Anyone who has ever blogged has had a problem: what to write about? Where can I get ideas? Meanwhile, regularity is one of the main rules of blogging. Clients and readers need to be constantly reminded of themselves: post articles, reviews and news that are interesting to your target audience. There is no point in blogging from time to time: it will only be read if you regularly post new material. At the same time, the content should be useful and engaging. This builds reader loyalty to your business and turns it into a customer. This is where the content plan helps.
What is a content plan and why is it needed
A content plan is a tentative list of topics and ideas that you will post on your blog over the course of a week, month, or even a year. At first glance, it seems that coming up with so many topics and sorting them out by dates is too difficult. But once you have a plan, you will realize that blogging has become easier.
- The content plan makes the job easier. You don't rack your brains every time you need to write new material - the themes have already been invented and fixed in the content plan.
- The content plan allows you to allocate time. Some articles take a lot of work: drawing an infographic , interviewing, asking an expert, or taking photos. With the content plan, you can start preparing in advance so that the text is ready by the required date.
- The content plan does not let you miss important dates and holidays. For example, teacher's day, May holidays or New Year's holidays. Depending on the topic of your blog, you can release interesting content on suitable dates.
- The plan helps to fill the blog with a variety of content, rather than rolling into one topic. For example, when planning a part of the articles you give for informational materials, another part for educational materials, and the third for entertaining and engaging ones.
All this allows you to maintain interest in the blog, and it becomes a business tool. When necessary, the reader will remember you first and become your client.
How to design article topics Check out blogs on the topic
Study the blogs of competitors. With an appraising glance, see what is cool and what you would improve or do differently. Write down all the ideas that came to your mind: interesting topics for articles, formats, headings, presentation method - you can use all this for your blog.
Generate ideas
In a couple of hours, you can come up with more than a hundred ideas for a blog - that's enough for six months in advance. The easiest way to generate ideas is by brainstorming. Its essence is to record all ideas - without stopping, criticizing and editing. Just throw whatever comes to mind. Use Wordstat to understand what people are looking for and target popular searches.
For example, you want to write about South Korea. In "Wordstat" you can see what people are looking for on this topic: sights of South Korea, resorts in South Korea, tours to South Korea, Seoul, Busan, Jeju. These can all be article ideas.
After the ideas run out, take a short break and then repeat the brainstorming session again. Then look at the ideas with a critical eye and remove unnecessary: topics that are repeated; uninteresting or too narrow topics; topics that are too complex and you don't have enough resources to write them.
Narrow down the topic
With one idea, you can create several topics for articles. For example, we have an idea for an article: how to travel alone. From it you can make somewhat narrower ones: "How to travel alone if you don't know the language", "How to decide on a trip alone: 5 life hacks from advanced travelers", "How to travel alone and not go broke", "How to travel alone, if you are a girl: 10 useful tips ”.
Change the time
Another way is to change the time period mentioned in the article. For example, let's say you want to write about a trip to Austria. We split the topic by seasons:
- "Mountain lakes, hiking and museums: 7 ideas for what to do in Austria in the summer"
- "What to do in Austria in winter: 3 best ski resorts"
- "The most romantic places in Austria: 5 places to stay in the spring"
In addition to the seasons, there are other techniques. For example, you can talk about how to quickly pack a suitcase, how to quickly get a visa or quickly make a travel plan: "How to make a travel itinerary in an hour." Here are some more ideas: "What to do in Austria: travel program for 10 days", "What to do in Austria: travel program for 7 days", "Top 10 countries for solo travel in 2021". There are a lot of options, the main thing is to start generating ideas.
Look at the topic from the other side
You can turn the topic 180 degrees and look at it from the other side: give the reader anti-advice, tell you how not to do it. For example: "7 tips how not to behave in Austria." "5 stupid mistakes novice travelers make."
How to create a content plan Step 1. Select Categories
Headings are a grouping of blog topics by meaning or format. Choosing headings will help you create a content plan and organize your blog articles. For example, if you run a travel blog, the categories might be:
- routes - guides by country and city;
- life hacks - tips for beginners and experienced travelers;
- news - up-to-date news for tourists (visas, discounts on air tickets, tour sales and other informational events);
- photos - impressive photo collections of the most beautiful places on the planet;
- interviews - stories of people who moved to live in another country.
As your blog evolves, you can change or add new categories. In addition to informational and useful materials, do not forget about entertainment content: people love to watch pictures, infographics, gifs and videos. Therefore, it is appropriate to make very simple publications with photo selections, photographic facts or interesting quotes.
Step 2. Organize topics into categories
Grouping topics by headings will help in the future: this way you will publish a variety of content, and not roll into one format.
If you want your blog to have a heading "news", be prepared to write them promptly: it will not be possible to plan and prepare such publications in advance. It's not scary if, in addition to the planned blog article, news comes out on the same day - these are different formats that complement each other well.
Step 3. Determine the frequency of publications
The frequency of posting depends on the size of the audience and your capabilities. For a start, it is enough to publish 1-2 articles a week: if you write them yourself, there will not be enough time for more. Decide on what days the articles will be published and make a schedule. For example, you will be releasing materials twice a week: Mondays and Thursdays at 11 am.
Frequency of publications is an important factor, but you shouldn't forget about the quality of the materials. After all, a blog is a tool for attracting a target audience, and not a diary of a bad copywriter. To be read, articles must be unique and generate interest in your company.
Step 4. Make a table
Collect topics, categories, keywords and publication dates in the table - this will be your finished content plan. Here is a ready-made content plan template, you can copy it into your document and use it for your blog.
Depending on the frequency of publications, you can create several content plans: for a week, a month and six months. A content plan for a week will be needed if articles are published regularly (more often 1-2 times a day), and a team of copywriters is working on them. This will help coordinate the work of the authors and monitor the implementation of the plan. Here's a ready-made content plan template for the week:
Useful services for working with a content plan
To design a content plan, you can use the following programs:
- Google Sheets is like excel, only in the cloud. Access to the document can be given to other users, even if they are not registered in the system.
- Evernote is an organizer program available from any device (desktop, smartphone, tablet).
- Trello is a post scheduling software. For each article, you can create a card with a deadline and assign a responsible person (if any). The card can be moved depending on the stage: "in the idea", "in work", "on moderation", "published".
- "Google Calendar" - it is convenient to schedule publications and set reminders in it, but it is difficult to control the process and see the big picture.
- Pinup is a handy board for generating ideas to which you can connect other users without registering. The program is not suitable for storing a content plan, but it is useful for recording and sharing ideas.
To search for keywords and generate topics:
- " Wordstat " - selection of Google search queries.
- Google Trends - Here you can see what topics are trending right now.
- Serpstat is a paid tool for SEO professionals, but some of the features are available for free. For example, by a search query, you can find your competitors and pick up key phrases.
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