As you’ve started to craft your content calendar for 2017, you’ve answered some important questions. You know the overall goal of your blog and you’ve defined your ideal reader. You know what step you want your reader to take after they read a post and what topics you’ll cover that will be beneficial to your reader. Now it’s time to make a blog schedule.

This is more than just picking a random time. Dive deep into the information you have about when people visit your website.

Do you know:

• How often they visit the site?
• How readers find your posts or site?
• What day they visit your site?

Use the answers to these questions to create a blog schedule when there is likely to be traffic on your site. Once you’ve chosen a time, stick to it.

Be Consistent

If you post every Thursday at 10 AM, your readers expect a new post at that time. This cultivates a positive working relationship with repeat visitors. It demonstrates your reliability before they ever contact your company.

If you’re just starting or reviving your blog, start with once a week. While most statistics state you need to post at least 11 times a month to significantly increase your lead generation, that’s impractical when just starting out or restarting your blog. The best method blog schedule is one you can maintain.

To start with, determine the time you have consistent visitors. Then, post at that time once a week for at least a month. After the month, research to see if your engagement numbers and page views are where you want them to be. If they are, continue posting at that rate. If they aren’t consider another high-traffic time that may be better.

After you’ve determined a day and time to post, keep that blog schedule for one to two months. If you’re able to keep up and post consistently at that time, then you can start adding one more post a week. The goal is consistency and high-quality posts, not necessarily quantity.

You’ll also find with SEO and other metrics, your older posts will gain more views over time. It’s important to have consistent amounts of content instead of poor quality, inconsistent new content.

You also won’t be relying on repeat visitors to draw readers to your blog.

Promote Your Posts

To capture new visitors, you’ll promote your post on other channels, such as social media and in your newsletter.

But, you want to share the post more than once. It’s beneficial to your SEO and to capture new audiences to share your post to social media several times. Only share evergreen, information that isn’t time-sensitive, content more than once.

You can promote your content to new followers or email subscribers days, weeks or months after it was published.

When you decide how often to post new content to your blog, you’ll also want to decide how often you’ll share that content to other channels when first published, and in the days, weeks and months after it’s published.

Once you have this information in place you are ready to create your content calendar, and your blog schedule specifically, for the year.

You know who is most likely to read your blog. You have connected topic ideas that appeal to your reader. You know when to post based on traffic and how to promote your blog to new visitors.

Are you ready to plan your content calendar for the upcoming year? Do you want to get started measuring the true engagement of your blog posts? Contact us to set up a free 20 minute phone call to discuss your content marketing. Or check out our other services.