How to effectively plan a month of marketing in just one afternoon

Last week I offered a downloadable content calendar and I had lots of people request a copy so I thought I should explain how I use it to plan and organise my business, to really get the most out of it.

I like to plan all of my content and marketing at least one month in advance. This allows me to take my time over the content as well as feeling in control and organised. There is nothing worse than panicking and trying to throw something together at the last minute because you haven't posted anything in a while.

Firstly you should have a huge list of all of your marketing ideas. This can be a physical list or an excel spreadsheet. It doesn't really matter how you keep this, as long as you have all of your ideas collected somewhere. Whenever an idea comes to you, whatever you are doing, you simply add it to the list.

I have an appointment in my diary at the end of every month to plan the marketing for the month ahead. This is a recurring appointment so I never forget and is usually blocked out for an hour or so.

At the end of each month, I take my list and my calendar and I plan out which days I want to publish something, spacing these pieces of content across the month. I take the title from my list and write it on the calendar. The list of ideas means that you are not trying to plan from a cold start, you have ideas and inspiration to work from.

Now you just have to create that piece of content by the date on the calendar.

To take things a step further you could batch all of your marketing and content to be done in one go.

There are lots of benefits to the batching method. Aside from the obvious organisation, there are many studies that show that you are more productive if you group similar tasks together. For example, you should do all writing tasks at the same time. Then create all of the graphics in one go. Your mindset for being creative with design is very different to the mindset when you need to concentrate and write something. If you switch between the two things throughout the day it takes a long time to get into the right mindset again. If you batch similar tasks together there is no switching around and you will ultimately produce a better quality of work.

I block out an afternoon at the start of the month to plan, write and schedule my content for that month, including creating the graphics and images.

One of the key things to remember is that done always beats perfect. If you try to get to perfect you will never get anything published. The world will never know that you were working on something amazing because it is still sat in draft! And if you never put out anything then you and your business will be forgotten.

If you would like a copy of the calendar template, or if you have any questions about how to plan and structure your content, please leave a comment.