3.2 The Blogging Calendar

Welcome back to Chapter 3 of this course on Blogging for Business. We’re bang in the middle of an important chapter that’ll help you service your client on a blogging project. 

In the last episode, we walked you through how understanding the business you’re about to blog for is always an important step. 

Now, you probably wanna get into writing these blogs and start showing off your neat literary skills, but before you can do that, you need to plan your blog posts in advance. 

In fact what you’re going to build is something like this. That my friend is what you call a blogging calendar.

Do you see how well planned out that entire month is? 

This is what you’re going to be building every time you start a blogging project. Embrace the ninja-level organisation skills you’re gonna build. 

So, how do you start planning your calendar? Well, there are 2 main things to keep in mind - The type of blog post and the topic it covers. 

Let's start with the type of blog post -

There are several types of blog posts that you can work with but we’ll take a look at the main ones.

1. The How-to blog

A very effective and popular type of blog. These focus on helping the audience do something or solve something. It’s extremely action oriented. The key characteristics of a HOW-TO blog is that they are practical, implementable and often not too complicated. 

So for example, here’s a blog on How to do a push up -

Here’s one on how to, well, mow your lawn.

Oh and here’s one on how to trim your cat’s toenails.‍

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2. The listicle

Next, you have the listicle, blogs that are based around lists. The reason these blog posts rose to popularity was because of how easy it is to consume information when it’s presented in a list. These are also much likelier to go viral but can also be extremely cringe-worthy at times. 

For example, here’s a Buzzfeed blog about 15 Hedgehogs with things that look like hedgehogs. Who on earth is reading this? 

Okay that’s pretty cute. 

3. The thought-leader post 

These types of posts often come from people with deep expertise in certain areas with the aim of sharing their perspective of experience on a given topic. The idea with these posts is to influence how people think over a period of time.

Business coaches, authors and speakers are famous for using this type. 

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Seth Godin, widely considered as the leading voice in marketing is a great example of a thought-leader. His blog is filled with posts that give fresh perspectives on topics like marketing, culture, branding etc.

4. The curated post

These posts curate information or knowledge that usually doesn’t have anything to do with the business. They’re also easier to produce because a simple search can help put together the content.

For example: The top selling shoe brands in India or The best cafes to visit in Goa. Blogs like this are based around curating a list or content related to other brands and activities outside the business itself.

5. The fun post - 

Well, the name says it all. These posts are generally lighter and often even humorous. The idea is to showcase a different side to the brand and this can generally be a great tactic to use to attract and entertain users.

6. The infographic post 

Infographic-based blog posts are pretty design heavy and carry an infographic that is meant to provide valuable information to the reader without them having to read a lot of content. 

These are pretty uncommon - probably because you need a designer to pull them off - but they can be very useful. 

Here’s an infographic blog post about infographics. Why? Cause it’s 2021 and there are no bad ideas. - 

There are definitely more kinds of blog formats out there but this should give you a rough idea of some of the more popular types.

The second aspect to consider when building a content calendar is the topics themselves. How do you come up with topics? Well, we’ve actually already tackled this a bit. The place to start is the audience.

We talked about 3 kinds of audiences that each business has - Those in the awareness phase, some in the consideration phase and finally, the ones in the decision phase. 

Your blog needs to cater to all 3 kinds of audiences. So how do you go about putting down blog topics for the 3 kinds of audiences?

Let's break it down into steps:

1. Define the 3 kinds of audience in relation to the business.
   
   
2. Make a list of things that these audiences would want to know or be searching for.
   
   
3. Make a list of topics that might answer some of these questions.

Do you wanna see how this works?

We created a hypothetical business that we can use just to teach you how to blog. It’s called Lancify Abroad. Lancify Abroad is a study abroad consultancy that helps students get into their dream universities. 

We went and created a whole website too - not just because we have a lot of time on our hands and aren’t sure what to do with it - but to help you learn better. Let’s go with that.

Here’s the website - http://lancifyabroad.com

So Lancify Abroad is a Study Abroad consultancy that offers counselling and university guidance, test prep for exams like SAT, GMAT, and GRE as well as application assistance.

Now let's define the 3 kinds of audiences for a business like Lancify Abroad. 

The first one (awareness) are those that don't know much about study abroad and just getting aware about it. They have just begun to think about the possibility of studying abroad.

The second category (consideration) is as the name suggests: they’re considering studying abroad. They’ve probably been thinking about it for some time and are moving closer towards seriously taking the decision.

The last category (decision) are those that are ready to take the plunge. They've been thinking, researching and planning to study abroad for months and are now ready to take the leap.

There you go, you've defined the 3 categories of users.

Now, let's put down a list of things that we think each of these audience types are looking to understand or know more about.

Awareness:

This category probably wants to know more about the following -

1. Is studying abroad a good idea?
   
   
2. Does it cost a lot?
   

3. Why do people go and study abroad?
   
   
4. Why is studying abroad better than studying within the country?
   
   
5. Is studying abroad a good idea for people in their specific field?

Consideration:

This category of people are probably looking for the following information -

1. Which countries are better for this specific field of study?
   
   
2. What is the process of applying and getting into a university?
3. What are the different tests that one needs to take?
   
   
4. How do college applications work?
   
   
5. How much does studying in a particular country cost?

Decision:

1. How to apply for a student loan?
   
   
2. How to prepare for the test prep?
   
   
3. Which Universities specialise in a particular subject?
   
   
4. How to write compelling application essays?
   
   
5. How much does it cost to live in a particular city?
   
   

What we have done here is put ourselves in the shoes of each of these categories and asked ourselves what we would like to know. Getting used to these categories might take some time but once you really understand it, it will make life much easier.

Now, making that blog topic list is relatively simple since you have these questions down. Let's create a table for you.

Now you take each question, decide what format of blog you want to write about and then put down the title.

See what we did there? We thought about what the best format to answer this question is and then we wrote titles according to that format. Let's try a few more:

There you go, we've just shown you how to write 4 blog topics using 4 different blog formats. This should give you an idea of how to come up with blog topics on your own. 

By breaking down the steps in this way, it takes away the lack of clarity that hurts most bloggers. 

Now once you have put down all these blog topics, you already have 15+ blogs that can go into your content calendar. Let’s say you’re going with 2 blogs a week, you now have a calendar that covers nearly two months.
Get yourself a neat calendar and put down your topics into their respective slots. Here is what your calendar should end up looking like -

Pretty neat, right?
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This is honestly half the job done. The hardest part is often trying to figure out what on earth to write about. 

Most writers will sit at their desks expecting a stroke of genius to hit them like a meteor but pre-planning your calendar helps writers’ block better than any writing workshop can. 

And, that is how you create a blogging calendar. 

We’re warming up to start writing these blogs but we have one more episode before we can get to that.