Building a content plan

All major website builders let you add a blog to your site, including Wordpress, Wix and Squarespace. But just putting a ‘Blog’ tab on your website alongside a couple of articles might not be enough.

A successful blog should be updated regularly with relevant, meaningful content, which offers genuinely valuable information to your readers. The best and most efficient way to do this is to build a content plan. Whilst it may sound like a barrier, spending fifteen minutes every few months planning out your content will save you hours of time throughout the year, and help keep your content on track.

Not sure where to start? Find out which type of article is best for your business.

Step one: Define your audience

Unless you’re going to hire a writer, you likely won’t have a huge amount of time to work on your blog. So it’s important to keep your content focused on your key audience. 

You can break your audience down in a number of different ways, including age, gender, and income. But for an outdoor experience business, the most useful insights about your audience are likely to be their interests, location, and experience level.

Interests

Defining the interest of your intended audience should be pretty straightforward. Are you a stand-up paddleboarding school? Your readers should be interested in SUP. Run a riding centre? You should write for a horse-loving audience.

More broadly, you might want to try and appeal to people with interests adjacent to your activity. People with a general interest in the outdoors, fitness, or wellness might be interested in your business, for their own different reasons. You can write content targeting each of these audiences specifically.

Location

Your location is central to your offering, so make the most of it! Your audience will be searching for activities to try in your area - defining that area will help you find your audience. 

Experience level

Are you primarily running activities at a beginner, intermediate or advanced level? Perhaps you do all three, or guide people all the way from beginner to advanced? However you break it down, it’s important to write for the level of experience you are targeting.

Once you’ve defined these three parameters, it’s time to get creative.

Step two: Brainstorm

Come up with a bunch of article titles that your potential customers might be interested in. Remember, you’re the expert here! Your customers will enjoy content that comes from a place of expertise, so write about what you know.

If you run a surfing school in Lincolnshire, you could write about how great the Lincolnshire coast is for beginner surfers. If you’re an archery centre in London, why not discuss how archery is the perfect post-work hobby for busy Londoners? The important thing is to keep your audience in mind - not just the experience they’re looking for, but their location and experience level too.

Try not to be too self-critical at this stage - it’s important to let your creative juices flow, and come up with as many different titles without worrying too much about whether your topics are ‘perfect’. And remember - sticking to one of the five main types of article will help keep your writing on track.

Step three: Build an honest schedule

When you have five or six article headlines that you think might work well for your blog, take a look at your calendar and ask yourself how regularly you can commit to publishing an article. 

It could be as often as one a week, or as little as once every two or three months. The important thing is that you post content at relatively consistent intervals, as search engines will view this as a sign of credibility and rank your site higher in results. Remember, you can always write blog posts in bulk when you have time, and then schedule them for publication at a later date.

Finding time to write can be tricky. Using your eola calendar, you can find time in your schedule to set aside for writing, and avoid missing publication deadlines.

If you’re the kind of person who likes spreadsheets (we do), building a simple content spreadsheet is a great way to maintain oversight of your publishing calendar. As you move through the year, you can keep track of how many articles you have left to write, and plan ahead for more content.

Alternatively, a Word document or good old fashioned pen and paper can work just as well.

That’s it! There’s really no need to overcomplicate building a content strategy - it’s just about planning out in advance what you’re going to be writing, and when you’d like to publish it.  

Of course, the next step is quite an important one. Now that you’ve mapped out your content calendar for the year, it’s time to start writing - find out more here!

For more marketing tips and ideas, visit the eola Academy, and give us a follow on Instagram for all the latest updates.

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