Writing excellent content consistently can be complicated, even if you know how to write great SEO content. A compelling and valuable post takes time and effort to create. As a result, you may find you have already sacrificed the majority of your calendar to writing content. Of course, this will not help, especially if you are still starting with your business. But did you know that you can sustain your momentum in writing great content with a well-planned blogging schedule? Learn how to do just that below!
Why Need a Blogging Schedule
It’s not enough to know about writing blog posts and SEO strategies to increase blog traffic. It would be best if you had a blogging schedule to help you publish those excellent blog posts consistently. In doing so, you can increase website traffic, social media shares, social media subscribers, and, most importantly, customer conversions.
With a blogging schedule, your entire team will have enough time to research, plan, and create excellent content. In addition, setting a blogging schedule will help you avoid rushing people who need more time doing their job. Aside from that, a blogging schedule can inform your team when they should start carrying out their designated tasks. With that, every one can meet deadlines.
How to Create a Blogging Schedule
Here are some steps to create a blogging schedule for your content marketing campaigns:
ONE: Determine Your Optimal Publishing Frequency
First, you need to determine how many posts you want to publish every week and month. If you’re still new to the blogging process, we recommend that you set your publishing frequency to a minimum. Anyway, you can work your way up once you’re confident enough.
If you have finally settled on the number of posts, you can start figuring out how to achieve such a goal. By establishing this goal, your staff will know how much work they should perform to achieve it.
TWO: Start Small—Then, Work Your Way Up
As mentioned above, if you are new to blogging, you do not have to publish much content immediately. After all, don’t people always say “quality over quantity”? So, focus on creating quality content instead.
As such, in your first few months of blogging, focus on creating enough content to help you and your content writers get how things work. You do not want to overwhelm your staff—especially if they are new to blogging—by publishing too many articles in just a short period.
Let us set an example. In your blogging schedule, you may set to publish two articles, two weeks apart, for the first three months. Then, you may add one more article per month for publishing for the following two months. Finally, you can add another article for publishing in your sixth month. So, by the end of your first six months of blogging, you have learned how to post one article every week.
Furthermore, during the first months, find time to evaluate how things went through during the content writing and publishing process. Determine which methods work. Then, find areas for improvement and work on them.
THREE: Evaluate Your Published Content
You can determine the success of your content marketing campaign by assessing its results with your previously established goals. Check how an average post helps in achieving your goals. For instance, you can figure out how many site visits one article contributes to your goal of increasing site traffic.
By then, you have already created a consistent blogging schedule, which means that you already have weeks’ or months’ worth of data. Analyze the data to determine which topics or posts appeal best to your target audience. You can also specify when it is optimal to publish content with the said data.
Moreover, you can use insights from your collected data to perfect your content creation process. You can then determine which areas need improvement and who are responsible for the task. Your team can figure out ways to enhance their respective processes with these insights. In the end, evaluating your content will help create better content for your subsequent campaigns.
FOUR: Calculate a Publishing Frequency
After determining how an average post helps achieve your goals, you can calculate your publishing frequency. In doing so, you can determine how many articles you will need to publish to achieve your previously set goals.
Let us take this example from CoSchedule:
Let us say that, on average, your posts currently attract 1000 page views per month. So, if you want to achieve 8,000 page views monthly, you need to publish 8 blog posts. It’s as simple as that.
FIVE: Establish an Achievable Publishing Frequency
The next step is to figure out how to achieve such publishing frequency. To do this, you need to find out how much time it will require to write, design, publish, and promote a single article. As such, you and your team may have to discuss if you can scale to a medium amount of publishing that achieves your goals or gets close to achieving them.
So, talk to your team and identify areas that you can reduce attention or even forego to give more time to creating excellent content. Aside from that, it would help if you also determined what improvements you can make during the content creation process so that you no longer have to allocate extra time and effort developing said content.
SIX: Increase Your Content’s Efficiency
You need to publish content that hits your goals. As such, you must regularly improve every content you post.
For instance, to improve your social media shares, you can place social media buttons in your content to let people share your content on their social media. You can also encourage them to subscribe to your social media channels to get the latest updates.
In improving site traffic, you can optimize your content for search engines. Of course, you need to publish relevant, educational, entertaining, and helpful content so that people will keep coming to your website.
SEVEN: Publish Your Optimal Blogging Schedule
By now, you should have a tentative blogging schedule prepared. However, it is best to use a content marketing calendar to craft your blogging schedule better.
Consider another example of how to craft your blogging schedule from CoSchedule:
Let us consider the first six months in your blogging schedule to publish one article per week. Try out different days to determine which day performs best. You can set the first two months in your blogging schedule to find the best times to publish your content.
Then, after determining the best day for publishing content, you can publish one more article on another day. Add more articles per week until you have created a blogging schedule that best helps you achieve your business goals.
