22 Jul Content planning for a (growing) blog: 5 easy tips for allied health
Maintaining a blog is about more than just writing a bunch of blog posts. You should develop a strategy and plan your content – especially if you’re writing with multiple staff in your clinic. You should also interact with your audience and respond to their comments. In this post, I’ll explain the importance of content planning and give some practical tips on how to plan your blog posts – effortlessly!
Planning your content is important!
If your blog and your audience are growing and you’re getting more serious about blogging, you should make a plan for your content.
Planning becomes much harder if you are working with multiple authors who write about different topics. I’ll share five important pointers that will help you to create a proper plan:
1. Create an editorial calendar
An editorial calendar is essential if you’re working with multiple authors and if you post frequently. That’s why you should create an editorial calendar in which you plot all the posts that you’re going to write. This could just be an excel sheet, but it’s easier to use an editorial plugin or service with a drag and drop calendar for this, e.g. Trello, MeisterTask or Monday. In this calendar, you can easily assign posts to authors and editors and, if you like, use labels for categorization.
2. Sit down and brainstorm
If you want to fill the editorial calendar, you could start with a brainstorm. Invite all your staff and sit together. Ask everyone what their ideas are and which posts they would like to write in the near future.
Make a list of the ideas and wishes, and then plot them out on the editorial calendar. Make sure you finish your blog posts a few days before the publish date so you can proofread, edit if needed, and find or create accompanying illustrations or photos.
3. Decide on frequency
You should blog regularly. It’s hard to give exact numbers. Once a week would be great, but this probably won’t be feasible for a small clinic. Try to establish some kind of frequency and stick to it. Once you know you can commit to your chosen schedule, make sure to communicate it to your audience somehow, so they know what they can expect.
4. Add variation
If you often write about similar topics – beware of keyword over use though – make sure to mix things up a little. Don’t post articles about nearly identical topics one after another. Of course, you can still write blog series, but try to vary between subjects as much as possible. You could also make variations in the form of your content. A video post, for example, spices things up!
5. Use news and current events
When planning your content, you should take a look at your calendar as well! Are there any major events coming up which are worth mentioning in your blog post? Or should you write some seasonal posts? Make sure to mix these ‘current-events posts’ with the other posts you have lined up. A good example would be Diabetes Awareness Week – could you create a content plan around this week to maximise your efforts?
Content planning will help you grow!
A growing blog will help in a number of ways for your allied health business – SEO, content for social media, content for your emails and also help create and maintain your brand!