How To Create A Killer Content Calendar FREE

You've got great content that you want to share with the world.

Now how do you get it out to the world?

In this section, we will be going over how to create your very own content calendar.

Having a content calendar is very important because it allows you to make sure you are creating the best content all the time, even when you are sleep.

Please check out my post about creating an automated social media plan to help gain traffic from your social media profiles.

Ideally, you will want to have a separate content calendar for each social media account and also for your blog.

This will allow you to keep track of your progress easily.

Whether you decide to do this on a website plugin, or on an Excel worksheet, I've got some great tips for you.

There's a couple of things to consider before making your calendar.

1) Do you have any upcoming events that can change your content? Such as a product release, a vacation, a convention. You'll want to make note of these on your overview and also on the individual days.

2) Seasonal changes: it's not a secret that many companies use the seasonal changes to make certain products they may offer or to tweak the images or color schemes. so this is also something small that can help you.

3) Instagram Holidays: so you may notice that every day is almost another made-up holiday on the internet, research those for your niche, and don't forget to promote on those days.

4) Take a look at your business page analytics, see what did and didn't work in the past, and try to revamp any old content that did really well if you can re-purpose it then use it.

5) Create a clear goal of what you want this calendar to do for you. Do you want it to help you build brand awareness? Does the content help customers create interest in your products? Help more people convert into customers? Keep your current customers? Build referrals so that your old clients tell everyone about you?

Once you have done those 5 things you are ready to begin:

By defining your goal above #5, you can determine what metric you should track for your business objectives. 

If I wanted to track sales, then I would track conversions, or if I wanted to focus on building my brand I would focus on impressions and building email subscribers/followers.

For this example, we are going to focus on building awareness. 

First things first, how will you build awareness for a new brand? 

I've said it before but I just want to make sure you know that.

People follow people. They want real people.

Thus, this leads me to another question. 

Do you know your perfect buyer persona?

If you're not new then your Facebook analytics can probably tell you the most about your buyer persona or customer demographics, but if you're new you should take the time to get to know your perfect buyer persona.

The more you know about the people interested in your products, the better you can create content specifically for them.

You can build your buyer persona easily by sending out a brief survey to them after they subscribe to you.

You can find great surveys over at Survey Monkey.

This will be a great way to connect with someone who is interested in your product.

Some things to think about that will help you know your audience are things such as, age, what do they do, what do they research, what are they looking for help with, what are their goals, their challenges? What are their current concerns?

These are all great questions to get your research started.

Once you have made your target audience you are ready to finish your business objective.

Your business objective should be how you plan to engage your audience.

So in this example, we are going to post information that is helpful to build brand awareness to increase likes, shares, follows, etc to build engagement on my site.

Then determine how you will track it.

I will track my site traffic through Google Analytics, for example.

Once you have a clear idea of your business objectives and how you will track them and you know your audience, you are ready to create your pillars.

Your categories.

A great way to get a look at what you should post you should start researching your competitors.

Just look at their social media accounts and see what content is really working for them.

Make sure you craft your own genuine ideas. And never use someone else materials.

Are they posting ads, promotional feed, what do the colors look like, do they have an overall theme?

Analyze their feeds and chose categories of ways that you could post your information.

Promotion ads for a holiday sale, motivation post, pride/lifestyle, behind the scenes/personal, coffee, shoes, makeup, inspiration, quotes, videos, how-to, quirky memes

Create 4 pillars on your own!

In our example lets use:

Motivational/Inspiration/Memes, How-To, Product, Behind The Scenes/ *Personal *

I chose motivation/inspirational posts to be one of my pillars because based on my research this is usually where most social media managers get a lot of their reactions and comments. I feel it's important. Funny or inspirational memes will be here too.

How-to and product, I am a social media manager, and I am building my brand, so I should post easy how-to and information about my products, however, I will do this less often as I don't want to overdo it. These will also include helpful reviews on the tools I use.

Lastly, I want to be sure that the bulk of my content is behind the scenes/personal posts.

This is the most engaging post I've seen so far.

You are now ready to put all this information together and start making content.

Make sure you get out a piece of paper for this part if you aren't a whiz with Excel.

How many weeks do you want to plan ahead?

And what days will you post?

The dates will go horizontally across and the days will be going vertically.

Add new product and seasonal calendar entries below match the dates with the dates going across the page, pictured in example.

Your Key: (Content Pillars) will go below your new products and season and you can then color code each pillar so that you can find them easier on your content calendar.

Except in your content calendar, you would just use the colors and you would type the title on top of the writing.

Remember when you get closer to new product releases you'll want to really amp up your strategy posts for your content.

I took a social media manager course on my Fiverr account and it blew my mind how easy the course was to manage.

The course gave me a lot of knowledge of current industry trends such as Instagram and Facebook.

I highly recommend checking it out.

Check out Fiverr and sign up to become a seller today. 

Additionally, you can do this all by paper if you prefer to see it visually.

The sample in the paper is not actually how I'd professionally set this up as I did above in Excel.

If you'd like help from a social media manager I would be more than happy to assist you with a one-on-one consultation via adobe connect.

I offer these types of services over on my business page which you can check out here.

With my services we will discuss either 6 - 12 weeks of content idea's for your small business.

And you will receive an excel document much like the one shown above that is editable for you and your business to use!

I would love to help you grow your blog. Please contact me anytime if you'd like to set up a consultation.

I do offer a free consultation to make sure I am the right business partner for you.

Just send a quick text to 214-414-9068 with your contact information and I will give you a call shortly.

-Taylor Micheal