It seems counterintuitive.
When I ask you to sit down intentionally and plan out your next three to six months of content ideas, you probably immediately think that it will take more time.
You already spend hours each week creating content for your blog, and it’s tough enough to find that time. Why would you want to spend more time writing out a plan?
Brian Tracy, an international time management guru, says that spending every minute spent in planning saves 10 minutes in execution. So even 10–12 minutes planning can save you up to 120 minutes of work. WOAH! That’s a 10x return on your time investment.
Where else in your business can you see a ten fold return? And the only investment you have to make is your time.
Planning solves three of the biggest problems bloggers report, as shown in a survey by CoSchedule:
- 20 percent of bloggers report that planning their content is their biggest challenge
- 22 percent of bloggers say that finding the time to create content is their biggest challenge
- 16 percent of bloggers say that creating content consistently is their biggest challenge.
A blog editorial calendar can help you overcome all three of those challenges.
Does planning interfere with creativity?
One of the biggest objections people seem to have with planning their blog posts ahead of time is that it will interfere with their creativity. They claim they like to write when inspiration strikes.
And, in theory, that’s fine. Great, even!
If your creativity naturally provides you with awesome blog post ideas, on a regular schedule, and those post ideas are not only beneficial for your readers but also serve a purpose for your business — then I say AWESOME! You’re amazing. Get on with your bad self.
My muse doesn’t work that way.
My muse is a bit more fickle. I tend to come up with great ideas in bursts — and usually in the most awkward situations, like when I’m in the shower or working out, or stuck in traffic. In other words, not when I’m sitting down in front of a computer.
And sometimes, I have GREAT ideas and lots of things I want to talk about, but they don’t tick all the boxes for being useful to my business. (This is why I have no less than three personal blogs going at any given time. It’s a sickness, I know.)
How planning can support creativity
There are ways that planning can actually support and increase your creativity.
Take, for example Jacquette Timmons. Jacquette participated in the Blogstorm program in June 2015, and she approached me with an interesting problem.
Jacquette wanted to plan out her blog editorial calendar, but she also wanted to write about timely topics. For example, she might write her weekly post about a TV show that was popular or a story making the rounds in the news.
She was afraid that she couldn’t plan her blog posts ahead of time — because she had no way of knowing what would be making a splash in the cultural zeitgeist weeks or months ahead of time.
Instead of planning the specific topics she was going to write about, I suggested she instead use her calendar to plan out her sales cycles. That way, she would always know what her post was supposed to accomplish even if she didn’t know exactly what it would be about. She would still save time in the writing process, because she would be able to narrow down her focus to the points she wanted to make, regardless of the topic. And her blog would still serve a business purpose.
5 ways planning your blog posts will save you time
- Support your priorities. If you not only know what you want to write, but also which posts will be the most important to your overall business goals, you can ensure that you have time and spend time on the posts that will generate the most impact. To me, time spent writing a post that doesn’t support your business goals is wasted time.
- Avoid unpleasant surprises. A problem I hear all too often is that people forget to start promoting their sales and launches until the last minute. They get so caught up in the OTHER tasks of selling that they forget how powerful content can be to support the process. A calendar helps you plan ahead so you aren’t in a panic to create content at the last minute. This could mean promoting your own products and launches, or it could mean content you owe to others. Either way you’ll never again forget that important post you were supposed to write.
- No more writer’s block. Think about all the time you’ve wasted having writer’s block. Hey, it happens to the best of us, but by starting and using an idea bank and an editorial calendar, you can avoid those wasted hours, days, weeks and put them to better use.
- Avoid mistakes and typos. If you plan ahead, you can build in time to edit, rewrite, and proofread — a step in the writing process that all too few people take advantage of.
- Opportunity to outsource. If you’re not organized and working ahead, it’s almost impossible to outsource any of your content marketing tasks. If, on the other hand, you have a plan and you work it, there are lots of those little niggling tasks that go along with good content marketing that you can easily outsource and save yourself hours of time each week. I estimate I save as much as 4 or 5 hours a week by outsourcing tasks my team can do.
Convinced? If so, and you’re looking for more information about how to plan your blog editorial calendar from start to finish, I recommend you start with my free ebook.
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