Blogs are a fantastic form of social media. Unconfined by a template of Twitter or Facebook. You can get creative, share stories and convey a more personal side to your business. They are also excellent for Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) as you can be very specific in the subject – plus Google loves new content.

But so many of my clients struggle to think about what to write. Usually however an hour brainstorm can pull us a varied 6 month blog plan together.

This post covers some easy strategies and inspiration for putting together a blog plan for your business.

Hooks

In our brainstorm we look at subject hooks – there are obvious ones like Christmas, Easter, Valentine’s Day, sporting events and local events such as food festivals, agricultural shows etc.

If you’re struggling for inspiration there are a lot of awareness days, weeks or months that will relate to what your business does which you can use in your content. For your blog site you will also want full stack website development. These can be anything from ‘Organic September’,  National Stress Awareness Day’ or ‘National Craft Day’. You can take these and tailor your content towards them. There’s a great calendar on https://www.awarenessdays.com/ but we’ve created a brief one for you in this post.

They do need to be relevant to your business, but it can sometimes be a tenuous link – for example it might not be appropriate for Red Kite Services to write about National Dementia Carers Day, but it may be that I could write a blog for National Stress Awareness Day suggesting that busy business owners out source some work.

 

	September Classical Music Month 9th – National Dementia Carers Day 10-16th – Remember a charity in your will week 23rd – 1st day of autumn	October National Disability Employment Awareness Month (NDEAM) 5th – Do something nice day 10th – World Mental Health Day 18th – Conflict Resolution Day 22nd – Make a difference day	November 1st – National Stress Awareness Day 13th – World Kindness Day 30th – Carers rights day
December 1st – Small business Saturday 20th – International Human Solidarity Day 24th – Small Business Day	January Dry January 8th – Bubble Bath Day 10th – Houseplant Appreciation Day	February 4th – World Cancer Day Creative Romance Month National Weddings Month 14th – Valentines Day	March National Craft Month 6th – National Stress Day 13-19th – Mental Health Awareness Week

 

Setting up Your Blog Plan

Your blog plan should include broad subjects – these will often be seasonally based and use the awareness days discussed above. You then need to decide how often to blog  and try to do it regularly – once a month is fine if that is all you have time for – but don’t write 5 on consecutive days and then leave it for 6 months. Once you have the publication dates in and your broad subjects start filling in the blog titles. You will need to think about lead times – if you are promoting Christmas events you need to start talking about them in September at the latest. Other blogs might be a report of an event, so you would schedule it after the event.

Here is a list of the sort of things to put in your blog:

• case studies
• events
• awards
• new products
• ten things you should know about…..
• a specialist service you offer
• links with local businesses.
• your business journey

Have a brainstorm with your staff or ask some of your clients for suggestions – my next blog is all about hashtags, thanks to a conversation with a client.

Stories

Telling a story is a great way to hook people into your writing, so try to make your blogs into little stories and put something or yourself in them. They are memorable, personal and intriguing. Stories about how and why you built your business are always of interest, but so are stories about things you love outside your business or what your staff are doing. People buy from people and if they know you have similar interests, that might be just the reason they choose you over the competition.