8 Steps to Plan a Blog Scheduler on a Month to Month Basis

When you decide that blogging is something you want to incorporate, it’s important that you build a habit of publishing articles on a regular basis. In order to do that, you need to plan ahead and get your team started on working on the deadlines.

This blog article will help you make sure that you do have blog articles planned out and published on a month to month basis.

Here are the 8 steps to have a well-planned blog scheduler, every month

1. Decide How often you want to blog and stick with it

How often will be determined by how much your team can output. We suggest that you start off with 1 blog article per week. If that is too much you can even start with bi-weekly. The important thing is to be consistent while building the habit. If you stop, you will lose the momentum of lead generation and traffic to your website.

See it like a marathon. The moment you stop training for one, you will need to rework your way up again. Same goes for blogging.

If your blogging frequency is quite low, we suggest that you don’t set the bar too high if you are planning to use your internal staff. If they are not able to deliver, you may be discouraged to continue and see the value of your blogging efforts.

2. Select a theme or topic related to your field of expertise

Having 1 theme for the month will help you narrow down what you should be blogging about.

To find your theme, think about what pain points your prospects may be dealing with in which you can help. For example, if you are a financial advisor, is it how to educate family members about wealth for the next generation? How to plan for philanthropic giving? Or maybe how to invest where investors may generate monthly income according to their lifestyle?

Use these pain points as themes. Select 1 that you would like to focus on for the upcoming month and it can serve as a general guideline for the content you produce that month.

3. Think How You can Generate Leads with your selected theme - Add a CTA (Call-to-Action)

You do not simply want readers to stop by, read your blog and leave. When they are on one of your blog articles, this is the opportunity to turn them from visitor into a lead. For a visitor to become a lead, they need to show a bit of commitment in wanting to learn more.

What you need to do is to offer a free downloadable content resource in exchange for their contact information. If they download your content, then you have a recorded lead.

Think about what downloadable content you can offer to potential investors related to your theme. Following the example of a financial advisor, if your theme is income generation through alternative investments, your free downloadable content could be a checklist to identify the best alternative investments for income generation.

This downloadable content could be placed as a CTA at the end of every blog post for a natural transition.

Here is an example of a CTA below.

4. Find your blog article ideas

Write down questions you believe your prospects may be asking related to the theme.The best way to guide your thoughts is to focus on the CTA for the free downloadable resource. Ask yourself “What can I write about that will lead them to want to download my free resource?”

Going back to the example of alternative investments, since you are offering a checklist for selecting the right solution, you can write blog articles that touch upon these questions.

• What are the typical locked-in periods to for alternative investments?
• Who should I contact to learn more about my alternative investment options?
• Why alternative vs traditional?
• Can I lose all my money in alternative investments?

Pro tip:

Notice that these questions could lead to a visitor downloading the free checklist to learn more. You can even repurpose all your blog articles to build the checklist.

Take the 4 points above for example and repurpose them to build your checklist.

• Checklist item 1: Identifying your level of comfort for lock-in period
• Checklist item 2: Understanding the role of an Advisor
• Checklist item 3: Eliminating traditional investments from your choices
• Checklist item 4: Risk assessment: Are you risk averse or risk taker?

5. Select 4 blog ideas that you want to focus on and come up with blog titles for each one.

With the list of questions that you have come up with, select 4 that you would want to write about for the month. The best is to select the ones that would lead to the free download.

Looking back at the 4 example questions, here are titles that I came up with:

• 4 Typical locked-in periods in alternative investments.
• Why Certified Financial Advisors are your best resource to learn more about alternative investments.
• Have alternative investments become more popular than traditional investments?
• 3 reasons why losing all your money in alternative investments should be the least of your concerns.

6. Decide who will write each one along

As mentioned in my blog article about building an internal blog team, you should assign a minimum of 2 writers.

To equally distribute the task, if you plan to have 4 blog articles published every month, each writer should write 2 for this instance. Make sure that the articles to be written by each writer are assigned according to what they know best.

7. Decide when to publish each blog article

The frequency should not be too hard to figure out. If you plan to start blogging 4 times a month, then you would publish 1 article a week. You would want to spread them out equally just like TV episodes.

However, what could be challenging is deciding which day and time of the week. A lot of research has been done on finding the optimal time frame, but in the end, you know your prospects and clients the best.

8. Fill in the details in the blog calendar

The blog content calendar will make sure that you have everything in place to go, all the way from planning to action. To help you get started, you will find below a blog calendar template that I’ve made. Feel free to use it as is or as a foundation and add what is needed that you see fit for your financial service business.

Great! Now you should be able to start planning your blogging activities on a month to month basis that will not only help you drive traffic but also generate leads by including your CTAs in every blog article you publish.