Content Planning For 2018 – 6 Steps To Get Shiz Sorted

2018 has appeared out of nowhere! Although your clients might still be in holiday mode, it might be time for you to get planning. Content planning is one of the easiest ways to get yourself organised and sharing quality content.

So let’s go through a step-by-step process to get you sorted for the first quarter of 2018!

Step 1: Figure out your target audience for Q1

It might seem obvious. But nothing can happen without knowing who you’re targeting. Otherwise, content planning is just random topics. So let’s break down your target audience.

Do they have a specific age, gender, condition or lifestyle? What goal do they have for their wellbeing?

For example, instead of ‘tired women’, your target audience might be ‘women aged 30-45 who have children and feel exhausted by doing it all’.

See how that’s a lot easier to write about? You know they are mums, that they live busy lives, and that energy is their biggest concern.

Step 2 & 3: Decide on your Q1 topics and promotions

Next, you want to decide on themes and topics to address in your content planning, as well as the promos to run. Now, which goes first depends on you! You might have a specific promo you want to run, so your content should support that. Or perhaps you want to explore specific areas, so your promos should work around those.

I suggest 1 theme per week that ties in with 1 blog post. So if you’re writing about 10 tops to relieve stress, your theme would be stress. The theme is important to know for step 4.

Step 4: Content planning for your social media

Writing blogs is great. But if your content planning doesn’t support them with social media, it can be hard to get it out there. Social media is a great business tool - when used wisely.

With the occasional exception, every post you share in a week should relate back to the weekly theme. So if the theme is stress, your funny memes will be related to stress. Your fun fact will be about stress. Even the questions you ask or the stories you share should relate to stress.

By pre-planning this, you can ensure that your social media is working for you, not against you.

Step 5: Write

Now you’ve got your topics – it’s time to write it! I could say a lot about this, but some tips to get you started:

• Set a timer for each topic (no more than 1hr for a 500-600 word blog)

• Skip the intensive research – it takes up precious time, so stick to referencing only specific findings or statistics

• Dotpoint it out before writing, so all the important points are covered

Learn more about what a good health blog post looks like here.

Step 6: Schedule it in

Now that your content planning and production is done, get that shiz scheduled in! Pop your social media posts in, ready to publish. Schedule your blog posts to go live week by week.

Then, as each post goes live, schedule them into your slot for a blog post.And just like that – you have ¼ of your year’s content ready, thanks to content planning.

In fact, want to know a secret? This article was written on the 16th of December – because I followed this very process to produce most of my content. I really do practice what I preach!

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