Planning anything in advance keeps you in front of the 8-ball.
Planning your blog schedule in advance helps you stay in front of the 8-ball while at the same time helping your focus on the goals you’d like to achieve for the coming year. Your blog strategy should, of course, be in sync with your marketing and PR strategies as well as your company’s business schedule (ebbs and flows of your business cycle), events in the community and the universal, a.k.a. “Hallmark,” calendar. There are more pieces to this strategic puzzle as well that are specific to each individual person and each individual business. That’s why no one blog schedule or annual strategic plan is ever the same.
As for the blog, specifically, says Darren Rowse of ProBlogger.com planning the blog in advance allows you to “define the steps [you’ll] take toward them [and] that will help [you] generate some momentum with the blogs … [which will help you] achieve the goals [you’ve] identified.”
Planning your blog in advance is no different than designing your own editorial calendar, just like a magazine. Here’s SmartCEO‘s editorial calendar, for example. Depending on the magazine, depending on your business, you may focus on the world at large when setting up your blog schedule. February is home to Valentine’s, so a magazine that caters to women, for example, understands that the issue will have to have something to do with love, or red, or heart health. An April issue will be dedicated to Spring, December to the holidays, and so on and so forth.
As Rowse suggests, start your editorial calendar this way:
1. Calculate how many blogs you want to post in the coming week or month
2. Set up a spreadsheet on a word document and chose the day and time (same time each week or month works best).
3. Plug in your brainstormed list, the one that’s based on your “editorial calendar,” and plug in the blog theme. During this step, title your blog; that will bring you one step closer to writing it. Rowse also suggests writing down some general points to get you going when you finally sit down to write the blog. Plus, if you have a list, or better yet, an outline, it’s not only a memory booster, it’s a gift — like finding $20 bucks in your pocket when you pull your summer pants out of winter storage. It makes you smile, because you are one-step ahead of the game. I have a go-to blog file with research and links pasted and saved. When it comes time to write my scheduled blog, the research leg is often behind me and I get to have fun just playing with my words and delivery.
Further still, and it just so happens to be one of the key letters, the “a,” in the acronym that makes up the /’sas∙s’ē/ name, make others “accountable.” Don’t do it all yourself. “Delegating responsibilities for various tasks also helped give us a sense that we could actually achieve our dreams for the next 12 months,” says Rowse.
Achieving dreams: sounds like a great short- and long-term goal!
