How to Plan your Blog Content Calendar for the Entire Year?

Planning your Content Calendar

Last updated - April 13, 2023

Are you out to plan out your blog content register for an entire year? That is a tough task to do. This would include incorporating the main themes of the blog as well as sticking to a publishing routine most of the time. 

Laid out below is a plan of action that would create an annual blog content calendar for most uses. It is important to get the audience engaged and that the blogs get the visibility that it so deserves. 

Content Calendar – What is it? 

A content calendar or blog content schedule would help the content manager properly plan, prepare, and schedule the blogs. It helps the team stay on top of tasks and take a proactive approach to creating and publishing blogs.  

There are some powerful tools on hand to better handle blog content on a daily basis. Some of them are paid to use, but it is possible to have sufficient exposure to content planning without using costly tools. 

Building an Effective Content Calendar 

Listed out below are the main components of building a blog content calendar. It does help to take a systematic approach to create the content register, and more importantly, people should stick to the calendar made. 

Identifying Goals

The content manager must be clear as to the kind of results that he needs to create with publishing blogs or articles. It is a foregone conclusion that the prime aim of any business is to attract customers. The content team must identify how this must be done practically, and that is what is meant by getting to identify the goals. 

The content strategy must be such that it hand-holds the potential customer right through the different stages of decision-making and purchase. 

Keyword Research 

When it comes to basic keyword research, it is important to rely on the most dependable tools possible. There are highly-priced tools available in the market, but that does not guarantee any success with keyword research. 

The best approach to keyword research is to think at the customer’s most basic level and build up a tempo as the purchasing decision must be made by the customer. Some everyday tools do not cost anything extra to use in blog keyword research. 

Selection of Relevant Keywords

Once keyword research is conducted on the topic at hand, the second step is to select the right keyword to be inserted in the right blog. With keywords, a factor that few content managers consider is the keywords’ competitiveness. 

At each stage of the marketing funnel, just the right keywords would make the difference between a customer choosing to move on further or not. The keyword research would provide the content manager with the right keywords in the form of metrics that aim at converting visits to the site to purchases. 

Data Spreadsheet 

There can never be denying the importance of the keyword research datasheet. This is mostly a spreadsheet with all the relevant metrics necessary for a manager and writer to compose blogs. 

Most of the time, the keyword throws up a lot of the metrics for consideration. The content manager must understand the relevant parameters to include in selecting the keywords. 

Few people understand keywords and how they most influence the purchase decision. Thus, how the keyword data sheet is prepared would help those involved with creating the blogs and content understand the intent of the person setting out to make a purchase. 

Review of Keywords 

At this stage, it would be pertinent for the content manager and the content writer to review the keywords in light of the data sheet that they have managed to create. The idea is to identify trends in the blog content and ideas. It also goes to identify gaps in the blog trends as well. 

Another important step in reviewing the keywords is to check which of the chosen keywords or phrases would help form a proper headline. There are no shortcuts to this but to try out the different combinations of the keywords. 

Selecting to publish your blog at the same time as searches increase for the topic is a sure way to bring in visitors to the site and create sales. 

Publishing Schedule

Once the keyword research is done and a review of keywords has taken place, it is key to establish when the blogs have to be published. The key here is consistency, and it is important to stick to the chosen schedule even if the results are not that encouraging. Consistency will give you returns even if it is a bit late. 

Most content managers recommend that blog content be published twice or thrice a week. But the key to getting the most traffic is to remain consistent. The frequency of content publication also depends on the kind of business you are dealing with and the kind of products you deal with. 

It is also important to realize the importance of resources or funds. There is no point in having a busy publishing schedule without having the backup of funds to make the content. Most content creators are freelancers who need to be paid for the efforts that they put in. 

Constructing the Content Calendar 

Once all the resources are gathered, a mix of content is decided upon. That is, content need not be blogging alone but infographics as well. The publishing schedule is decided after considering the points mentioned earlier. 

It has been observed that a successful content calendar is arrived at by a method of trial and error. Often publishing a few blogs would point to how well the market is receiving the content, and any fine-tuning must be done in light of this. 

Conclusion 

The content calendar of your website is a kind of feeder for your website. You manage and monitor the content-uploading activity on your website with the help of a content calendar. Therefore, plan your blog content accordingly for the entire year. Further, if you need an in-depth analysis of how to rank your website, Forrest Webber has more to offer you. 

Once the content calendar is made, it is time to step back and publish according to the schedule. Whether the content manager has the feel of the market would be demonstrated soon by the kind of results the blog content would bring in. 

The best efforts at blog content marketing are people who have been flexible enough in their approach and managed to change tack as the campaign moved along.

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