Keeping Your Content Flow from Running Dry
Written by Travis, partner and contributing writer at Young Go Getter.
This guest post is an example of what can and will happen at some point in your blogging career. You’ll think you’ve covered every topic for your audience and have a bit of blogger brain freeze when trying to think of what to write. I know Adnan and I can admit to this happening on all too frequent basis.
The solution comes from borrowing a practice from blog’s sister medium, magazines. Editorial calendars are created at the beginning of each year by every magazine to plan a schedule for content for the entire year. This calendar focuses on determining feature articles, not topical. These articles may be lists, holiday themed, relate to an annual event, or just an article format that your readers enjoy (ex. Sites We Love on YGG).
Being that blogs have an hourly turnaround time as opposed to monthly like magazines, I recommend your calendar be created on a month-to-month basis as opposed to annually.
The first step is determining how often you’d like to consistently post on your blog. Don’t commit to one post per day if you can’t deliver; most small blogs can develop a loyal readership with a few posts a week.
Once you decide on the frequency of posts, mark those dates on your calendar (editorial calendar). If you’ve scheduled a new post every Tuesday and Friday, you have 8 spots per month that need to be filled.
This is where recurring formats can be planned ahead of time. So say you have a bi-weekly podcast you feature on your blog; that’s 2 out of 8 spots covered for the month. You might also feature an interview every other week; only 4 more spots to go. You get the point.
I recommend leaving a couple posts per month open to be topical (current happenings in the news). A big announcement, scandal in your industry, or pop culture will invite you to comment on such incidents.
Creating an editorial calendar will help you determine the content your readers enjoy, develop a rhythm for writing posts, help you consistently grow your readership, and avoid the dreaded blogger brain freeze.