#ContentCreationChallenge Day 2 — Planning your editorial schedule with solid strategy and action

We decided on our goals yesterday now we need to create a plan to get us there.
Always try to plan out at least 12 weeks of content so that you will have a clear idea on how your content will tie in with your marketing, sales and ultimate business goals for the months ahead.

You also save a lot of time creating content in bulk, we have all heard how much time we lose switching from task to task and unfortunately with something like posting and social media there are a lot of little different task that you need to do.

  • These include the planning phase,
  • Creating images
  • Writing the post
  • Posting or scheduling your post
  • Then finally sharing these post on Social Media

You can understand that if you do some of these task in bulk, let’s say plan ahead for 12 weeks create images in bulk writing your post and then of course scheduling it in bulk it will save a lot of time!

If you plan it right you can get consistent income from your SM traffic to your opt-in pages and/or specific sales pages. Just use a combination of value adding and promotional posts aimed at the specific product you are promoting.
Another benefit of planning and scheduling ahead of time is that it opens up your calendar for life interaction and engagement with your audience. You can answer questions and engage on a personal level without having to worry about getting new content out.

There are three calendars or planners that you need in business. Your marketing calendar, Editorial Planner or Calendar and you Social Media Planner.

You marketing calendar guides your income generating activities, your editorial calendar drives your content and your social media planner has more to do with your overall social media strategy like getting quality followers etc. I will do all 3 planners in detail on the Content Creation Camp but for our content creation it’s important to first have our Marketing calendar in place and then from there move backwards to see when should call to Action posts be posted and when should we post value adding posts etc.

Are you planning to launch a program, product or book or maybe participating in a Giveaway event or Joint Venture launch? Work back from whenever that launch would be and decide when you would start your marketing Add that to your calendar Next up is holidays and special occasions mark that on your calendar and also work around that.

Your core message should be an integration between what your ideal client would like to hear about and what you like to talk about pertaining your business services.

Brainstorm topics around your core message Brainstorm the topics your readers really care about that your competition is ignoring. This make you stand out from your competitors.

The first step is to start making a list of your most important themes. That ties in with your core message and what’s coming up in you marketing calendar. One way to get topics that most people know about but sometimes forget to do – is to go to Amazon book and have a look in the look inside section. Remember you have your buyers on Amazon.

The next thing that you need to think about the categories This is mainly used for social media content although different types of blog posts also fall into these categories. I speak about them in my book and if you’ve been following me for a while you would’ve gotten the inforgraphic. Otherwise I’ve send it out in the email so go have a look.

The Categories are Education, Entertainment, Inspiration, Engagement and Promotional. And you should have a balanced spread with promotional content being less than 20% Go read about the different examples of posts on the infographic within your mail. Decide for each of the categories what you can write given your themes.

Next up you need to decide on the platforms – so ultimately you want an Integrated approach to reach the widest audience possible. With this you have one or two main platforms and you then share your content out to as many platforms as possible but you are only starting out. don’t try and do it all.

Choose 1 focus and 2 supporting platforms. Focus on platforms where your ideal client’s spend most of their time. If your audience are on Pinterest or Instagram you can really see a significant raise in traffic once you decide to focus on those platforms as well

The next step would be to decide on the amount of posts and again I would suggest that you build it up over time. It is really important to be consistent so rather aim for something that you can manage and build on it as you go along. You might start off with 2 posts a month in the beginning and work your way to once a week and later twice a week. Again I’ve created an infographic with the ideal amount of times

So have a look at that but remember that is the ultimate (or even max) consistency is still more important.

So now that you have all this planned out it is time to fill in your calendar. I’ve created 2 versions of calendars for you depending on the way you work.

Let me know if you’re interested in a video explaining better how to use these calendars!

If you haven’t yet – join us now for this challenge!

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