How Content Planning Can Do Wonders For Your Blog

With blogs being increasingly employed to reach out to customers, it is important to make sure you maximize the effect of your content. In order to get the most out of your words, you need to be organized. In other words, you need content planning.

Sure, the idea of planning your blog/website’s content may seem like a no-brainer, but it’s easy to overlook putting together a coherent strategy for what’s posted on your site. But just like a company has a business plan, or a restaurant plans its menus days in advance, you should extend the same effort to site content. Here are some compelling reasons as to why.

Organization
By planning your content in advance, you can organize your posts into actual monthly (or even weekly) themes. This allows you to focus on one topic and one topic alone, giving you the time you need to research the information for each post. By having a content plan in mind, you have the flexibility to generate different types of content as the situation dictates. For instance, there’s “evergreen” content, which can be used anytime, and usually covers a broad subject. Then there’s “newsjacking”, which is the practice of putting your spin, ideas, or brand into a current hot topic. Paradoxically, by having a content plan in place, you have a good idea as to when you can throw in something last minute, capitalizing on an unfolding news story, for instance.

Co-Ordination
Not all promotions are tied to online content, and not all online content has to do with promotions. But by putting together a plan for content publishing, you can better co-ordinate with whatever unique deals and promos currently running at the same time. After all, nothing is worse than having some special sale or contest, and having your blog remain utterly silent about it.

Co-Operation
Do you feature guest posts in your blog? If so, you can use guest posting as means of tying into your blog’s themes. This comes especially in handy if any of your guest posters have particular strengths or areas of expertise, topics they excel at writing. If your content is planned ahead of time, you can make arrangements in advance to secure that content from specific guest bloggers and be assured that they will be available to contribute. Conversely, a content plan gives you the means of perhaps returning the favor, letting other bloggers know what topics you intend to cover, and perhaps being a guest blogger for them!

Relaxation
One of the most stressful parts of writing comes before you even put pen to paper, or, to be more up to date, fingers to keyboard. That stressful part is figuring out just what the Hell you’re going to write about. If you sit down and invest the time in figuring out what themes are running when, you will alleviate a lot of concern and aggravation.

Reputation
Being organized tends to make people think you know what you’re doing, and that you have an actual plan for your business and its blog. That sort of knowledge builds confidence, confidence builds trust, and trust makes it easier for people to not only frequent your business, but also to keep coming back to your blog as a respected authoritative source. And when word gets out that you know what you’re doing, that will generate more traffic.

Remember that when making up a content plan, address these three questions:

• Who is your target audience?
• What kind of content are you going to give them (blog posts, articles, profiles, etc.)?
• How are you going to fulfill it?

All in all, the best way to conduct a trip by car is to have an itinerary with a planned route. Consider content planning to be your itinerary for your blog. You’ll never get lost if you do!

John Terra has been freelance writing since 1985. His blog posts deal with everything from online gaming to content marketing.

Photo Credit: Photos.com

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