Maintaining a business blog has become a valuable and widely-used tool that can allow you to connect with your customers and personalize their experience to build brand loyalty and adapt your products, services, and marketing to your target audience. In fact, studies have indicated that businesses and companies with consistently updated blogs are better able to acquire and keep new customers by building a positive two-way relationship. However, there are many ways to blog for your business, and not all of them are effective. Whether you are new to blogging, have tried it only once before, or are a regular blogger, there are many ways you can improve your business blog to reach a broader audience while sending more purposeful messages.
Understanding the Need for an Editorial Calendar
The key to successful business blogging is not only creating an online blog for your business, but maintaining that blog and delivering consistently high-quality and relevant content. Looking at these requirements alone, you may already feel overwhelmed. While it’s easy to decide you’ll make posts regularly, how do you ensure this happens? Conversely, it’s also important to spread out your blog posts to prevent new articles from becoming lost in a never-ending flood of information. Developing an editorial calendar that guides your posting practices offers numerous benefits in terms of both organization and content quality. First, you’ll know exactly when blog articles should be posted and can prepare accordingly if editing or rewriting is needed. Second, keeping upcoming deadlines in mind gives you and your staff time and motivation to develop high-quality blog topics. While deadlines that are too close together can hurt blog content, the right spacing will give your team members the deadlines they need to focus and produce the type of content you want.
Developing Your Posting Schedule
There are numerous articles and suggestions already available on the web to guide you toward a content posting schedule for various social media sites. However, posting to your own business blog is a slightly more flexible process, allowing you to factor in your business’ size, goals, and content generation capabilities to determine the best schedule for your blog posts. Other considerations that may govern your posting schedule include special events and holidays, as well as sales and other business-specific information you may want to include on your blog. You may want to ramp up the release of content as an important date approaches, or maintain a steady stream of posts and information throughout the year. Regardless of your approach, it’s important to keep a few strategies in mind. Consistency is the major goal of editorial calendar creation—you will be putting your content goals and deadlines in writing to ensure they are met and your blog is updated regularly, rather than becoming a wasteland of occasional updates and irrelevant information. Additionally, your goals will drive your schedule—if you simply want to increase customer awareness of your services, you’ll want to devise a very different schedule than if you are pushing a large sale or event with a specific end date in mind.
Creating and Maintaining Your Calendar
There are many ways to create and maintain an editorial marketing calendar. While a pen and paper approach may work for a single writer, there are a variety of online tools available today to help you create, share, and manage calendars among many individuals. This type of approach is particularly effective if you employ more than one writer or offsite writers that may contribute to the blog. Making sure that everyone is on the same page in terms of topics and deadlines will eliminate confusion and improve content delivery so you can be sure you’re updating your site consistently. The ability to look at your calendar and instantly see not only the content you have planned for this week, but for upcoming weeks and months as well, will help you stay on track when it comes to creating new and informative content in keeping with your goals.
Generating consistent, high-quality, and relevant content is the key to optimizing your business blog. Pennington Creative can help you boost your blog content and social media sharing with our SEO optimization and content creation services. You can learn more about what we do and how we can fit into your plans for online growth when you visit our website.