Your Small Business Struggles Blogging? Setup A Content Schedule!

Content, Content, Content... It's all we hear these days right? If it's any consolation, it's because a content strategy is highly effective at gaining very targeted traffic. Much like dieting and exercise, content creation is great for you (or your brand), but something most people dread doing... Why is this? It would seem that most people struggle with what they should write about from day to day or week to week. Another similarity to dieting and exercise is that there are a million excuses you can use for not sticking to it.

We Too Feel your Pain

At protocol 80, we have not always been the best at posting regularly to our blog, and as we get busier and busier, it often gets harder and harder to stay active. Because we see the importance of continuing to create and share content, we have come up with the only solution that works for us...

We Setup A Content Schedule

In order for us to ensure that we are blogging regularly, we had to establish a blogging schedule in our marketing calendar. You may have noticed that we have been writing one post per day for a while now. You may have also noticed that 3 of us take turns throughout the week. I'm posting today, Josh will post tomorrow, and David will post on Wednesday.

This is truly the only way we stay after blogging. Every day the person whose turn it is knows that the other team members will be looking to read their post. That added pressure helps to ensure that the posts do happen and that the schedule stays intact.

We Don't Schedule The Actual Topics. You May Want To.

Although we have in the past, we do not schedule the daily topics for the blog posts. It can be very helpful to have topics all lined up ,but it can also hinder timeliness of some of our posts, as our industry literally changes daily. Not scheduling the topic also gives us all some freedom to think about what we want to write about and have our own opinions.

When you are first getting started with a content schedule, I would actually recommend that you schedule the topics for the first couple of weeks. It will help to ensure that you stick to the schedule and don't use the easy cop-out of "I can't think of anything to write about today...".

An Added Incentive To Keep Blogging

The boost in traffic that you will see by regularly blogging should be incentive enough, but it often doesn't convince everyone on the writing team. We have just implemented a policy that says that anyone that misses their blog post on their scheduled day has two write 2 posts the next day. For some, it may be just enough to get them to tackle the post when they are supposed to.

Having recommended this policy myself today, I will be writing 2 more posts today, as I missed a day last week, and today is one of my regularly scheduled days.

Frequency of Blogging Can Vary

We stick to one post a day, but that may be impossible for your small business. The important thing is that the posts are regular. Post twice a week if you want, but do 2 posts a week, EVERY week. Readers will soon pick up your schedule and start expecting your content on the days that you regularly blog.

The bottom line is that content creation is where it's at. Start by creating the content. Then start sharing through social media, and soon you will see how the content impacts your traffic and conversions.