If you’re still asking yourself, “What should I post about today?” or you catch yourself saying, “It’s been a while since I put out a new blog post.” This post is for you! Today I’m sharing the steps you can take to build an infinite bank of content ideas and start planning out your content calendar in advance.
This is the exact content planning system that I use in my business and that I also use with my clients and students. And now you can swipe it and use it for yourself, so that you always have plenty of ideas for your content and you can start planning it in advance.
1. Start with Content Buckets
The first step is to come up with content buckets, which are the broad, overarching categories that your content ideas will fall into. I recommend that you choose anywhere from 2-5 content buckets that tie into the work that you do. When you create content within those predetermined categories, it will help you to lead your audience toward the decision to buy from you. For example, if you are a graphic designer, you want your content buckets to be highlighting the benefits of graphic design, showing your audience how graphic design can help people reach their goals, or maybe even talking about some of the things that need to be in place before someone is ready to work with a graphic designer. You can also have buckets related the mindset someone will need to adopt in order to be ready to work with you. For example, if you serve mid-level business owners, your content buckets might need to help them adopt the mindset of investing in themselves and in their business at a higher level than they ever have before. Or if you’re a coach who serves busy moms with young kids, you might need to have a mindset content bucket helping moms feel worthy of investing money or time into their own personal growth. So, your first step in planning your content calendar, before you start coming up with individual content ideas, is to narrow down 2-5 broad categories that your content will fit into.
2. Choose Content Topics Within Your Content Buckets
Once you’ve narrowed down your content buckets, it’s time to come up with content topics WITHIN those content buckets. You’ll want to do a major brain dump of ideas for any topic you can possibly think of that fits into your different content buckets. Don’t think too much about this, just sit down and write down whatever ideas come to mind. Then, once you’ve got a rough list of ideas, you can go back through that list for each of your buckets and try to come up with blog post titles for each of those ideas. You may be able to come up with topics for multiple blog posts from just one of your original ideas. Because you’re constraining yourself to topics that fit into the buckets you’ve already determined are relevant to your audience, you have some space to get creative and come up with as many ideas as possible, within the constraints of each content bucket, so you know you’re staying on track.
3. Determine Your Content Bucket Rotation
From there, it’s time to start planning out your content calendar to incorporate these new content ideas you came up with. The easiest way to do that is by setting a content bucket rotation, that allows you to rotate through your different content buckets week after week. To keep this simple, I recommend that you start with a weekly rotation where you’re going through each of your buckets one week at a time. For example, you can get started by looking at your content calendar and committing to putting out a blog post from Content Bucket 1 on week one, Content Bucket 2 on week 2, and so on until you rotate through all of your buckets. Then you can start over again with Content Bucket 1 and continue rotating through your different content ideas. By rotating through your content buckets like this, you’re making sure that you’re hitting on all of the different topics that are going to be relevant in moving your ideal clients toward your paid offers.
4. Plug Your Content Topics into Your Content Calendar
Finally, once you’ve established your content bucket rotation, you should know what bucket you’ll be creating content within each week. From there, all you need to do is look at your content topics within that bucket and pick one that you want to plug into the calendar for that week. Choosing content topics in this way will help you to narrow down your focus in a way that keeps you aligned with your offers and promotions so that you’re using content in a way that helps you get business results.
If you want to learn more tips that will help you go even deeper with creating a content calendar that helps you to book out your business with ideal clients, watch my free masterclass: How to Create Content with Purpose to Attract and Convert Ideal Clients.
This masterclass will walk you through my step-by-step system for building a content strategy that gets people to take action and become clients and customers.
Watch the FREE masterclass, How to Create Content with Purpose to Attract and Convert Ideal Clients.
