Content Ideas: Getting Clear and Focused

I hope your mind maps are coming along. Today I thought I’d help you take them from ideas in a mind map to an action plan for creating content.

If you’re having trouble coming up with content ideas I’ll again suggest the blog planner from Blog Energizer. You’ll have to sign up for the service (it’s free) if you haven’t already. Then when you log in on the right hand side you’ll see a a link for the blog planner and the blog calendar. They will help you by giving you different holidays/celebrations throughout the year that you can tie into your blog topics. Of course they won’t work for every blog, but if they will for yours it makes like much easier. For example: yesterday was “do something day”. What a great topic for a blog post ~ in just about any niche!

Once you’ve got some ideas for your blog let’s take them and create an editorial calendar. I seriously resisted this whole process for years. I didn’t want to have a “plan” I just wanted to blog about whatever it was I wanted to blog about! dangit. What I realized (and I wish I could say quickly realized, but it actually took me a couple years) is I just didn’t end up blogging. It was really easy to get distracted, not think about what to write, get irritated I couldn’t think of anything to write about, and then just not write. Here’s what happens when you hit that point.

1. You give up.

or

2. You have huge gaping holes of nothing on your blog.

Neither of those options is very good.

I still railed against the whole idea of having a designated topic to write about each day. But here’s where it gets good.

I’m the boss of this whole dang thing.

and so are you.

You can write in a topic for any given day and if something more exciting comes up… write about that instead. The editorial calendar is not written in stone and you can change the rules any time.

I would suggest you use it pretty strictly for a month or two, just to get into the habit. I’ve found with my new blog even though I have topics written down for each day I have never really gotten into the swing of it for that site, and now I find it gets pretty easy to not post vs. post. So I’m just saying. I use it religiously for this site.

How far out should I plan?

Depends, on you of course, and your site. You may find planning a month at time works well. You may want to plan according to the seasons so quarterly. You may want to plan by the week. All of those will work if they work for you.There is no right or wrong way to do it. You may want to try a couple different things to see what will work best and stick for you.

My one suggestion is right now, while ideas are flowing like there’s no tomorrow write them down.

I know it feels like you’ll have ideas coming out the wazzoo forever, but it just isn’t the case. There will come a time when you just can’t think of stuff to write. Having a huge list from the beginning “I’ll never run out of ideas” time is a great asset.

I personally have a big black book I just keep writing ideas down in. I can then pull from them if I’m out of ideas or to help create my editorial calendar, or for articles, or guest posts or whatever it is I need to write.

How do I create this editorial calendar?

You can do it any way that works for you. Here are some ideas I’ve heard when I talked about this with people over at Lynn’s Elite forum (creating an editorial calendar was one of the monthly challenges for us over there).

Google calendar
Outlook calendar
Wall calendar
Desk blotter
use the blog planner from Blog Energizer

I personally use my day planner, which sits on my desk between my keyboard and my monitor. I like it because I can write down the daily blog post topic as well as other action steps I want to take that day. (and it’s easy to cross them off when I’m done, which I love) There’s just something about seeing a whole week’s worth of work DONE and crossed off that makes me a little giddy.

If you also want to have a “checklist of sorts” for your daily activities you might want to check out the Daily Docket from SimpleMom.net (which is one of my favorite blogs ever!) It’s a great tool to organize your whole day.

How often should I plan to post?

While you’re creating your editorial calendar you need to think about how often you’re going to post to your blog. In the beginning of a blog I highly recommend you post at the very least 3 times a week. It would probably be better to post 5 times a week, but be realistic with yourself. It’s better to consistently post 3 times a week, than to slack off, get discouraged because you’re not posting 5 times a week and just not post at all.

Remember, while you want to post 3 times a week at least, there’s nothing that says you can’t write all those posts in one day and schedule them to go out throughout the week. You can do that with the schedule feature in wordpress. That may work very well for some people.Then all you have to focus on during the rest of your work time is your promotion efforts.

So that’s something to think about. Be easy on yourself… be realistic. You know how much time you have to do this. If you can’t do 5 a week, then don’t. Do a consistent 3 a week and you’ll be fine.

I hope this helps you get clear and focused around your writing. Because the writing will be a large part of your job from here on in. It’s nice to get a good clear start right from the get go. If you have any other questions/concerns about content ideas fire away.