is a timely reminder that content is more than a content marketing tool. It can play a role in accomplishing your company or organization’s larger business goals. But the chances of that are slimmer if you’re not intentional about:
With the above in mind, are you ready to dive into blog planning (and planning for other content)?
Whether you answered “yes” or “no,” you’ll benefit from GatherContent’s content production planning guide. It’s free to download. And, in addition to what you've learned here, it’ll help you welcome the new year with a fresh, ROI-delivering content plan!
This, however, is only a primer. There’s a lot more that goes into planning blog content and we’ll cover it in this article. But, first, we need to understand why blog planning matters in the first place.
Blog planning has many benefits. For instance, it helps to maintain:
But that last point raises a good question. How far ahead should you plan your content?
Quarterly planning is easily the most popular choice. It’s far enough out to help you stay on track or ahead on content, but not so far that you can’t adjust when needed. Yet, there are good arguments for all sorts of planning. That goes for annual, bi-annual, quarterly, monthly, or a mix of these.
For example, Christoph Trappe of Voxpopme creates a high-level plan for the year. But Cristoph determines exact topics on a rolling basis, explaining:
Will Whitham of CMO Alliance, takes a different approach.
Do you see the common thread here? Though some plan further ahead than others, content marketers agree that flexibility is essential. As a general rule of thumb, the further out you plan, the more wiggle room you need to allow.
But there’s another perspective worth considering. According to Stephen Jeske of MarketMuse:
What’s the takeaway when considering how far out to plan? Don’t just think about preference or the general advantages of one timeframe over another. Think about:
Accounting for your unique circumstances and needs will help you plan at an appropriate cadence. But we’ve got many more tips to help with your planning.
Many guides try to distill the blog planning process into just a handful of steps or tips. However, they leave out many details and steps you need to know to build an actionable plan for your blog.
In contrast, we’ve put together an in-depth list of 16 best practices. Whether or not you follow them can make or break the success of your blogging strategy. So, without further delay, let’s dig in.
First things first, set SMART goals. These goals are:
Simply setting goals is never enough. You need a plan to achieve them. You should write down how you’ll do so. For instance, in the example above, notice that the SMART goal was anchored to an action—creating downloadable assets.
Buy sat you’ve chosen annual planning. Since planning for the entire year can be overwhelming, create quarterly to-do lists. You might plan to produce quarterly downloadable ebooks to boost email subscribers. From there, chop each quarterly to-do list into monthly to-do lists. (Of course, the same principle applies if you’ve decided to create biannual or quarterly plans.)
Create a list of tools you need for optimizing your content production.
Need a new plugin or keyword research tool, for example? Add it to your resource list. Will you need to outsource content production to meet your content goals for the year? Add ‘find new freelancers’ to your list.
You’ll also want to add a blog content planner to this list. Or invest in a content operations platform such as GatherContent. This tool can double as your blog post planner while providing you a place to:
See also: Check out a comparison of the top 5 document collaboration tools.
It's pointless to plan content that simply regurgitates what’s already out there.
Ask yourself: how can we take a unique angle? And, specifically, a unique angle that provides additional value to readers? Some ways to do this include:
Ensure your blog plan includes a healthy mix of content types, such as:
Just be sure to choose content types based on what your readers prefer to consume, not what you prefer to create.
Refresh your buyer persona and customer journey map
Never limit yourself to one source for your blog post ideas. Diversify your search for winning ideas by:
Not all the ideas in your blog content plan are going to be home runs. Every experienced blogger and content manager can agree with this. So, how do you spot the needles in your haystack of ideas?
For each idea, ask yourself two questions:
A good content topic idea aligns with both your readers’ and brand’s interests. (This is another reason why it's wise to collaborate with your customer-facing teams. It ensures the content you create is relevant to prospects and customers.)
See also: Planning contextual content for users
As you source and sift through ideas, ensure that you’re planning content for all funnel stages. This way, your content marketing plan (and each blog post) will:
If you don’t already have a plan for publishing content, create one. Decide how many:
Creating a posting schedule will help you identify gaps in your blog planning. You’ll see at which points you’d start to run out of each content type based on your chosen publishing cadence.
Scheduling is also helpful for identifying opportunities to repurpose content. It makes content distribution and promotion easier. In fact, you could bake repurposing into your process from the start.
For example, your quarterly ebook could become eight blog posts. Those eight blog posts could become 16 emails. And you could pull snippets from both the blog posts and emails to create dozens of social media posts. Or you could put the process in reverse and combine smaller, existing pieces of content on a topic into larger pieces.
Many marketers and content creators treat editorial and style guides as optional resources. In reality, they’re essential for maintaining high quality standards and consistency across your blog. Both remove friction for readers.
Provide thoughtful guidelines for your team’s sake. And for that of any agencies or freelancers you work with. These can include details such as:
Then, consider how to keep these guidelines top of mind for everyone creating content. In GatherContent, you can embed style guidance into the content creation environment. This way, writers and reviewers have them on hand at all times.
Look at Google Analytics and pinpoint any decaying content. In other words, pieces that were performing well but that have a reduced inflow of traffic lately. (This happens naturally as content ages or becomes dated or irrelevant.)
Create a list of these posts and add them to your content refresh list. From there, follow these steps to freshen up your content:
Interviewing your readership is essential for sourcing blog post ideas. It’s also a great way to understand:
This is one area where your email list can come in handy. Do you promote your latest blog posts via your email newsletter? If so, you can also ask for your blog readers’ feedback via that channel. It’s a simple way to reach your most active readers and understand what you could do better in the upcoming quarter.
Outline the steps to take your content from ideation to production. If you don’t already have a content workflow, that is.
Make sure you add content distribution to this workflow as well. Why? Your content marketing and blogging strategies will fall short of their potential if you don’t promote your content. So, create a detailed distribution plan, including the channels you’ll use and the cadence at which you’ll promote your content. Then, schedule it on your calendar to help you follow through.
Creating new content shouldn’t be the only focus as you develop your blog strategy. Look for as many opportunities as possible to repurpose content.
This could mean changing the format of a piece, combining content, or deconstructing it. In any case, repurposing can:
💡Learn more: A complete guide to repurposing content [including 9 real-life examples of repurposed content]
Now, prepare your content calendar based on your decided publishing frequency. Set a realistic schedule, factoring in content production, design, and publishing time.
Also, mark important holidays in your calendar. This way, you can plan relevant content when those dates are around the corner.
If there’s anything the pandemic has taught us, it’s that you shouldn’t plan everything down to a tee. Leave room for flexibility in your calendar.
A good rule of thumb: Plan 75% of your content for each month or quarter. Leave the remaining 25% for ad hoc requests or timely pieces.
So far, we’ve covered general best practices and steps for blog planning. But there are also a few things you should keep in mind when planning for 2023 specifically.
Each new year brings with it the risk of losing traffic to otherwise effective pages. The cause? Pages being dated with the previous year!
You wouldn’t want potential readers—or worse, potential leads—thinking your content is outdated or irrelevant. So, what should you do?
Update any time-sensitive content as soon as possible (and certainly before we get months into the new year).
Next, it’s important to be mindful of events and concerns that could impact your audience. Will Whitham explains why.
Finally, according to Shayla Price of PrimoStats:
This is a timely reminder that content is more than a content marketing tool. It can play a role in accomplishing your company or organization’s larger business goals. But the chances of that are slimmer if you’re not intentional about:
With the above in mind, are you ready to dive into blog planning (and planning for other content)?
Whether you answered “yes” or “no,” you’ll benefit from GatherContent’s content production planning guide. It’s free to download. And, in addition to what you've learned here, it’ll help you welcome the new year with a fresh, ROI-delivering content plan!
Masooma Memon is a pizza-loving freelance writer for SaaS. When she’s not writing actionable blog posts or checking off tasks from her to-do list, she has her head buried in a fantasy novel or business book. Connect with her on Twitter.