As a small business owner, you’re always looking for ways to increase your reach and visibility. One of the most effective strategies is creating blog content on topics that interest potential customers. So, in this post, we’ll be covering how to plan blog content.
But even though you know blogging for business is an important part of driving more traffic and sales, how do you make sure your blog posts are successful? With careful planning, thoughtful writing, and plenty of helpful tips, planning out effective blog content doesn’t need to be difficult or time-consuming!
Here’s everything you need to take into consideration when it comes to how to plan blog content as an entrepreneur.
Decide on your quarterly and/or monthly content pillars
I have a little bit of a different kind of look at how to plan blog content because not only do I do blog content for Inkpot Creative, but I also have a look into how we do blog content over at our travel blog, Volumes & Voyages, which publishes anywhere between 20 and 30 posts a month all about travel.
The very first thing that I do when I am planning my blog content is I will come up with my quarterly content ideas. I try to do at least one quarter at a time because it can get a bit crazy if you go way further than that.
Plus I find if you plan more than one quarter at a time, that another quarter may come up and your business could have completely changed by then. So I try to do one quarter at a time.
I’ll sit down and I’ll try to decide if I want an overarching theme for that entire quarter or if I want to instead have a very specific theme for each month.
We tend to do it monthly here at Inkpot. So you’ll see that this past month has been a lot of blog content. We have actually some education-based content for web designers coming up soon as well, just because we are relaunching Camp Site. Then over the summer too, you’ll start to see we will have some notion content coming out and that’s just because we are going to be working on our notion launch!
You can really plan based on the launches that you’ll have, or if you’re really just using your blog as a way to inform people about your services and things like that, then maybe each month you pick a different service that you want to talk about.
You want to base everything on a theme, and then you can talk about a whole bunch of different topics surrounding that theme. So for instance, we have been doing lots of topics surrounding blogging lately.
What we did was have the overall theme be blogging as a business owner. But then we had all of these different topics related to blogging for business. So we had how I plan blog content, how Pinterest and blogging work together, the best tools for blogging, and things like that.
There are a whole bunch of different directions you can take your topic. You just have to brainstorm!
Decide how many posts you want to publish a month/week
After coming up with the quarterly content topics, what I do is I go ahead and I will decide how many posts I actually want to do.
So with blogging, I found consistency does help, but at the end of the day, you should only commit to the number of posts that you can actually commit to. You’re going to want to decide how many you want to do a month and how many you actually want to do a week.
Here on Inkpot Creative, for example, in the summer we tend to do a little bit more, but for the most part, we tend to actually just do a lot of posts based directly on our podcast episodes and vice versa. That’s just to make it a little bit easier on us when it comes to content generation.
So we tend only to do two a week for Inkpot and over on Volumes & Voyages though, we tend to do anywhere from four to six. It just depends on the week. That’s because it’s a lot more content heavy over on that site, but definitely don’t do more than you think you can handle.
If you think you can only do one every other week, then just commit to that. I found that really setting a smaller goal for yourself and then achieving that goal is going to make you feel a lot better. I highly recommend just doing less, to begin with, and then as you reach that goal, you can, of course, build up from there.
Brainstorm post topic ideas
After I go ahead and I have those quarterly monthly content topics, and I have how many posts I want to do, I start to brainstorm ideas.
So let’s say, for instance, I know that next month I really want to talk about Notion topics, and I’ve decided I only want to do two a week. Let’s say that there are four weeks in the next month because most months have four weeks. Maybe I want to do two posts a week, so that means I should come up with about eight topics or so. So I’ll go ahead and write those out.
Of course, if I come up with more, that’s totally fine. If that happens, we’ll decide which ones we think are actually interesting enough to actually write posts about. And again, it’s always better to have more anyway, because what you’ll want to do is go ahead and do some keyword research next.
You do that because you want to make sure that the posts you want to write are ones that actually have keywords people are searching for and it’s actually got keywords that you can rank for because you don’t always want to write posts that are going to be ones you can never, ever rank for unless the pieces are solely to share with your clients or website visitors.
Schedule out when you will publish your posts
After you go ahead and do keyword research, it is time to schedule them out. I don’t mean like actually schedule them out. This is just kind of when I look at my calendar and I’m like, “Okay, so this Tuesday I want this post to go out, and then this Thursday I want to assign this topic to this one.”
You might be wondering why we are assigning topics so far ahead. Really, the reason I do it is that I know I’m like this, and I’m sure a lot of people are like this too, but when I start to get really busy, that’s when my whole content generation kind of stops.
When that happens, I just like to know exactly what I had planned for that day, so I don’t even have to think; I just have to do it. I find that having these topics scheduled out really far in advance allows me to just look at and complete the task without really thinking about it.
It really helps to schedule them out. That can also help a lot with your consistency too, because if you don’t have to do as much work when you go to write the post, then you’ll probably find that you’re actually hitting your goals.
Choose when and how you will write the posts
Once I schedule them out and everything, I decide when I’ll write the posts and how.
So sometimes I find that I like to get them all done in one day, which is not for everybody. Everybody’s completely different, but sometimes that’s what I’ll do. Other times I’ll write them whenever I feel like it that upcoming week.
I figure out how I can fit those into my schedule again, just so I don’t feel super bombarded one day with all of the content that I have to do, and then that is essentially how I plan out my blog content. You can also consider time-blocking these into your calendar to make sure they get done.
There you have it! Now you know how to plan blog content as a small business owner.
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KP’s design journey began in book publishing, but she fell in love with the truly limitless possibilities that web design presents. Since then, she’s been helping photographers and creatives become the no-brainer option for their dream clients before they even get on a call.
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4/24/23
Published On:
Krystianna Pietrzak
