Last week I talked about my efforts to get serious about building my vlog to increasing your number of daily views by 50.
What matters is that you aim high but keep your goals realistic. Aim for a slightly larger input than what you’re comfortable with. This allows you to push yourself to the next level without pushing yourself too hard and burning out.
Don’t commit to posting more frequently than you can handle. It’s better to publish fewer posts and schedule them a couple months in advance in case you get really sick or busy. Of course, you can change the schedule at any time, but having posts ready to go several weeks in advance helps eliminate a lot of blogging stress.
Your long term goals should include how many posts you want to write this year, how many readers you want to gain and any content you want to release that’s related to your blog–say an email newsletter or an ebook based on your blog content.
Planning for each month
Your plan for each month should include the number of posts you’ll publish each week, when they’ll publish–consistency in your schedule matters more than frequency–and potential themes or topic ideas. You can choose to give each month a theme or create a point form list of post ideas. I usually do both. Ideally, your plan should include outlines for at least a handful of these posts.
Remember to build a variety of posts into your plan, both in terms of topics and formats. You want to keep readers interested by providing something a little different each week. You’ll also want to figure out what posts attract the most attention so you can incorporate more of those into your future planning. Starting with a wide range of posts will allow you to narrow your work down to the most effective.
Any important dates–such as the release of your first email newsletter or subscriber freebie–should also be included in each month’s plan. After all, you’ll want to write a blog post about these dates, right?
Creating a long term plan
You don’t need all the details, but having some idea what you’ll be doing six months, a year or even two years from now can help keep you on the right track. A long term vision makes it easier to do short term planning–after all, how else are you supposed to know what you’re working towards? How are you supposed to measure success if you don’t know what that success looks like?
While a long term plan should definitely note changes in your posting schedule–say if you’ll be returning to school in September and will want to cut back on posting frequency at that time–and potential themes for future months, it’s also where you put goals related to building outwards from your blog. If one of your long term goals is to create an ebook from your blog, plan to start working on it in a few months and publish it in a year when your blog is fairly well known–or work with whatever schedule you’re comfortable with.
Think of your long term content plan as a business plan for your website. Any extra content, future ideas, and goals you have for your content–both in terms of how many people you reach and how much money you make–belong here.
The more solid your plan, the easier it will be to implement. It’s important to always leave some room for change, because the only constant in life is change and better ideas may surface, but give yourself a solid foundation to build your author platform on. Putting conscious energy into building your author platform now will separate you from the rest when it comes time to publish your first novel.