As a solopreneur, you likely can’t waste time creating a blog that will not help you grow your business, and this is why we have created this list of 10 essential content planning tips.
Content planning is a crucial part of any successful personal branding strategy. It helps you set goals, create content that resonates with your audience, and measure the effectiveness of your efforts.
These tips will help you create a content plan that allows you to grow your business on autopilot by attracting, educating, and converting website visitors into paying clients.
Let’s get started!
Contents
- 1 Establish your content goals
- 2 Understand your audience
- 3 Define your buyer’s journey
- 4 Conduct keyword research
- 5 Create an editorial calendar
- 6 Develop a writing process
- 7 Create direct and indirect calls to action
- 8 Set up content tracking and measurement
- 9 Refresh old content
- 10 How to apply these content planning tips?
Establish your content goals
Establishing your content goals is the first and most crucial of these content planning tips.
As a solopreneur, it is critical that your initial content efforts are focused on getting clients. You don’t have the budget that big corporations have. This means that, at least initially, you don’t have the luxury to play the branding and awareness game.
Once you have a content engine that is running on autopilot, you can expand your goals. But when you are getting started, you should focus on content that can help you get new clients.
It’s critical to set measurable goals for your content. This will help you measure your content’s performance and track your progress towards achieving your goals.
Additionally, you should decide on the type of content that you want to create. This could include blog posts, videos, infographics, and more. Knowing the type of content you’re creating will help you create a content plan that is tailored to your goals and target audience.
Understand your audience
Once you’ve established your content goals, you need to understand your target audience. This means researching your audience to get a better understanding of what they are trying to achieve and they obstacles that are preventing them from doing so.
Start by researching your target customers’ demographics, such as age, gender, location, and income level. This will help you create content that is tailored to their needs and interests. Then, research your target customers’ interests and pain points. This will help you create content that resonates with them and solves their problems.
Once you have a better understanding of your target audience, you should also research your competitors. Take a look at their content and see what type of content they’re producing, what topics they’re covering, and what channels they’re using to reach their target audience. This will help you create content that sets you apart from your competition.
Define your buyer’s journey
The next step in creating an effective content plan is to define your buyer’s journey. This involves mapping out the steps your customers take, from becoming aware of your brand to purchasing. Each step of the buyer’s journey should have different types of content to engage and educate your customers.
We recommend starting with content that attends to the needs of someone who is at the end of the customer journey. Topics like “pricing”, “costs”, best x”, “or “services” are all usual topics that someone is looking for when they are close to making a buying decision.
Let’s say you are an executive branding LinkedIn coach. In this case, you want to start with topics like:
- Executive branding LinkedIn coach pricing
- Executive branding LinkedIn coach services
- What is the cost of working with an executive branding LinkedIn coach
- Best executives branding LinkedIn coaches
Focusing on topics like these will help you leverage your content to get new clients as quickly as possible.
Conduct keyword research
Once you’ve defined your buyer’s journey, you must conduct keyword research.
This involves researching keywords that are relevant to your content goals and target audience. You can use tools like Google Keyword Planner to help you find the right keywords.
When conducting keyword research, you should focus on finding keywords that are easy to rank for. You don’t want to for topics that are too difficult to rank for because it might take several months for you to rank.
It’s always best to start with low-difficulty keywords so that you can see results in a matter of weeks or days.
Create an editorial calendar
Once you’ve conducted keyword research, you must create an editorial calendar.
This will help you plan out your content in advance and ensure that you’re consistently producing content.
Your editorial calendar should hep you organize your topics. This is key, because if you cover similar topics and keywords in different blogs, Google will have difficulty deciding which blog to show in those similar searches. You might end up not raking, even if both blogs are great.
You should also include deadlines for each piece of content so that you can share content consistently.
Develop a writing process
Once you’ve created an editorial calendar, you need to develop a writing process. This will help you create content quickly and efficiently.
Your writing process should include steps such as researching and outlining your content, writing the first draft, and editing and proofreading your content. This will help you create well-researched, well-written, and error-free content.
You should also set aside time for content promotion. This will help you reach a wider audience and increase the visibility of your content. You can promote your content on social media, through email, or through other channels.
Create direct and indirect calls to action
Calls to action are important for driving engagement and conversions. They should be included in your content to encourage your readers to take action.
You should include both direct and indirect calls to action in your content. Direct calls to action are explicit requests for your readers to take an action, such as “Sign up now” or “Buy now.” Indirect calls to action are more subtle, such as “Learn more” or “Get started.”
Both direct and indirect calls to action should be included in your content to encourage your readers to take action. Additionally, you should ensure that your call to action are relevant to your content and the topic at hand.
Set up content tracking and measurement
To ensure that your content is effective, you need to set up content tracking and measurement. This will help you measure the effectiveness of your content and track your progress towards achieving your goals.
You should track various metrics to measure your content’s performance. This could include website traffic, social media engagement, and conversions. You should also track the performance of your content over time to identify trends and improve your content.
Refresh old content
In addition to creating new content, you should also refresh old content. This will help you keep your content current and ensure that it’s still relevant to your target audience.
You can refresh old content by updating the content with new information, adding visuals, and optimizing for search engines. You can also use old content as inspiration for new content. For example, you can take an old blog post and create a new video or infographic.
How to apply these content planning tips?
Creating an effective content plan is essential for any successful personal branding strategy.
By following these ten content planning tips, you can create a content plan tailored to your target customers and will help you reach your goals.
And by implementing a content plan that works, you can grow your business on autopilot.
If you want to start creating your content plan today, you can book a call with a personal branding consultant.
