Planning Your Content

IF you know what kind of content you want to provide, life becomes so much easier if you plan ahead. This will not only help you produce content, but also maintain an audience who are more likely to follow your work.

1. Audience, audience, audience

I say it a lot but always think about your audience and the value you can bring with your content. Before you get into what you want to say, get to know who you’re writing for. Think about the different audiences that might be attracted to your work, and consider what each of them are looking for.

For instance, if you’re a chef sharing recipes online, your audience will include other professional chefs as well as normal people looking for a fun cooking experience. It’s important to tailor your content for both groups by focusing on what each person is looking for.

2. Listen!

Ask people what they’d like you to talk about. Never be afraid to ask potential audiences what they’d be interested in seeing. Even if it’s just talking to your friend and asking them, “if you were reading my blog, what would you like to know?”

Think about the comments that you receive on your posts on social media. What are the common questions that people ask? If there’s something that people are clearly interested in, think about how you could turn that into content?

Listening to your target audience is the best way to know what you should write about next.

3. Have a theme

Setting themes is a great way to plan your content.

My blogs, for example, are always run in series, all relating to a single theme (‘Making Content Work for You’, for example).

Once you’ve set your theme, separate it into four or five key ideas to cover – each one representing a week of content. Then use it to produce a range of content, so your live-streams and videos relate to your blogs, for instance.

This is a great way to make planning easier for you so you’re not scrabbling for ideas to write about, as well as keeping your audience engaged.

4. Outline first

In my blog series on ‘How to Write’, I mention that the best way to write is to structure all your ideas around a key idea. You can do this with any type of content you produce.

Once you’ve got your theme for the series, grab all the ideas you can and link them to four or five main ideas. This makes writing easier and ensures you don’t get stuck at the lastminute. It also means you won’t keep saying the same things over and over again.

5. Be realistic

I see this so often. The novice content creator gets excited about the idea of three or four posts a day, two blogs a week and a podcast, a YouTube channel and, and, and…

Avoid overstretching yourself by setting an expectation for an unsustainable amount of content.

Start with a few content types first and stick to no more than three regular types of content. Make sure you still have time to produce the ‘static’ content such as fliers, logos and banners that don’t change too often. And, make sure it’s sustainable for you as your business grows and you get busier.

In my previous series I covered a lot of tips for planning out individual pieces of content. Remember that these tips don’t just relate to writing, you can use them for other types of content too.

Try planning out a content series of your own, think about your topic, key ideas and types of content you’d want to produce.

And if you’d like more help with your own content, check out our short course Demystifying Content.