1. Lay A Foundation
Create your content calendar for the year now. In January, it will just be a skeleton, but the skeleton is what will hold the body of your content plan together as you build it out month by month throughout the year. If you can afford an enterprise tool to handle your content calendar and publication to multiple platforms, that’s fantastic. If you are like most people; however, you’ll need to rely on a spreadsheet.
Your spreadsheet should include:
– Month-by-Month Breakout of Content Goals (I make each month a tab of its own when creating a sheet for one brand. For multiple brands it gets more complex.)
– List of major events, holidays and brand-sponsored events in each month, as well as any speaking gigs at which your brand may be presenting and any events you sponsor or host (these will have content tie-ins and will also affect your publication schedule)
– List of planned topics
– List of planned keywords, keyphrases and other SEO-related data
– A column to track content across social shares, downloads, conversions, etc.
– A column for notes to track suggestions for improvement
– Author and author popularity and shareability rankings
– Type of content (video, audio, blog, tweet, display ad, micro content, image, etc.)
– Share checklist (What happens to each piece of content after it’s uploaded to the site or published to a blog, for example? Where is it shared and when?)
