Content Strategy Planning and Calendar

Content Creation Ideas

Creating content is one of the most challenging things for a lot of people. I hear people say they struggle with ideas.  That they struggle with strategy and with how much they should be creating. This is where a content strategy planning combined with a content calendar comes in. This approach will stop you working too hard and not getting the results, you’re after.

The fundamental of a content strategy is deciding what your core content for your business blog or website is. Some people call these content buckets, content pillars or content focus areas.

There are lots of different words to describe this approach. But basically, you need to drill down which areas you are going to focus on in your business, blog or website.

So, let’s use my business as an example. When I create any content it has to sit within the focus areas of…

1. websites

2. social media

3. marketing

4. Pinterest

When I create my content, it is within these four areas and these four areas only. I then think about my target customer and what things they want to hear from me, what are they struggling with and what challenges are they facing. Basically, how can I help them?

Content Strategy

To create a strategy, I would start with thinking of core content for your 4 focus areas. Core content means a podcast episode, a YouTube video or blog posts.  These are your major content pieces for a week. 

I recommend creating one major piece of content per week. Some people create multiples, you don’t need more than three pieces per week. A few years ago it was recommended that you created a major piece of content every day! Thankfully those days are over!

Using my business as an example I would need three blog posts about websites, three blog posts about social media, three marketing blog posts and three Pinterest blog posts. This would be for a 12 week period.

Next, I would revisit the idea of what is my target customer interested in. I’d think about what are they struggling with at the moment and create posts based around this.

Now you have a 12-week strategy of the major content for your business you can move on to the smaller content areas.

You will use these core content ideas to design your smaller content. You will base your social media posts and pins on this.

The idea here is that everything supports everything. So your blog post is married up to your social media posts, your pins are advertising your blog posts and everything is working in harmony.

It’s also going to save time because you don’t need to think about lots of different ideas for your content. You need multiples of the same idea. For instance, if your blog post is on SEO you can create five different Instagram posts about SEO.

As you can see having a clear content strategy, where you nail down what your core content is and come up with ideas for a 12-week period will save time. 

Content Calendar Download

To make this even easier I’ve come up with a content calendar.

You can use it to plan your major content and minor content over a six week period. This will help you to save time, something we all need!

Click the link below enter your email address and get yourself the free calendar.