6 Tips to Establish Your Content Plan

Surely you have already heard the famous mantra that “content is king” many times. 

Although it is not an absolute truth (in fact, in SEO there never is), it is true that a content strategy is essential for any blog, whether personal or business.

In these times when almost everything is digital, there is an excess of content available on the web, even in niches that you have probably never heard of. 

Unfortunately, this content saturation or “intoxication” makes it impossible to manage everything; even search engines often find it difficult to filter out quality content that is just trying to get a link or promote things we don’t need.

Despite all the spam that floods the Internet, quality content is still a fundamental piece that can help a lot to the web positioning of your business. 

But to do it effectively, you need two things: consistency and a strategic approach to content creation.

Why Should You do Content Planning?

The main reason why you should carefully plan your content is purely organizational since it is convenient to know what topics concern your audience and when is the best time to publish content about that topic.

For one, while posting frequency doesn’t directly affect ranking, there are many other reasons why it pays to plan and be consistent with your content creation and posting process. 

Either because you want to publish a newsletter, or you just want to keep your blog updated and have something to share on your social networks. 

Or just so your users know when to expect something new on your blog.

On the other hand, I think it is obvious that the quality of the content should take precedence over the quantity. 

If you regularly post mediocre content with the intention of “tricking” Google into ranking you against the competition, you are wasting your time. 

So stop and think about whether you really want to publish 2 posts a week, of mediocre quality, that do not help you position much, or do you prefer to focus your efforts on quality content.

Most marketing professionals agree that following a content strategy can grow an Internet business. 

For them, frequently creating content with a goal in mind is not an option, it is a necessity.

6 Tips to Plan Your Content Strategy

What does it mean to create quality content? 

Below I will show you five tips on how to plan content appropriate to your goals.

Research Your Target Audience

Creating suitable content for your audience that helps them solve their problems with practical advice is difficult if you do not have a clear idea of ​​who you are addressing. 

So in order to consistently create content, the first step is to understand the big and small problems your target audience is dealing with on a regular basis.

To do this, visit niche forums, conduct surveys among existing customers and subscribers, follow the top blogs in your niche, and last but not least, analyze your competitors.

If you’ve done extensive research, you’ll have a huge list of topics that interest your audience. 

However, you will not be able to cover all those topics in your blog. 

Creating personalized and quality content is a job that will take many hours, so it is normal that you want to focus your efforts on articles that solve a problem that is most common among your audience.

This is where keyword research comes into play. 

You have many tools at your disposal for this. 

With Ahrefs, SEMrush, Ubersuggest, and even Google Trends, you can easily find out the scope of the topics you’ve identified and decide which ones are worth including in your content planning.

Create Content with a Purpose

Making content with a purpose means talking about a real problem that your target audience has and how they can solve it, generating brand awareness, and fostering the acquisition of potential customers…

It is clear that any business has several objectives to attack with its content strategy (probably all the ones I have listed before). 

Therefore, you will have to diversify your content to cover the different objectives.

Plan Your Content in Advance

Creating an editorial calendar allows you to control the frequency with which you publish your content. 

The key point is planning ahead, although the number of months is open to debate. 

If you have enough resources and the ability to stick to the schedule, you can plan six months or even a year in advance. 

However, in many cases, it is not necessary and three months is more than enough.

For example, let’s say you publish one or two articles each month and the average time to produce each one (keyword research, writing, layout, custom images, promotion, SEO optimization) is about three weeks.

Taking into account the resources available (not all companies have a content writer), the time to produce each article and the number of articles you publish per month, planning two months in advance is enough so that you never run out of anything. what to post

As production time increases, you should plan more than three months in advance, especially if you are doing a lot of research, or your content features long videos. 

These types of content are more likely to be delayed and increase average production time, which means they need to be scheduled much further in advance.

Outsource, Yes or No?

At some point, you may need to scale your content production or your business may not have enough resources to create content on a frequent basis. 

In those cases, hiring a content writer can be a good investment.

But outsourcing part of the content creation process is not without risk, especially if it is not done correctly. 

There are many people who can write quite well. 

Many of them have good research skills and can create very decent articles on almost any topic.

However, there are usually not many people with a lot of personal experience who can give practical advice. 

Therefore, it is necessary that you have someone who knows your sector and your product or service. 

That way you make sure the content is authentic.

On the other hand, if you opt for the internal production of your content, it is normal for you to think that any employee could be perfectly qualified to talk about your products or services. 

But in that case, it would be convenient if you had someone with good writing skills and knowledge of SEO.

Don’t Rule Out Guest Contributors

Many blogs are reluctant to post guest contributor content because they feel it is not of high enough quality or they believe it would not be a good fit for their audience. 

However, guest posts can be an excellent opportunity to complement your blog with new themes or give it a different point of view than your own.

And that’s without counting the opportunities to expand your contacts and get quality links to your website.

To implement guest posts well and avoid possible misunderstandings, it is convenient that you follow some guidelines:

• Set up the “write for us” page to describe the type of content you are looking for. This way, if someone is interested in posting on your blog, they know in advance what the requirements are.
• Create a contribution form to request the contribution and include it somewhere on the contributions page. You can reply only to the people you want to work with, which eliminates a lot of unnecessary email communication.
• Create detailed writing guidelines and send them to each guest author so they know how you want the post to turn out. For example, how many images they can place, the links to their pages, etc. That way, guests can adapt to your style.
• Don’t be afraid to say “no.” Do not waste time with proposals that do not convince you or with collaborators that do not respect your guidelines. You can say “no” politely and you don’t have to be blunt either. Although they do not meet your needs now, you may be interested in collaborating with them in the future.

If you want to go a step further, you can even prepare content summaries. 

For example, guest authors who sign up for your blog and are willing to write about a topic you suggest will get a list of primary and secondary keywords to target their posts and a list of the main sections the article is about. should try.

Ensure Content Quality

Something that usually worries blogs when the focus is on volume is the quality of the content. The more articles, the less time to prepare them, research the subject to be discussed, plan keywords, promotion…

The best way to prevent dangerously low-quality content is to set some detailed guidelines (and stick to them). When preparing your content, keep in mind:

• Voice tone. Of course, your style has to be coherent and unique in all the articles that you publish.
• Target audiences. You always have to write with your audience in mind, their problems, and possible solutions.
• Link policy (outbound links).
• format guidelines
• Visual guidelines and the use of rich content
• Focus on examples and practical advice. It’s something your audience will surely appreciate.

By following these guidelines each time you make a new item, you’ll ensure that quality doesn’t suffer.

When all this is done as part of a strong content marketing strategy, the results will not be long in coming.

Thanks for Reading