Q4 Food Blog Challenge Day 5 – Content Calendar
Phew we are still in this challenge together, you got this. How has it been going? I hope you are doing great through this Q4 food blog challenge. It was designed to help you set your blog up to have your best Q4 yet!
We have covered a lot so far and now we are in the planning stages. These last 3 days are about planning. Having a plan is super important guys or you may not commit to doing it. Today is creating a content calendar on page 12 of the workbook.
Create a content calendar
Make sure to have your list of NEED to update, easy to update and new posts in front of you.
Remember that some of your NEED to update may be more of a big update so don’t plan them all in one week if you have more then 2-3 for each month. That will lead to burnout for sure! Trust me, I know this. Especially if you need pictures for all.
Print out as many copies as you need of page 12. On the monthly calendar page I want you to write the dates in the little boxes for the month and write the month on top.
Next take a look at the 8 NEED to be updated posts. You want to get them done and out of the way in the beginning of the month they are intended for or just before the month starts. But do not try to do all of them in a week! That is burnout waiting to happen.
For October’s NEED to be done I recommend doing them in the last week of September and first week of October (depending on if they are for most of October or just Halloween.) Thanksgiving I start to update November 1st and Christmas I start to update Black Friday (day after Thanksgiving in the United States.) That is when many people are into Christmas mode and start thinking about baking cookies and planning their parties.
Schedule
Put the NEED to be done posts on the calendar about 3-4 days apart based on the time frames above for each month. Only you know what all needs to be done to each post. This is a rough guideline and please adjust to you and your blog’s needs. If you need to do full photo shoots and don’t have the time, don’t schedule too close. It is better to do an amazing job on some of the posts then to do an eh job on all of them.
Now add in new posts you plan to add. I like to add them in the weeks after my NEED to be updated posts are done. So usually the first week and a half is for updating the most important and then I start to add in my new posts during week 2-4. This works best for me, but you may find that you rather mix it up between new and updating. Remember that existing content may rank better quicker if updated well where new content may not rank so quickly.
Now we have the remaining posts from page 8 – remember the ones that didn’t get added to the lists on day 4? These should be posts that you want to update because they should do good, but they are not a OMG I NEED to update this for Halloween or either holiday. Add some of them throughout the month that they are relevant for. Do not go overboard here, these are ones that are great but not the top ones you are aiming to update.
Last you want to add in the easy to do posts. These are easy to do so I try to sprinkle them in between harder to update posts and new posts. Easy to do should be able to be done in an hour or less (or it isn’t easy to update.)
Wrap up
Today’s challenge was create a calendar with the posts we plan to update based on importance along with adding new posts into the mix. I hope that this all makes sense to you and if not, please reach out! This is how I do it but for some reason it was a little harder for me to write it out exactly how I do it while making sense to newer bloggers.
Tomorrow we will need the calendar we created today because we will be creating an email plan for the recipes!
