Once you know your market (that is your niche, other sites in your niche and your audience), you should spend some time planning your blog before you go ahead and start writing it.
There’s an old saying that goes “measure twice, cut once” - a little bit of time spent on planning in the beginning can save you a lot more time in the implementation. It can also help to prevent writer’s block.
Categories
First, think about the possible subject areas or themes that your blog is going to cover. Write them down on a big piece of paper (or mind map them). Can you group them into coherent categories?
Once you have whittled down your list to a bunch of categories, think of labels for the categories that make sense for your reader (you may want to do some keyword research)
If you think up new categories every time you write your blog posts, you are liable to end up with a big jumble of categories that make no sense to a reader or you. Remember that a lot of blogging systems allow you to add tags when you write your posts - tags are better for that sort of ad-hoc categorisation while categories are better as the bigger thematic umbrellas.
Another way of seeing categories is as a navigation tool, they help your readers navigate your blog. This may not seem such a big deal when you’ve only got twenty or thirty posts on your website, but once you’ve been blogging for some months and even years, it does become essential if you don’t want your older content to be lost.
Blog Schedule
When you know what areas you want your blog to cover, one neat way of organising your site is to create a schedule of when you will blog certain types of posts. If you had a money tips blog, you could make Monday the day you talk about financial goals, Tuesday is technology savings tips, Wednesday is food saving tips, Thursday is education and school savings tips, Friday is auto savings tips, Saturday is entertainment savings tips and Sunday is reader’s tips.
If you post less frequently, you may want to create a schedule over a month - say you had a food blog, the first Saturday of the month is lunches, the second Saturday is main meals, the third is side dishes, the last is desserts.
Blog schedules are what you want to make of them. You don’t need to schedule all your posts. You could write daily posts but schedule one day to have a particular theme - so with a craft blog, you could make Saturday “Show and Tell” day where other bloggers send pictures of things they have crafted. Or you could make Friday “Around the Grounds” day where you have links to interesting stories related to your blog that you’ve read online. Maybe once a week or month, you can do a special interview with someone in your niche.
Also don’t feel that you have to stick to one schedule forever. You can run things for a specific length of time, for a season, for just one month (for example if there was some special event running over that month) - it’s up to you, it’s your blog.
It’s helpful to communicate these to your readers so they know what to expect but you don’t have to, You can keep these to yourself as an informal template to help ward off being stuck for what to write or you can make these days on your schedule into publicity events (for example if you did “Show and Tell” once a week or month).
Blog Calendar
Blog schedules can be part of your blog calendar, but a calendar is a lot more and should be an essential part of your blog’s planning.
You can use a paper calendar (with enough space to write at least a line for each day); a paper diary type planner; a notebook; a word processing document; a mind mapping program; or what we use, a spreadsheet with the date in one column and the topic of our blog posts in another column. Electronic versions are the most flexible because you don’t have to rewrite your schedule if you want to make changes, but it’s really up to what works best for you.
Brainstorm ideas for your blog over for the next 6 months to a year. Remember to note in any special promotions you or your company might have - if you have a product launched, you will want to make sure you spend enough time on your blog promoting it as well as any other marketing you may do. Look also to other special events like Mother’s Day and holidays and make sure these are marked on your calendar - consider building posts or promotions around these themes (if appropriate to your niche).
Think about things that you want to cover in your blog, can you do series of information pieces? Are there themes you want to explore? These are all things for your blog calendar.
For the longer term part of your calendar, you can keep it quite broad and just highlight the areas or themes you might want to focus on or the special promotions you’ll be doing. But in the shorter term, you can break this down to more detailed topics that you will covering on specific dates. Unless your blog is very reactive like a news site or a news commentary site or a personal experiences journal, it will help you tremendously to make sure that you always plan at least a couple of weeks’ content at least to topic detail in advance.
Reviewing your Blog’s Plan
You don’t have to feel bound by whatever you have in a blog calendar (unless of course your marketing is dependent on it!) and in fact, you should review your blog’s plan on a regular basis and change it as you feel necessary.
Your blog’s plan should be a living document and one that is constantly revised and updated. It needs to keep up with your developing relationship with and understanding of your audience. It also needs to match your own changes - you may aim to blog every day but find that change it to three times a week or once a week - if so you need to rethink your blog content to ensure that it provides the maximum value for your readers. Your blog is better off with one really well thought out bit of quality content each week than hastily created haphazardly posted short bits of content.
Just remember if you plan your blog and review and revise that plan regularly, you’re giving yourself a great advantage as you’ve already put yourself in the top percentage of bloggers by those actions alone.
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Next time, we’ll be looking at how to set goals for your blog.
We try to keep any Sunday posts dedicated to the other stuff that supports our business lives but that which often gets ignored - Goal Setting, Productivity, Motivation, Review, Health (we’ve categorised these under “Constant Progress”) and Higher Purpose (giving back to the community and feeding your soul). This will continue during the How to Blog series - only we will be focusing on how this is related blogging.
This is part of our super series on How to Blog. Subscribe to our Newsletter for some special surprise How to Blog stuff over the course of the lessons.
