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Need An Editorial Calendar Template For Your 2020 Marketing Strategy? (Hint: The 2020 Diary Is It!)

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You know you need to be more consistent with your content but you’re struggling to get into a rhythm. And you often struggle to come up with ideas for social media updates and for your blog/vlog and email newsletter.

Sound familiar?

I’ve struggled with this in the past too. I’ll admit I’m not the most organised person in the world but I’m very productive, publishing hundreds of podcasts, blogs and social media posts every year, and rarely missing a deadline.

So what changed? I put systems in place to help with content planning. I now know exactly what I’ll be publishing, where, when and – most importantly – why.

This is what led me to create the 2020 Social Media Diary & Planner , an A4 desk diary designed to help you hit your content goals – not just for a few weeks, but for an entire year. The diary takes you through your annual, quarterly, weekly and daily planning with the help of templates, planners and hundreds of key dates and awareness days to inspire your content. Read: How the 2020 Media Diary Can Help You Create 52 Weeks of Content.

Just as it has for me, the 2020 Social Media Diary & Planner will save you time on your content planning and creation, and give you tons of content ideas for the coming year, allowing you to create multiple pieces of content from a single blog post, video or podcast.

If you prefer a little more support, guidance and accountability to stay focused and on track, the Media Diary Owners’ Club is ideal. Read more about the difference between the 2020 Social Media Diary & Planner and the Media Diary Owners’ Club.

Here’s how to use the 2020 Social Media Diary & Planner to create your 2020 editorial calendar. 

Create your annual content plan

Start by blocking off some time, undisturbed, to take a longer-term, broad look at the whole of 2020.

Whilst you won’t know exactly what’s happening every week - or even every month - there will be some key business activities you have planned at various points throughout the year.

Next, list two to three things that are happening within your business in each quarter of the year. If you run an online shop it might be that you already know which time/s of the year you’ll be running sales so you can plot those in. If you have stands at expos you can put in the dates of the events you’ll be exhibiting. Or maybe you run your own live events and/or are a speaker and already have some dates booked in.

There’s a handy planning sheet in the diary to help with this and if you’re in the Media Diary Owners’ Club it’s available as a printable.

Next, look at what’s happening in the wider world and in your industry as a whole.

Pick two or three awareness dates per quarter that are relevant or could be connected in some way to you and your business.

Plot these in the diary and use them as inspiration for content. In the 2020 Social Media Diary & Planner we’ve included hundreds of key dates connected with sport, food and health and so much more.

For example, if you have a pet business, you might want to create some timely content around Crufts dog show in March. If you design clothes or accessories, you could create some content around London Fashion Week in January. And if you run a food business, you might plan some content around National Doughnut day in June.

Create your quarterly plan

Now that you’ve formed an overview of your year, it’s time to focus in on each individual quarter. If you struggle to work on all four quarters in one go, I'd suggest starting with Q1 and making a note in your diary to work on Q2 in a few weeks’ time.

If you want your content plan to be manageable, it’s best to plan one piece of cornerstone content for each week. This one key piece of content (whether it’s a video, blog or podcast episode) can then be broken down into multiple pieces of repurposed content for each day of the week. This means you’ll only need 12 ideas for each quarter. Sounds more manageable already, right?

Plot these pieces across the weeks of your quarter/s, based on your business activities and the key dates and awareness days you’ve chosen to focus on so your content will be timely and engaging.

Plan your weekly content

Now it’s time to zoom in even closer in on 2020 and look at each individual week.

Take each piece of content you’ve planned for each week, and work out how you can break it down in several smaller pieces of content. This is the beauty of repurposing. A video can become a blog, you can strip the audio from it and put it out on your podcast or you can work with a graphic designer or use a tool like Canva to create some eye-catching images based on key points and quotes from the video.

Content repurposing - combined with a creative mindset - will make every piece of content work harder for you and your business. You’ll no longer be stuck for fresh ideas for content when you’ve got this content repurposing plan in place.

Schedule your daily content

This is where you plan the detail of what content is going to go out on which platforms each day.

The 2020 Social Media Diary & Planner contains a planning template for each week where you can jot down the content you plan to publish on all of your channels.

I recommend using a tool such as Buffer or Hootsuite to get your content written out and scheduled in advanced, which will take away the day-to-day pressure.

If you want to make 2019 the year that your content really starts working for you, drawing in business and converting sales, then the 2020 Social Media Diary & Planner is what you need. If you like the idea of more support and accountability, as well as further advice on how to use the diary, we’d be delighted to give you that in the Media Diary Owners’ Club.

[336] How to make sales from your business blog

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You think you’re doing all the right things to build a successful business blog. You’re showing up every week, you spend ages researching, writing and promoting, but it’s not making you any money.

In this episode, I break down the steps you need to take to create strategic blog content that people actually want to read - and will actually lead to sales. I look at the type of content you should be creating, how to find the right keywords to help people find you and how to gear your content towards your paid products and services.

{Click on the player above to listen to the podcast episode and/or read on for a detailed overview. Scroll down to the bottom to read the show notes including all the links mentioned in this episode}.

Create content your ideal customers are actually searching for

One of the biggest mistakes I see business owners making with blog content, is choosing topics that they want to write about rather than what their audience want to hear about. They assume that what interests them will interest their audience too, or use their blog as a way to vent about the things that are annoying them.

Another common mistake is to use creative but obscure blog titles. For example, one of my clients wrote a blog post entitled ‘Beginnings’. But when was the last time you did a Google search for ‘Beginnings’? That’s just not how people search for content online.

Think about your own online search behaviour — what was the last thing you typed into Google?

For me it was ‘Motorway service stations M1 KFC’. I was travelling along the M1, totally starving and I needed to find some food, fast. I was asking a very specific question to solve a very specific problem.

That’s how your customers search too. They don’t necessarily care about the topics that interest you, or your opinions - they just want to find the answer to their problems.

That’s why when you’re creating content for your blog it’s so important to get inside the head of your ideal customer. Ask yourself, what’s the problem they need help with? Which words or phrases would they use when they’re searching? What would they type into their search engine?

My client - the one who started off with obscure blog titles - is killing it now. She’s writing topics like, ‘five fundamentals to choosing a career you love’ and, ‘seven lessons from being on the brink of burnout’ because these topics tap in to the things that keep her customers up at night. The things they’ll actually be searching for on Google.

Make sure your content links to your paid products and services

You’ve read a million times that blogging is great for brand awareness and establishing expertise but don’t forget that your business blog is there to drive sales too. Which means you shouldn’t shy away from linking your content to your paid products and services.

In fact, doing so is mutually beneficial — you’ll increase your sales and your audience will benefit too. After all, they need the products you’re selling or they wouldn’t have landed on your page in the first place. Not giving them the opportunity to buy would be doing them a huge disservice.

Start by making two lists - one on the most common questions people ask you generally about your industry, the other on more specific questions customers ask you in relation to your products or services. You can then use these questions to generate topic ideas, which you can link back to your paid products (including information on how people can buy from you).

Take my Media Diary as an example - it’s an A4 desk diary full of key dates and awareness days that will help you plan your content.  More general questions people may ask are, ‘How do I create a content plan?’ or, ‘What should I post on my blog?’. More specific questions, about my Media Diary include things like, ‘What size is the diary? or, ‘How do I use the diary?’.

The first list is a great springboard for general ‘How to’ content that will answer the question and offer the Media Diary as a potential solution, and will include a call-to-action (where I show readers how to order the diary), while the second list gives me a host of ideas that I can turn into blog posts, all of which will encourage diary sales.

How to do keyword research

Once you’re creating content people want to read, the next step is making sure that your ideal customers can actually find it - ideally on the first page of Google. This is where keyword research comes in.

A lot of this is down to common sense and goes back to my earlier point about getting into your customer’s head and thinking about the kind of things they’ll be searching for online. But using keyword tools can help you refine your terms.

The first thing to do, now that you have some topic ideas in mind, is to find your keyword sweet spot — ideally you want a term that people are searching for, but not one that is so popular that your post will get lost in the noise of the competition.

Narrowing things down can help with this. For example, the phrase ‘how to write a press release’ is a very popular search term. Using a less popular, but more specific phrase  like ‘How to write a press release for your small business’ or ‘How to write a press release for a charity’ (generally referred to as ‘longtail’ keywords)  is likely to be more effective when it comes to Google rankings.

If you’re not sure how to make your topic more specific, using Google’s autocomplete is a fantastic hack. Start typing in your topic title and take note of the suggestions that come up under the search box — that’ll give you a great idea of the kinds of things that people are searching for relating to that subject. You can apply the same trick to Youtube and Pinterest too.

Other keyword hacks

If Google autocomplete isn’t giving you what you want you could try looking for inspiration in your industry’s trade publications. You could also head over to Amazon and look at books relating to your industry (chapter titles can be a great source of topic keywords), or have a quick look at your competitors’ sites for inspiration too.

Keyword tools

Keywords Everywhere — Type in your chosen phrase and this nifty tool will tell you how many people are searching for that particular phrase so you can determine whether it’s going to be too popular a search term.

Answer The Public — Key in your topic and you’ll find a list of related questions that people are asking about that particular subject.

Google Ads — Enter your keyword and let the price be your guide: the higher cost per click, the more popular the search term is likely to be.

Keyword Finder — This tool gives you really in depth information on how easy it’ll be to rank for your chosen phrase and shows you the top 10 pages ranking for that term. It even gives you some alternative suggestions, again showing you the popularity of each phrase.

Break down your content into awareness, consideration and purchase content

You may have heard me speak about the three main types of content before but it’s so important it’s worth mentioning again for anyone who missed it.  Dan Knowlton originally taught this so brilliantly at my event last year, Content Live.

  1. Awareness content: this content relates to your area of expertise and general information about the type of products you sell — so for my client Jennifer Hamley, who designs handbags, an example might be: How to protect an expensive handbag in the rain.  Or for my Media Diary: How to create a content calendar in six easy steps
  2. Consideration content: this is where you get a bit more specific about your product or service to help people decide whether to buy. For Jennifer, this is where she looks at how previous customers are using the specific features of one of the bags she sells, showing potential customers its many benefits: Eight ways to carry your cross-body handbag. And for my Media Diary: Have you got a 2019 content calendar for your blog? (How the 2019 Media Diary can help in just a few hours of using it)
  3. Purchase content: this is the straight up selling part — where Jennifer might do a live sales event on Facebook, for example.  I have also done a Facebook Live to sell the Media Diary or an Open Day to sell the Love Marketing Membership.

Most people are great at creating awareness content but fall down when it comes to the other two categories - often because they believe that it’ll come across as too ‘salesy’.

I find though, that lots of my new clients come to me directly as a result of my consideration or purchase content. And when you think about yourself as buyer, isn’t that the kind of content that makes you feel more confident about your purchasing decisions? You appreciate consideration and purchase content — and so do your customers.

When planning for the three content types, it’s all about hitting the right ratio. I’d generally go with about two to three ideas for each content type every time you launch a new product or service to make sure you’re not missing out on sales opportunities.

Podcast show notes:

  • Why you need to write blog posts that answer your clients or customer’s problems (6:03)
  • How to tailor your blog posts towards a paid product or service (12:54)
  • How to use keywords that will help you rank higher on Google (18:36)
  • Examples of the three different types of content you need to be creating (35:45)

Resources

Keywords Everywhere

GoogleAds

Answer the Public

KW Finder

Jennifer Hamley

Jammy Digital

Apply for a place on the LinkedIn Content Strategy Masterclass here

Get your hands on the ‘How to write awesome sales copy’ course now

Janet Murray’s Audience Calculator

Register your interest in the Build Your Audience programme

Order the 2019 Sorted Content Planning Toolkit here

Order the 2019 Media Diary

Order the 2019 Media Diary and Media Diary Owners’ Club

Order the 2019 Wall Year Planner

Janet Murray’s Love Marketing Membership

Love Marketing, Make Money Income Goals Checklist

The Janet Murray Show Podcast Guide

My YouTube channel

**MY BOOK ** Your Press Release Is Breaking My Heart (A Totally Unconventional

Guide To Selling Your Story In The Media)

Connect with me on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and LinkedIn

 

Create 52 Weeks Of Content For Your LinkedIn Business Account (in just a few hours)

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Do you find it hard to think of creative content ideas for LinkedIn and stick to a content plan for more than a few weeks at a time?

It all starts with content planning and that’s exactly what the 2019 Media Diary is designed to help you do. It’s an A4 desk diary that includes hundreds of awareness dates and key dates to help you plan your media content for 2019. There’s also useful planning tools to help you with annual, quarterly, monthly and weekly planning (and save you tons of time in the process).

Invest in the 2019 Media Diary and, not only will you save time and money on your content planning and creation, you’ll never run out of ideas again. If you need more accountability and support to ensure you actually stick to your content plan, you can join the Media Diary Owners’ Club - the LinkedIn Edition.

With that in mind, here’s a step-by-step guide to planning 52 weeks of content using the 2019 Media Diary.


1.Block out time for your content planning

First things first, set aside some dedicated time for your content planning. If you can, go off site. Find a cafe you like to work in – your favourite cafe, a quiet hotel foyer - anywhere where you can focus on this task uninterrupted. You’ll be amazed how much you can get done when there are no distractions.

2. Create your annual content plan

With the diary in front of you, think about the key things that are happening in your business in each quarter of the year. Are you attending or speaking at any events or industry conferences? Are you launching a new coaching programme or consultancy offer?

Aim to list at least three key things for each quarter.

Timesaving tip: There is a planning sheet on page 10 of the diary to help with this. If you’re in the Media Diary Owners' Club - the LinkedIn Edition - perfect if you want some extra training, support and accountability to help you make the most of your diary – it’s also available as a printable.

Once you've written down what you're going to be doing each quarter, see if you can find two or three awareness days/key dates in the diary you can use to inspire content ideas.

For example, if you’re a relationship coach you might plan some timely content around World Marriage Day (February). As a diversity consultant you could plan content around Disabled Access Day (March) or Global Accessibility Awareness Day (May). If you work as a coach or consultant in the science/technology sector, British Science Week (March) or International Women in Engineering Day (June) could spark some interesting content ideas.

Don’t make the mistake of thinking some of the dates in the diary aren’t ‘serious’ enough for your business. With a bit of creative thinking, it’s entirely possible to make them work for you. For example, museums expert and parenting blogger Jenni Fuchs turned Hedgehog Day into a round-up of hedgehog picture books for children - which turned out to be one of her most popular posts that month. Read: how to double your web traffic in 10 easy steps.

In this phase of your content planning, it’s important not to overthink things. There’s no commitment; just because you write something down doesn’t mean you have to do it.

Some media diary owners tell me they struggle with this first task because they don’t know what they’re going to be doing in their business in 2019. If this is the case, you have a business problem not a content problem. This means you'll need to plan what’s happening in your business in each quarter before you move onto your content planning.

Others say they fear writing anything down in case their business plans change in the future. Again, it’s important not to overthink this. You’ll always have to factor in change in any business and it’s much less time consuming  to tweak a plan you’ve already worked on than to start from scratch. My best advice? Just apply your best thinking right now.

3.Create your quarterly content plan

Once you've created your annual content plan, you can move onto your quarterly content planning.

To make life easy for yourself in 2019, I suggest you create one key piece of content a week and repurpose it into multiple pieces of content (more on how to do this later). Ideally you’ll do this on your own website (as a blog/vlog, podcast, infographic) and repost it on LinkedIn. This shouldn’t negatively affect your ranking in Google (posting duplicate content sometimes can have this affect) - but it’s best to leave a couple of weeks between posting an article on your website and on LinkedIn.

This means you only need to come up with a list of 12 ideas for each quarter - ideas that complement the key business activities and dates you’ve already identified in your annual content plan. Simple when you put it like that, right?

If you don’t yet have a blog on your website, a well thought-out weekly article on LinkedIn - supported by two or three posts promoting your article - could help you generate leads and sales for your business.

Want to see an example of someone who is doing this really well on LinkedIn? Check out the technical copywriter John Espirian. He publishes regular LinkedIn articles and posts that answer his prospective customer/clients questions, including:

How to create LinkedIn document posts

LinkedIn view counts explained

LinkedIn Quickstart Guide 

Here’s two methods you can use to create your list of 12 ideas (or you can combine the two).

Method 1: Base content around your customers’ questions - Start by making a list of 12 questions your customers ask you regularly - both generic questions and specific ones about your product/service. Then look to answer these questions through your chosen content form.

For example, my prospective customers often ask me questions like this about content planning.

  • Why do I need a content plan?
  • How often should I be publishing new content?
  • What kind of content should I be creating for my business?
  • What are the biggest mistakes people make with content planning?
  • How far ahead should I be planning my content?
  • Is it ok just to post content on LinkedIn? Or should I be active elsewhere?

There’s six content ideas right there.

They also ask me quite specific questions about the 2019 Media Diary:

  • What are benefits of buying the 2019 Media Diary?
  • What’s the difference between the Media Diary Owners’ Club and the Media Diary Owners Club - the LinkedIn Edition?
  • Can I see inside the 2019 Media Diary?
  • I am a coach/consultant. Will the 2019 Media Diary work for me?
  • Is the 2019 Media Diary suitable for business owners based outside the UK?
  • I bought last year’s media diary but I didn’t use it. Should I buy it again?

There’s another six content ideas - some of which I’ve already turned into blog posts.

Six compelling reasons to buy the 2019 Media Diary

Common concerns about the 2019 Media Diary

Read this if you bought the 2018 media diary (and didn’t use it as much as you hoped)

Method 2: Create content for each stage of your customer journey

The digital marketing expert Dan Knowlton talks about the need to create three types of content designed to attract customers at each stage of the buying journey. These are:

  1. Awareness content
  2. Consideration content
  3. Purchase content.

For example, my podcast episodes tend to address a specific problem listeners are experiencing e.g. how to get more engagement on LinkedIn or how to create a content strategy This is awareness content - because it’s raising awareness of the problem and how I might be able to help.

I wrote a blog post about my content planning toolkit - 2019 Sorted, called Six Compelling Reasons to Invest in 2019 Sorted. This is an example of consideration content as I’m addressing prospective customers’ concerns and helping them make a buying decision.

An example of purchase content would be this video I created showing you around the 2019 Media Diary and introducing The Media Diary Owners’ Club - the LinkedIn Edition.

There are no hard and fast rules about how much of each type of content you should create - it really depends on what you’re selling and when. For example, if you’re launch a new service in February it makes sense to focus on awareness content in January and create more consideration and purchase content in the weeks leading up to (and during) the launch.

I’ve now shared two possible approaches to creating a list of 12 content ideas for each quarter of the year. If you're part of the Media Diary Owners’ Club - the LinkedIn Edition there are printables and proformas to help you do this.

Pro Tip: Most people struggle to plan content in great detail beyond 90 days, so put a date in your diary to plan for the next 90 days. Just being able to look across the first 90 days will really take the pressure off.



4. Create your weekly content plan

With your quarterly plan complete, you’re ready to create weekly content plans for your LinkedIn content.

This is where content repurposing comes in. Now that you’re focusing on creating one key piece of content a week, start to think about how you can break that down over a week.

For example, you could record a video blog, strip out the audio and turn it into a podcast. You could use a resource like rev.com to generate a transcript and turn that into a blog post. Then you could pull out some soundbites from the transcript and turn them into infographics for LinkedIn (using a graphic design tool like Canva), audio trailers (using a resource like Headliner) and video trailers (using a tool like Kapwing). If you focus on making that cornerstone piece of content work as hard for you as possible (by repurposing it in different ways), you’ll soon have enough content for every day of the week.

And don’t be afraid to post your content more than once. People are busy and may not see it the first time round (or even the third, fourth or fifth).

5. Creating your daily content plan

Now that you know which key piece of content you’ll be producing each week and how that can be broken down into lots of smaller pieces of content, all you have to do is work out what you’ll be posting when.

In the 2019 Media Diary, there’s space for you to plan what content you’re going to post on each of your social media channels on different days of the week – perfect for visualising how each week of your social media content will look.

If you've always found content planning an overwhelming, arduous job, you'll love how easy it becomes when you have the 2019 Media Diary sitting on your desk.

Get a copy of your 2019 Media Diary here and if you need more support and accountability you can get that in the Media Diary Owners’ Club. Find out more about the difference between the 2019 Media Diary and Media Diary Owners’ Club.


Create 52 weeks of content with the 2020 Social Media Diary & Planner

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Do you find it hard to think of creative content ideas and stick to a content plan for more than a few weeks at a time?

It all starts with content planning and that’s exactly what the 2020 Social Media Diary & Planner is designed to help you do.

It’s an A4 desk diary that includes hundreds of awareness days and key dates to help you plan your media content for 2020. There’s also useful planning tools to help you with annual, quarterly, monthly and weekly planning (and save you tons of time in the process).

Invest in the 2020 Social Media Diary & Planner and, not only will you save time and money on your content planning and creation, you’ll never run out of ideas again.

Here’s a step-by-step guide to planning 52 weeks of content using the 2020 Social Media Diary & Planner. 

1. Block out some time for content planning

First things first, set aside some dedicated time for your content planning. If you can, go off site. Find a cafe you like to work in – a quiet hotel lobby - anywhere where you can focus on this task uninterrupted. You’ll be much more productive and creative this way.

2. Create your annual content plan

It can be helpful to approach your content like a videographer. Start with ‘wide shot’ of your business - looking at how to shape your content across the year - and gradually zoom closer, until you’re focusing on quarterly, weekly and daily content.

So let’s start with that ‘wide shot’ of your year. Think about the key things that are happening in your business in each quarter of the year. When will you be launching new products/services? Are you doing any speaking? Will you be attending any industry events? List at least three key things for each quarter.

There is a planning sheet in the diary to help with this. If you’re in the Media Diary Owner’s Club – perfect if you want some extra training, support and accountability to help you make the most of your diary – it’s also available as a printable. Find out more about the difference between the 2020 Media Diary and Media Diary Owners’ Club.

Once you've written down what you're going to be doing each quarter, see if you can find two or three awareness days/key dates in the diary you can use to spark content ideas.

For example, if you have a pet business, you might want to create some timely content around Crufts dog show in March. If you design clothes or accessories, you could create some content around London Fashion Week in January. And if you run a food business, you might plan some content around National Doughnut day in June.

Don’t make the mistake of thinking some of the dates in the diary aren’t ‘serious’ enough for your business. With a bit of creative thinking, it’s entirely possible to make them work for you. For example, parenting blogger Jenni Fuchs turned Hedgehog Day into a round-up of hedgehog picture books for children - which turned out to be one of her most popular posts that month.

Read: how to double your web traffic in 10 easy steps.

In this phase of your content planning, try not to overthink things. There’s no commitment; just because you write something down doesn’t mean you have to do it.

Some media diary owners tell me they struggle with this first task because they don’t know what they’re going to be doing in their business in 2020. If this is the case, you have a business problem not a content problem. This means you’ll need to go back to the drawing board and plan out what’s happening in your business in each quarter before you move onto your content planning.

Others say they fear writing anything down in case their business plans change in the future. Again, it’s important not to overthink this. You’ll always have to factor in change in any business and it’s much less time consuming  to tweak a plan you’ve already worked on than to start from scratch. Just apply your best thinking right now.

3. Create your quarterly content plan

Once you've created your annual content plan, you can zoom in a little closer and start your quarterly content planning.

To make life easy for yourself in 2020, I suggest you create one key piece of content a week, whether it’s a blog/vlog, podcast, Facebook Live or infographic and repurpose it into multiple pieces of content (more on how to do this later).

This means you only need to come up with a list of 12 ideas for each quarter - ideas that complement the key business activities and dates you’ve already identified in your annual content plan. Simple when you put it like that, right?

Here’s two methods you can use to create your list of 12 ideas (or you can combine the two).

Method 1: Base content around your customers’ questions - Start by making a list of 12 questions your customers ask you regularly - both generic questions and specific ones about your product/service. Then look to answer these questions through your chosen content form.

For example, my prospective customers often ask me questions like this about content planning.

  • Why do I need a content plan?
  • How often should I be publishing new content?
  • What kind of content should I be creating for my business?
  • What are the biggest mistakes people make with content planning?
  • How far ahead should I be planning my content?
  • How flexible should I be with my content planning? Is there any room for spontaneity?

There’s six content ideas right there.

They also ask me quite specific questions about the 2020 Social Media Diary & Planner:

  • What are benefits of buying the 2020 Social Media Diary & Planner?
  • What’s the difference between the 2020 Social Media Diary & Planner and the Media Diary Owners’ Club?
  • Can I see inside the 2020 Social Media Diary & Planner?
  • Will the media diary help me if I have a product-based business?
  • Is the 2020 Media Diary suitable for business owners based outside the UK?
  • I bought last year’s Social Media Diary & Planner but I didn’t use it. Should I buy it again?

There’s another six content ideas - some of which I’ve already turned into blog posts.

Method 2: Create content for each stage of your customer journey

Knowlton Digital Marketing founder Dan Knowlton talks about the need to create three types of content designed to attract customers at each stage of the buying journey. These are:

  1. Awareness content
  2. Consideration content
  3. Purchase content.

For example, my podcast episodes tend to address a specific problem listeners are experiencing e.g. how to make more sales in their business, how to get engagement on social media or how to generate passive income. This is awareness content - because it’s raising awareness of the problem and how I might be able to help.

This blog post on the difference between the 2020 Media Diary and Media Diary Owners’ Club  is an example of consideration content as I’m addressing prospective customers’ concerns and helping them make a buying decision.

An example of purchase content would be the Facebook Lives I hosted to launch the 2020 Social Media Diary & Planner. They were aimed at those who were interested in buying the diary, but wanted more information - including how and where they could buy it.

There are no hard and fast rules about how much of each type of content you should create - it really depends on what you’re selling and when. For example, if you’re launching a new product/service in February, it makes sense to focus on awareness content in January and create more consideration and purchase content in the weeks leading up to (and during) your launch.

I’ve now shared two possible approaches to creating a list of 12 content ideas for each quarter of the year. If you're part of the Media Diary Owners' Club there are printables and proformas to help you do this.

Most people struggle to plan content in great detail beyond 90 days, so put a date in your diary to plan for the next 90 days. Just being able to look across the first 90 days will really take the pressure off.

4. Create your weekly content plan

With your quarterly plan complete, you can zoom in a little closer and create a weekly content plan for your business.

This is where content repurposing comes in. Now that you’re focusing on creating one key piece of content a week, start to think about how you can break that down over a week.

For example, you could record a video, strip out the audio and turn it into a podcast. You could use a resource like rev.com to generate a transcript and turn that into a blog post. Then you could pull out some soundbites from the transcript and turn them into infographics for social media (using a graphic design tool like Canva), audio trailers (using a resource like Headliner) and video trailer (using a tool like Kapwing). If you focus on making that cornerstone piece of content work as hard for you as possible (by repurposing it in different ways), you’ll soon have enough content for every day of the week.

And don’t be afraid to post your content more than once. People are busy and may not see it the first time round (or even the third, fourth or fifth).

5. Creating your daily content plan

Now that you know which key pieces of content you’ll be producing each week and how that can be broken down into lots of smaller pieces of content, all you have to do is work out which piece will be published on which platform each day.

In the 2020 Social Media Diary & Planner, there’s space for you to plan what content you’re going to post on each of your social media channels on different days of the week – perfect for visualising how each week of your social media content will look.

If you've always found content planning an overwhelming, arduous job, you'll love how easy it becomes when you have the 2020 Social Media Diary & Planner sitting on your desk.

Get a copy of your 2020 Social Media Diary & Planner and if you need more support and accountability you can get that in the Media Diary Owners' Club.

Find out more about the difference between the 2020 Social Media Diary & Planner and the Media Diary Owners’ Club.

[321] How to get people to actually read your blog with Andy Crestodina

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Andy Crestodina is an experienced content and ethical digital marketing expert who has helped thousands of businesses get better results online.  In this episode he shares his top tips on getting more people to read your blog, how to make your content rank higher in search engines and why collaboration is the key to growing your audience.

Here’s what you’ll learn in this episode:

  • Andy’s business story (2:52)
  • How to plan content that will get engagement (4:40)
  • How to make your content visible in search rankings and build up your website's authority (7:20)
  • What you need to know about no-follow and do-follow links (14:20)
  • Why creating a niche headline (and content) will give you more chance of ranking high on Google (17:01)
  • Why you should include quotes from other people within your content (23:48)
  • How to include video in your blog content (25:10)
  • How to build your audience online (28:42)

Resources

Andy’s website: Orbit Media

Andy on Twitter and LinkedIn

Andy’s Book: Content Chemistry

Order the 2019 Sorted Content Planning Toolkit here

Order the 2019 Media Diary

Order the 2019 Media Diary and Media Diary Owners’ Club

Order the 2019 Wall Year Planner

Janet Murray’s Love Marketing Membership

Love Marketing, Make Money Income Goals Checklist

The Janet Murray Show Podcast Guide

My YouTube channel

**MY BOOK ** Your Press Release Is Breaking My Heart (A Totally Unconventional

Guide To Selling Your Story In The Media)

My FREE Janet Murray’s Love Marketing Facebook Community

Connect with me on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook

[240] How to drive more traffic to your business blog

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Would you like to attract more readers to your business blog? In this episode, I explain the four things you need to do to get more eyeballs on your content.

Here’s what you’ll learn this episode:

  • Why you need to build as many links back to your blog as possible (2:42)
  • The importance of attracting one reader at a time (4:30)
  • Where you should be promoting your content (6:30)
  • The benefits of creating guest content (7:33)
  • How press coverage can help grow your traffic (8:08)
  • Why you need to be a helpful person on the platforms your customers are hanging out (8:53)
  • Why I celebrate every new visitor to my blog - and you should too (14:50)

Resources:

Episode 238: Three types of blog posts you should be creating regularly

Soulful PR Podcast Guide

My YouTube channel

**MY BOOK ** Your Press Release Is Breaking My Heart (A Totally Unconventional

Guide To Selling Your Story In The Media)

My FREE Soulful PR Facebook Community: tips & advice for promoting your business

Connect with me on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook

 

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