SEO Planning for your Business Blog: Build a Content Plan

Why Should You Build a Content Plan—Isn’t Blogging Enough?

You know that you need to blog for your business, but is it really necessary to build a Content Plan for the website?

My answer is a resounding–Yes.

The content plan serves a few MAJOR functions.

1. A content plan will help you align your blog posts and the timing of your blog content with your business calendar.  Does your business have a sale every year?  In addition to the obvious usage of your bog for announcing your sale, you can post reviews of your featured sale products leading up to the sale.
2. Planning all of your content will allow you to determine the budget and/or time necessary to create that content.  It is particularly important if you hire a writer to supplement the content you are already creating in-house.
3. Your content plan will give you another metric/method to analyze your website traffic and user data.

Despite it sounding complex, building a content plan is really easier that it sounds.  You can use a word processing document, spreadsheet, or a Google Calendar.  There is even a plugin called WordPress Editorial Calendar that allows you to manage your content in the Administrative Area of your WordPress Website.

Regardless of what you use to store your content plan, you will need your plan to hold information about the date, title, and category.  My content plan also records the target keyword or keyword phrase for each post.

Sample Content Map Spreadsheet

In order to make things easy, I have created a sample spreadsheet to track your content plan—and, populated it with some blog posts from a fictitious video company.  Of course, you can modify the document that you use to record your content plan to track whatever additional fields you would like.

• Download the file (Excel Spreadsheet–8kb)

We will be taking about other aspects of business blogging for your small business all week.  So, stay tuned for our next installment.