The best way to grow your blog is to publish blog posts consistently. Don’t know how to plan content for a blog? Or how to create a blog content calendar? This post will teach you how to create a powerful content strategy.

If there’s anything an organized blogger has that others don’t, it’s a content calendar. They have pre-planned the content for the blog and social media. And they follow it. 

When I started, I wondered how these bloggers can do so much when I’m barely even publishing posts. Now I realize that a blog content calendar made them so special.

If you’re on the same path as I was, then this post is for you. 

So, how to plan content for a blog for a whole year?

Here are the eight steps to follow to plan content for a blog for one year.

• Define your goals
• Choose a niche and create a target audience profile
• Create a rough plan
• Analyze competition
• Research keywords
• Come up with ideas for holidays
• Create rough blog post title ideas
• Organize blog posts for the year 

Below I go deep into each step and give you actionable tips to create a working blog content strategy. So, grab a pen and paper, and let’s get started.

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Why Plan Content for a Blog in Advance?

Before learning how to create a blog content strategy, you might be wondering why you should do it in the first place. If you’re better than me and you have no struggle brainstorming new blog post ideas (I do!) you still can’t ignore these benefits.

Grow your Blog Consistently

Publishing on your blog consistently will give you an edge over blogs that don’t do it. It helps in keeping your audience engaged. And Google also prefers websites that keep updating their content. Because it wants to show the latest information from credible sources.

By adding new posts on your blog you’re telling Google that you update the blog regularly. Google notices this and positions your site at higher search rankings. 

Growing Blog DA (Domain Authority)

Adding blog posts consistently helps you grow your DA (domain authority). The higher the DA, the better the chances of ranking on Google.

In reverse, if you publish new blog posts randomly or don’t do it at all for a long time then it decreases. So, if you want to keep growing your blog domain authority then you should keep publishing blog posts.

Plan for Holidays

By planning blog content you will prepare holiday content in advance. The holiday season has four major dates: 

• Black Friday, 
• Cyber Monday, 
• Christmas Eve, and 
• New Year 

And these are the times when you could spice up your earnings. So it’s always a good idea to prepare in advance.

Keep Yourself Organized

A clear blog content strategy is one of the best productivity tips for bloggers. Have a day set in a week to publish new blog content. You can also tell your readers the exact day to expect from you. This way you’re making a public commitment and you’re more likely to follow it.   

If you’ve made a promise and are fulfilling it then your readers will trust you more.

Now that you know the benefits of planning blog content, let’s quickly get to it.

How to Plan Your Blog Content? (8 Steps)

The first part of planning your blog content strategy is to do some basic steps.

1. Define your Goals

Before publishing anything on the blog you must be clear about your goals. This comes before even starting a blog. But since it’s about blog content, let’s talk about that. Think about what you want to achieve with blog posts. 

• Get more traffic
• Increase brand awareness
• Grow affiliate sales
• Get email signups
• Get clients
• Sell more products

By having clear goals you publish content that takes you closer to your goals. Of course, you can have more than one goal at the same time. 

2. Choose a Niche and Create a Target Audience Profile

Well, you might have picked a blog niche and defined your target audience before starting your blog. Now is a good time to revise them. If you don’t need revising, go ahead and move to the next section.

Ideally, you must publish blog posts that strictly fall into your blog niche. Such that your blog becomes an expert resource of all information in that niche. But it also helps you stay focused on the subject. So, make sure you first define your blog niche.

Using the target audience persona you will come up with ideas that solve their problems. Writing blog posts while keeping the profile in mind makes the blog posts more relevant to your target audience. So, create a target audience persona for your blog.

3. Create a Weekly Schedule

Once you have everything above mentioned done, it’s time to create a weekly schedule that you can follow.

A schedule will help you stay consistent so that you add new content every week.  You can choose to publish one blog post per week or more. 

Let’s suppose I publish 1 blog post per week. Here’s how I’ll create a weekly blogging schedule.

• List out all tasks I to do regularly. For example – research, writing, editing, promotion, etc.
• Set some hours to work on my blog daily. For example – 1 hour in the afternoon.
• Allot tasks to do each day. Like this:
  • Monday – Topic & Keyword Research
  • Tuesday – Planning & Outline
  • Wednesday – Writing
  • Thursday – Editing
  • Friday – Final Editing & Publishing
  • Saturday – Promotion (Email, Social media)
• Repeat the process every week.

Of course, you will create a more detailed weekly plan to include other tasks (maybe not related to blogging) but make sure to allot not more than 3 to 4 tasks every day.

Since we’re publishing one new blog post every week we need at least 52 blog post ideas for a year. 

The next part is collecting potential blog post ideas.

4. Analyze Competition

The best way to find blog posts ideas for which you can rank is to steal your competition’s organic rankings. So we begin our research with the competition.

Your competitors are websites in the same niche but slightly better than yours. Such that if your blog domain authority (check here) is 15 then your competitor’s is in between 25 to 30. So make a list of competitors and do competition research. 

You can use Semrush to find your competitor’s best-performing content pages. Go to “Competitive Research” and then “Organic Research”.

For example, let’s check the organic presence of Neil Patel.

Another tool is Ubersuggest. Go to “Traffic” and then “Top pages by Traffic” and enter the URL. 

Collect these ideas in a Google Sheet or a notebook. Keep doing this until you have at least 100 ideas. Now, you have many potential blog post ideas to work on. 

5. Research Keywords

Then, we do keyword research to do two things.

• Validate our blog post idea
• Find the main target keyword for each idea

For this, conduct thorough keyword research and find low competition keywords. You must find long-tail (3 to 4 words) keywords with good search volume and are less competitive (KD low). 

If you want an accurate tool then I use and recommend Semrush. But for free, Ubersuggest is good too.

To validate a blog post idea, check SERPs. Analyze the ranking domains on the first and the second page.

For example, you want a SERP result with low domain authority pages. Install the Ubersuggest extension to see the domain authority of pages. 

And SEOQuake for checking on-page SEO. For example, I checked the on-page performance for this blog post.

Pick ideas that you can rank for easily. 

6. Come up with ideas for holidays

Next, plan some holiday content for Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Christmas Eve, and New Year. Focus on ideas that will help you get more revenue. Here are some ideas for inspiration.

• List posts with affiliate links
• New product launch with discount offers
• Old product with discount offers
• Sales offers
• Product tutorials

Come up with 5 to 8 blog post ideas for the holiday season so you can start preparing for them in advance. 

7. Create rough blog post title ideas

Now you will have enough ideas, if not then repeat steps 4 and 5. You will have a target keyword for each idea. It’s time to give your idea a title. 

This is an optional step but I like to do it because this way I have a more organized Google Sheet. So, I write a blog post title for each keyword and idea. 

This is also a good time to check if your yearly content plan has variety. You don’t want to publish similar content all the time. It’s boring. You would want to publish different types of blog posts. Such as lists, tutorials, interviews, reviews, how-to guides, etc.

If you find that all of your ideas are how-to guides or so then repeat steps 4 and 5 to find more ideas.

8. Organize blog posts for the year

Now, the last step is to organize your blog post ideas and distribute them throughout the year. Do it in a way such that each month you publish different types of blog posts to keep your target audience engaged. 

For this, you can create a blog content calendar. But, how to create a content calendar for a blog? 

You can use a simple Google Sheet or get a blog planner like this one. 

You have done good research and prepared a wonderful blog content plan. Now that you have some great blog post ideas to work on, it’s time you start preparing blog content.

How to Write Good Content for a Blog?

You can’t rank for just any blog post by slapping a few keywords. SEO doesn’t work this way anymore. To rank on Google and get organic traffic, you have to write SEO-optimized blog posts.

So how to write SEO-optimized blog posts?

Yes, SEO-optimized blog posts are search engine friendly. But the main goal is to serve the needs of the reader well. That’s what Google wants us to do. Serve the audience’s needs. The more helpful your blog post for Google is, the better its chances of ranking on Google.

To write such good blog posts you should check out these resources:

• Write irresistible headlines for blog posts
• How to structure your blog posts?
• A simple guide on writing SEO friendly blog posts
• Image SEO tips to rank blog images
• How to write evergreen blog posts?

Once you learn how to write SEO-friendly blog posts I recommend you update your old blog posts too. This increases your chances of getting better search ranking positions.

Conclusion: How to Plan Your Blog Posts?

So this is how to plan blog content for a whole year. You know how to plan content for a blog and have a step-by-step process to come up with ideas that will rank. I’m sure you’re all excited to get started.  

But I want you to use this the right way so you get the best results. That’s why I recommend you to learn how content marketing works for bloggers. Once you have read it you will get a better idea of how the whole process works. 

So what is your favorite content research tool? Have you tried SEMrush before?

I hope you found this post helpful. Follow me on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. Or why not subscribe to my newsletter and get blogging and writing tips straight to your inbox every week?

More resources to check out:

• How to write viral going blog posts?
• Blog commenting for SEO: how to grow your blog using blog comments?

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