Mark in your calendar a time each day to market yourself. Even as little as fifteen minutes a day of pure focus on marketing activities will offer returns. If you don’t schedule time in for this, it’s possible you will place your focus elsewhere. Remember: They have to know you exist!
Variation: Instead of a mere fifteen minutes, set aside an hour a day for either yourself or a member of your staff to work on marketing activities.
Example: The Blog Editorial Calendar
To create and maintain a truly useful blog you need to create new original content on a regular basis. This is not only great for your readership but it is also a proven way to improve your organic search engine rankings. However, unless your blog is a full-time venture you probably have other responsibilities and it is easy to lose track of when and what you last wrote on your blog as well as what you should blog about next. To address this common issue, today’s marketing tip is the use of a blog editorial calendar to implement your content strategy.
An editorial calendar is basically a schedule you use to implement your content strategy. It can help you see what you’ve written about in the past and what topics you need to write about in the future. You can use anything from a physical notebook to an online tool, though most users either create their spreadsheet or purchase an editorial calendar application.
Fields you may want to include are:
- Blog or website
- Due date
- Topic
- Industry associated events
- Keywords
- Word count
- Author
- Notes
The idea is simply to organize your content strategy in such a way that you know what you will be publishing for the next six months to a year. This will help you match your blogs with industry events, you can also request articles far in advance if you are using guest bloggers, and of course, you can start outlining your own articles or blogs months in advance instead of the night before you publish.
Editorial calendars also help you make sure you are not writing about topics you previously covered and they are great as an idea scratchpad where you can jot down interesting ideas as they come to you. You can always expand upon them later or simply delete them. Writing definitely becomes less stressful since you can sit down and know exactly what you need to write about.
Will an editorial calendar improve your web site, get you more conversions or more visitors? Indirectly, but the work still needs to be done. An editorial calendar is simply a tool designed to help you organize your content strategy, which should improve both the frequency as well as the quality of your writing, both good SEO practices to follow.