I used to find it extremely difficult and time consuming coming up with new blog ideas each fortnight. I would find that I would waste a great deal of time trying to think of a topic that would be of interest and by the time I did, I’d lost my enthusiasm for writing. A loss of momentum meant that each blog was taking way longer than necessary to complete!
This year I decided to come up with topics for all of my 26 blogs in one go. That’s a whole year’s worth for me. It has saved me a bunch of time and now when I see my Asana task pop up each fortnight I can get stuck straight into writing. From when I start writing to when I finish uploading to my website, it now takes under 45 minutes to complete the process.
Today I’m going to share with you how you can map out a year’s worth of blog topics too.
Categorise
If you were to describe your business to someone, how could you categorise what you offer? Try and come up with at least 3 categories. You can understand the pillars of your business by asking yourself the following questions:
-
Who do you serve?
-
What do you do?
-
Why do you do it?
-
What are your overarching themes or values?
For my virtual assistant business, it looks like this:
-
Who: women, running a small business, on the brink of burnout, need to scale
-
What: blogs, email marketing, social media, content creation
-
Why: stop burnout, ready to scale, do what you love
-
Themes: empowerment, moving away from DIY
Looking at this list I went with “what” as being the base of my blogs this year, with some “why” and “themes” woven in as well.
Turn the categories into blog titles
Take a moment to think about your ideal client. What do they need to know right now to move forward in their lives? What do they think that their problem is?
Under each of your categories, list up to ten things that you can share your expertise about. To help you understand what your ideal client may be searching for you can use tools like Answerthepublic.com or use Google Analytics to discover what keywords people are using to find you.
To get your creative juices flowing, start with:
How to . . .
5 ways . . .
7 ideas to . . .
Why . . . is important
Dot it out
Now you have a batch of blog topics it’s time to flesh them out a little so that writing them becomes super easy. For each blog title, come up with 3 to 6 dot points. These dot points are things that your ideal client needs to know about your topic. It could be steps, processes, checklist, or just important ideas they could implement.
Each of these dot points becomes a subheading in your blog.
Write
The hardest part of blogging has now become the easiest! You have your heading and your 3 – 6 subheadings so now it’s a matter of writing a paragraph or two under each subheading. In no time you will have a 500 word blog to post on your website and social media.
Don’t forget to promote your blog once it’s written, as the world needs to hear your expertise! Schedule it to your social media several times over the current month as well as at least once a few months down the track.
To extend the life of your blog even further, you can also use it as the base for a bunch of other content such as tips, quotes and graphics. Check out our new Blog Builder Package if you’d like help systemising and extending the life of your blog.
