I talk to small business owners all the time about online business development and marketing. One of the things that comes up often is the fact that it takes time to create the content needed to successfully engage and develop your online business.
Things are changing rapidly in terms of marketing your business so you have to be where your customers and potential customers are, and that is online, specifically on social media.
But let’s face it. It is time consuming to create and offer unique content on a regular basis. If you are just using your social media or blogging tools once in a while, you are missing out on the potential traffic from posting consistently.
It is well documented that utilizing your website and social media together builds higher traffic and more conversions when posting consistently.
The easy answer to that is planning. That’s where a content calendar comes in.
Planning is required in any business. You plan your target market, you plan your sales development, forecasting, day, life… Everything is planned. So why not plan your content?
The content calendar is as simple as scheduling what you are going to post and where to post it on a daily basis. This can be for your social media and also for any updates, changes, or blog posts to your website.
If you use WordPress, you can install a calendar plugin on your site to help you plan and schedule to publish your blog posts consistently. For social media, you can use a regular calendar to plan or use a social media management tool, such as Buffer, that allows you to use their calendar on their Pro accounts and business plans.
Another thing that it works is to plan ahead what you’re going to post and on which account. You don’t want to share the same information across all of your accounts since you have a different focus for each one.
Sit down and create a list of topics you want to share. Mix it up so that the content is not only product focus or sales. Tell stories. Share facts about your business, tips and tricks about product, how to use product, motivational quotes, personal tidbits, and so on.
Block out an hour or two a week for the creation of the content and then just do a bulk creation for scheduling later during the week. Create your Memes or images to accompany your blog posts in bulk. Knock out 5 or 10 within your blocked time and schedule them.
By focusing on using a calendar for your content creation, you are taking away the hassle of trying to come up with something every day to publish. Plus, you’re more effective by only dealing with it once or twice a week.