Table of Content
Whether you’re using Instagram for your business or personal goals, most likely, you already know what a content plan means – a written schedule of upcoming publications. It helps to track when and which post or story you plan to publish, as well as more effectively develop a content strategy for the blog.
Ninetales often uses a content plan and considers this tool to be our best helper. In this tale, we’d love to share our experience and tell you how to create a great content plan.
Start with the content categorizer
Content categorizer is a table document, in which all your ideas for content are structured. Write down a few directions for your blog. For example, informational, entertaining, or selling content.
Next step – you should define content formats related to each of the directions. Selling content can include such formats as “advantages of the product” or “reviews”. Our advice: devote a separate column of your table to customer pain points – this helps you create content. Anything can be a customer pain point: starting with ‘I don’t know how to launch a business’ and ending with ‘how to create original content’ – focus on your target audience.
The last column can be dedicated to different content options for each section – it’ll make navigation easier when creating a content plan.
Why do you need all this?
The categorizer allows you to see what the main directions, content formats and goals of your blog are. If you feel that the blog needs alternative ways of development, you can make changes there. When developing a content plan, it’s always helpful to go back to the categorizer – most likely, you’ll find inspiration for upcoming posts. Read more about how to come up with new ideas in the article about brainstorming and other ways of generating content:
Key rules of creating a content plan:
Now that you’ve created the categorizer, you can move on to a content plan..
Define how far in advance you should plan content.
It’s important to decide how much time you need to have your content planned. Most companies and bloggers have planned out their content a month in advance. It’s an optimal period, since there is enough time to write posts and track the results – so you can analyze which publications caught the followers’ attention and which didn’t and respond to it quickly.
However you can choose a different frequency – a week or two months. The most important thing is that you should find comfort working with content.
Decide on a publication frequency
The frequency of social media posts depends on several factors. First, pay attention to your blog niche. If it’s a personal page, then you should push posts out regularly – preferably every 2 days. It’s not worth publishing too often – don’t make 10 posts per hour. If it’s a business account, then it’s optimal to post once per 2-3 days. However, stories can be published more often.
By the way, Ninetales has a planner that helps you manage posts. Also, you can use our auto posting feature, since it’s a time-consuming task to monitor a content sharing process.
Go back to the categorizer
You did it for a reason! If you want your content plan to be balanced, put chosen directions and content formats in a different order. Come up with a variety of topics for each of the directions, and you’ll get a large number of posts. All that’s left to do is to fill in dates, according to the frequency you established.
Make your content plan visual
Add extra columns to separate content formats, authors, topics, references and, of course, texts. Define the date each topic is going live and start writing!
There are several advantages to using a content plan for your blog – clarity and a clear vision of where you’re moving forward. Don’t worry – your blog won’t be interesting or spontaneous. There is always room for flexibility and unplanned posts. Let a content plan be your best assistant and not a tool that complicates your life.
