Creating content for your business on a regular basis is incredibly important for SEO and provides more choices for you marketing messages. Google and other search engines reward businesses that publish content on a consistent basis. Consistency helps these search engines understand that your business is an authority on your subject matter. Creating content on a regular basis also helps to establish your reliability as a content creator and as a business in general. If you begin publishing a newsletter every Thursday, your clients and customers will come to expect your newsletters on Thursdays. If you suddenly switch to Tuesdays without explanation or warning, this cause concern for your reliability or credibility with your customers. You can use a content calendar to help you plan your content and work ahead so that you can deliver high quality, SEO-friendly messages on a regular basis.
When you create your content calendar, start by determining the communication forms that you want to use. How do you want to interact with your customers? Do you prefer to create a blog? A newsletter? Both? Estimate how often you can send newsletters or blog consistently.
Next, determine how you will use the content that you create. The use will affect the both the actual content that you develop and the way you ultimately promote your business through the use of your copy and images. Where and how will you share your content? Which social media platforms will you use to promote your business? How often will you promote the content that you create?
Along with frequency, define how you can add to what you've created in your website, blog, or newsletter to further develop the messages you send to your customers and clients. How will you relate the emails, social media posts, and other media to the topics that you're currently discussing on your website, blog, and newsletter? If you create a calendar for your content sharing, you can list the topic, and each of the related messages and posts that you can use to further develop that subject matter for your audience.
Once you have determined what you will create and the ways you will promote your content through your customer-facing messages, you can begin to create a list of topics that you would like to cover. Start with a simple list of subjects that relate to your products or services. From there, do some keyword research to determine which potential topics are the most relevant to your audience. Prioritize your topics by your keyword search results and continue to develop your list. As a general rule, you should have about 12-15 topics on my blog post list at a given time. These ideas come from client interactions, topics that you read about in social and other media, and trending topics in your industry. Even if someone has already written about a subject that you would like to cover, don't rule it out. If you can contribute something new to the conversation, your blog post or newsletter might be worth writing.
Your blog posts and newsletters should engage your readers and provide helpful information for your potential clients and customers. Use a content calendar to plan ahead so that you deliver social media and email messages that relate to your current blog posts or newsletters and help your customers learn more about your business or industry so they feel confident making their buying decisions.
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P.S. Want our free content calendar template? Simply email us at info@silvershadegroup.com with the subject line: Content Calendar. We'll send it over right away so you can start 2018 planning.