If you’ve made a promise to yourself that you’re going to do tons of blog posts, but you’re unsure of how you’ll find the inspiration for all those ideas, follow these tips and your calendar will be filled up in a flash!
First, you’ll want to have an editorial calendar (so you have something to plan everything out on! We’ve explained previously what an editorial calendar is, and how to create one in Excel (with a free download!) and in Google Calendar so no matter how you find it easiest to plan things out, you’ll find it in the links above.
Fill in your regular series
Perhaps you take part in a weekly, monthly or quarterly blog post series – fill these in first so you can plan to get them posted on the relevant days. You might have your own regular series as well – maybe a Friday round up or a post at the start of the month to set your personal goals.
Seasonal Thoughts
Remember last year when you came up with an awesome Easter cake recipe and forgot to write it up until…Easter Monday? Avoid making that sort of mistake next year and add in your local holidays.
If you are planning to create some gift guides for Christmas, you’ll want to get them planned way in advance so you can post them in the first week or so of December, allowing your readers time to order things online!
Obligations
Have you accepted something to review? If it’s something like skincare, you may have given it a few weeks to see the results – get that scheduled in so you’ll know when you’ll need to get the post done. You could just add a space or two into your calendar to allow space for any reviews that you want to get posted sooner – you could even use this as a prompt to yourself to pitch to brands!
What Categories Do You Have?
Back when we posted 5 days a week, we had a loose idea of what sort of posts we wanted to do each day – tutorials on a Monday, discussions on a Wednesday, social media tips on a Friday. As we’ve developed the site more, these plans weren’t so closely kept to, but it was still really useful to have a vague idea of what to post on what day.
What Do Readers Want?
It might seem lazy, but if you have an engaged audience on social media, ask them what they want to see on the blog! If you don’t get much of a response to that, you could also do things like check your Google statistics (what are people searching for?) or seeing what posts of yours have done well on Pinterest (you can see what people have pinned from your site by going to https://www.pinterest.co.uk/source/bonjourblogger.com/, replacing the bonjourblogger.com bit with your own domain name)
Of course, the best editorial calendars have flexibility in them to allow for time sensitive posts to be inserted quickly – if you’re on self hosted WordPress, the plugin “Editorial Calendar” is really useful to be able to move around prewritten posts as and when needed.
