Content calendars allow marketers to easily plan, track and publish posts. A content calendar saves time while helping avoid publishing slow or poor-quality posts.
Establishing one may seem intimidating, but it can actually be easier than expected.
1. Know Your Audience
Your audience is the keystone of content production. Understanding their pain points and interests is critical for creating relevant, engaging pieces; performing in-depth research to develop detailed buyer personas is helpful in this respect. Gaining an in-depth knowledge of who makes up your target market allows you to produce content they will read, share and react positively towards.
Once you understand who your audience is, setting goals for content marketing efforts will ensure they support your overall marketing strategy and help meet business objectives.
Setting clear goals can also provide structure and accountability to your content marketing team, helping avoid inconsistencies or missed opportunities as well as helping the content team focus on relevant tasks at appropriate times.
Determine how often you want to publish new content by taking into account the capacity of your team and setting a content calendar that provides ample time for staying abreast of trends and managing seasonality. For optimal results, start off with quarterly or six-month content calendars if possible.
As part of your content calendar, it’s also vitally important to create a distribution plan. This should identify which platforms and when you will promote your content. Doing this can increase reach and ultimately drive up affiliate sales.
Final tip: it is also crucial that your content marketing schedule includes an assortment of content types – both educational (blog posts and infographics) as well as entertaining (videos and memes). This can keep your audience engaged while increasing brand recognition.
2. Know Your Goals
Content calendars serve to establish consistency and streamline production of content, helping avoid procrastination or procrastinating until your creative muse strikes, which could otherwise lead to missed deadlines and last-minute stress.
As part of your content calendar creation, consider what goals you would like to meet and their impact on the audience. This should serve as the driving force for every piece of content created; its details should be laid out clearly within its brief.
Establishing your goals is the starting point to creating your content schedule, as this will determine its type, frequency and channels of delivery. Furthermore, any collaborators involved should be made aware of your overall strategy so they can align their work to it.
Setting realistic goals that enable you to consistently publish quality content for your affiliate blog is essential in meeting its publishing schedule and taking into account team capacities as well as external influences such as seasonality or holidays that might disrupt its flow.
Once your goals have been defined, it’s time to get creative! Hold a brainstorm session with your team (or solo if going solo) and brainstorm topics and formats for content creation – be sure to include details about its goal, audience, format etc for every item on your list.
Your next step should be to organize these ideas into content frameworks, such as how-to guides, case studies and listicles. This will keep your ideas organized while giving each one its own structure that aligns with your overall marketing plan. Incorporating any key dates or upcoming events into your content schedule ensures you’re ready and take full advantage of any opportunities to promote affiliate products.
3. Know Your Resources
Once you understand your audience and goals, the next step should be creating a content calendar. This document serves as a roadmap for your team, providing visibility of upcoming projects and deadlines while helping prevent any unpleasant surprises. In addition, content production workflow management makes assigning tasks simpler as well as tracking progress more efficiently.
As you generate ideas for your blog, take note of each idea on a spreadsheet with tabs for social media/opt-in offer ideas, product ideas and so forth. This will enable you to keep track of everything as it comes in while eliminating writer’s block. If you need assistance in choosing keywords for targeting, tools like Semrush may help pinpoint suitable ones for your business.
Make sure to include important events that pertain to your brand when developing your content calendar, such as industry conferences, company holidays and product launches. Use this time as an opportunity to produce promotional content which will attract audiences while opening the door for potential revenue generation.
Make sure that you identify your key performance metrics and the frequency with which they need to be tracked, depending on your goals. It could be something as straightforward as the number of posts published or organic traffic growth that needs to be considered.
Once your content calendar is in place, it’s crucial that it is updated frequently in order to remain on target with meeting objectives and avoid falling behind. Furthermore, assign one person as owner of your content calendar – this will make communication simpler while making it easy for anyone with questions to reach out for assistance quickly and efficiently.
4. Know Your Formats
Content calendars can be an excellent way to organize creative assets such as photos and videos in one convenient place, and help plan out future blog posts and social media campaigns in advance. By doing this, they allow for the development of relevant and search-engine-friendly content strategies that meet both search engines’ requirements as well as your target audiences’ preferences.
Content calendars offer you a helpful way to organize and categorize information. They usually feature columns like Date, Platform, Content Type, Title/Topic, Assigned To, Status, Target Audience and Keywords – color-coding may also help in marking important dates or milestones on the calendar.
As a general guideline, it is a good idea to plan out at least several months’ worth of content well ahead of publication date. This gives your team ample time to execute on ideas and prepare material in time. However, being flexible and open to new opportunities that arise is important; locking yourself into rigid plans too far ahead could cost you big opportunities down the line.
Once your content calendar is in place, share it with all members of your team so everyone is on the same page about what and when will be scheduled. Also solicit feedback regularly from team members as to how the process is working so as to make any necessary adjustments that ensure consistency while meeting team goals. Make sure everyone understands their role in maintaining the content calendar as well as when their tasks have been accomplished.
5. Know Your Timeline
Content calendars can help organize your content efforts, align them with marketing goals, and ensure all pieces are ready when they’re needed. They also reduce stress for all team members. Marketers who proactively plan their content are 331% more successful than those who publish random pieces; so create your content calendar right away!
Every way to create a content calendar comes with its own set of advantages and disadvantages, from spreadsheets to project management software solutions like Trello, Airtable and CoSchedule. Finding what fits best with your team and type of content creation should be your top priority.
Once you’ve determined how you wish to organize your content calendar, the next step should be identifying dates on which posts should appear. Depending on your business model and industry needs, planning posts daily, weekly, monthly or quarterly might work best; don’t forget important events like holidays, product launches and special occasions!
Planning out content for your calendar requires careful thought, so when setting out editorial and promotional pieces it is wise to divide these into distinct buckets. For instance, you could write a blog post featuring affiliate products with links, then promote this article through social media or email promotion.
Once your editorial schedule is clear, the next step should be identifying any promotional activities that might enhance it further. Perhaps guest blogging for another website might interest you; maybe a podcast interview or Reddit AMA might also prove fruitful.