2017 is nearly here and you know that I have been talking about having your content and marketing calendar in shape for it.
Last week, you discovered how to create a badass content system that will get you to focus on what your blog will say every single week. You also receive a free content calendar for your first 30 days in 2017 so you can begin working on that right now.
I sincerely hope by now you’re getting excited about your content plans. So what now? Do you just plan your content month by month? What would be the ultimate boss thing to do?
You can easily plan your first quarter of 2017 easily and effectively and I am going to show you how in this blog post. By the end of this blog, you’ll have your first quarter of your content marketing planned and organized. That also means your content marketing calendar will be planned too (because remember, your content and marketing calendars go together).
Executing your first 90 days of 2017
I have my first quarter planned in 2017 and how I began was by planning my content marketing calendar. You should be asking yourself these questions before you begin to plan your marketing calendar:
- What do I want to accomplish in my first 90 days?
- What are my top 3 activities I want to accomplish?
- Is there anything in the works now that I should be promoting in the first quarter of 2017?
My goals that I want to accomplish in my own first quarter is working on my signature program (I am planning on offering that in my own second quarter), producing several webinars, creating a few online courses and finishing my book. These are the 4 activities I want to accomplish in the first 90 days.
Because I do have a webinar in the works right now, I have that in my marketing calendar as well.
Below is an example of what your 90 day marketing calendar could look like.
The bullet points are your activities you’re going to be performing every week and this makes your first quarter manageable and not overwhelming.
Once you’re crystal clear on what you are going to do in your first quarter marketing wise, its time to move onto your content calendar.
Aligning your Content and your Marketing Calendars
Now that your marketing calendar is planned, lets plan your content calendar. You may have a variety of things planned for your first quarter, but I can only imagine that some of your plans merge together. For example, as you can see in the example above, your webinar you’re putting on may up sale your online course you are creating. They go hand in hand.
But you need to warm up your audience to get them excited for your webinar even before you announce your webinar. I warmed up my audience for two months before I announced my own webinar. I made sure that every blog post I wrote was in alignment with my webinar theme.
What are some topics you can be talking about that will get your audience warmed up for your webinar, online course or marketing activity? Because I am having a lot of webinars about blogging in my own first quarter, I am ensuring that every single blog post will be talking about blogging.
If you remember, I also base my social media content and newsletter content off of my own blog, so I know I am on topic on each platform and am gearing up my own audience everywhere I am posting.
Here’s a mock content calendar using my own free 30 Day Content Calendar that you can download.
Review and Revise
Towards the end of your 90 days, you’ll need to pick a day (probably now) where you’ll spend an afternoon reviewing your results. As entrepreneurs, everything we do is a tweaking process, but how can we tweak if we don’t know what to tweak?!
Take time to review your content marketing strategy plans. What worked? What didn’t? What could you have done better? What is something you need to stop doing because it’s not getting you the results you need? What is something you would like to try going into your next 90 days?
When you do this, you’ll see where your efforts are most optimal and you’ll see where it wasn’t. This will help you to plan your next 90 days even better. Remember, big time CEOs do this: they implement a plan of action and then review it to see what worked and what didn’t. Then if they want to repeat something (say a webinar), they will see where they need to tweak their marketing and wording and create a new plan of action, using a mix of old and new strategies.
This is especially great if you’re planning on repeating your activities from your first 90 days (online courses, webinars, etc). It’s vital that you go ahead and plan an afternoon now in your mid to late 90 days to set time to review and revise your marketing and content plans.
If you found this helpful and informative, I want to invite you to download your free 10 Easy Steps to Plan Your Social Media Post guides that will not only help you stay on track with your own blog (using the 30 Day Content Calendar), but also stay on track and in brand on your other platforms, having this guide will benefit you so much because it gives you ideas on how to take your blog content and turn it into social media content.
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Remember, your content calendar (and marketing calendar) needs to be on your blog, social media, newsletter and any other place you post. Lets make this easier on you and your time by connecting your brand and your topics together. Using the 10 Easy Steps to Plan Your Social Media will help with it. You’ll also get a guide about when to post on different platforms for optimal exposure and visibility.
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