Do you want to take your website to the next level?

How about publishing content every hour from now or daily from next month or year? 

A large percentage of your growth depends on how and when you post content. It's time to formulate a content plan and execute your content marketing strategy to achieve effective results.

Via a content calendar you pre-decide what content you will create which gives a road map for your content marketing campaign. With a content calendar, before you write anything, you know what your goals are.

1. Identify Your Niche, Offerings, and Audience

You already know what you are selling, but hold on, it's not that easy. 

You have to be mindful to identify and be specific to what you're selling through your blog post. Most people fail because they think the kind of content they produce is right for their niche. 

If you are selling an apple, talk about an apple, not a banana. 

You need to figure out what product fits which segment and how you can convince people to buy your offerings. This is a crucial step because if you don't know your target segment (male/ female/ location/ age/ annual income, etc.), how can you craft content for them? 

Creating a good content marketing strategy takes time, in fact, a lot of it. You cannot skip the step of finding who your people are and if you do, your content marketing efforts will take you nowhere.

2. Know Your Customers and Competitors

To know more about your customers, identify who visits your blog and where the web traffic comes from. You can use google analytics to explore all the relevant information (audience report, demographics, behavior, etc.)

It is necessary to segment your customers and target them appropriately to secure maximum out of your content marketing efforts. 

To make your content more competitive, check your competitor’s blog, the type of content they add, and their social media profiles to find their unique selling point. 

Ask questions – Why should people visit my blog? What's different? What do my competitors lack? In which areas I am better than my competitors?

3. Map Your Audience and Content

Create a buyer persona for your consumer base as it will help you visualize your audience as you write content. It should include details such as who, what, when, where, and why.

It's challenging to come up with the post ideas that suit the blog. You can use different content calendar tools to get suggestions and then brainstorm. You can check Google Trends, Quora, etc. to find popular topics. You can also check popular keywords for your niche and select topics that include those keywords.

4. Create a Master Excel Sheet

It's easy to stumble upon a lot of relevant topics and then forget them. You must write them in a spreadsheet. This will be your master file ‘as a guide’ for your content calendar ideas. 

Ensure that you include the monthly search volume for each topic you select. To check the number of search results, check below the search bar at the top of Google search results pages. 

You can also use tools such as SEMRush to know about the traffic potential for a particular topic. It must be done to estimate monthly traffic you can get and compare the existing and potential traffic.

Now you have an excel sheet that contains the blog topics, search volume, search results, and the traffic potential of each post.

5. Measure Content Performance

You need to apply a formula to get the traffic score of each topic.

Traffic potential/ search results*1000 give you a number that helps you find the topics with low competition and high traffic potential.

To fill this gap, you need to check the search results on Google's first page. 

For better customer satisfaction, you must cross-check content freshness. Is the content quality good and relevant? Can you go deeper and have a better answer to the query? 

Add all these gaps in the master excel sheet. Also, add the ranking potential in terms of high, medium, or low in front of each blog post.

From here, the next step is to add all the topics that have high potential in another excel sheet and name it "content calendar." You need to check the frequency of content that should go on the blog and what days. 

To Conclude 

A content calendar is an integral part of your business's digital relevance. Gain clarity with what you want to sell and who your target audience is. Develop buyer persona, blog topics, and identify the potential ranking opportunity gaps. With all these aligned together, your content calendar is in place. 

The only next thing is to start ‘writing’.