An Amazing Content Marketing Schedule to Try Right now

Okay, so you know you have to thrive on social media to grow your traffic, right? Great! But… that’s only half of the battle. Now, you actually have to do it.

I bet you’ve done something that sounds a bit like this:

1. Create a great plan with the best of intentions to start a strong social media and content marketing plan.
2. Monday rolls around and things are going great! You’re so impressed with yourself and are killing it.
3. Tuesday seems like it’s going well, but towards the end of the day, you realize you’ve forgotten to do something unrelated to your new content marketing schedule, so you quickly replan your Wednesday in order to fit in a few extra things.
4. Then, by Thursday and Friday, your shiny new social media and marketing plan is shot and you feel like a failure

Sound familiar?

I know you have genuinely intended on posting on a regular basis to Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter and building your following and increasing your traffic…

But then what happens is that life and other responsibilities get in the way. This is especially true and often the case for bloggers because it’s your one-person show!

If you’ve been wanting to promote yourself, then you might have a plan to post a certain amount of images, written posts, and even videos per week. It may sound like a great idea and plan, but if you are even a little off one week or day, you may just bag the entire plan to promote your content altogether. So, even though have a plan that’s too detailed may be a bad thing, not doing anything is even worse!

One of the most important things is finding your balance with this, but even more, so is keeping that content marketing schedule consistent. Content like blog posts, social media, and videos are best and more successful when your audience feels they can rely on a schedule.

Wouldn’t you agree that it’s more important (and easier) to commit to posting once a week than it is posting multiple times a week or daily?

Besides finding the right balance for you, there are a few optimization tips and tricks you can try to speed things up along the way.

Let’s look at how you can better optimize some of your social media marketing campaigns.

The Essential and Only Content Marketing Strategy You’ll need:

When we think of essentials, we want to consider the bare minimum only.

It may be a good idea to be on multiple platforms, but the reality is that being on so many can be a time suck.

So, as a bare minimum, it’s recommended to be present and posting regularly on 3 social media platforms.

Those are:

• Facebook
• Instagram
• Twitter

By covering these three platforms, you’re reaching a huge number of potential readers.

Side note: You may be wondering about Pinterest. Yes, Pinterest is one of my favorites but this is a lot less like a social media platform and more like a search engine, which has its own strategy. Click here to read more about the complete Pinterest Strategy here.

At this point, your only goal (remember this is the essentials) is to post once a day on each platform. But where possible, it is much better to post more frequently on each and shoot for a frequency of twice a day or even three times a day, if possible.

As for what you’ll be posting, you’ll, of course, run out of things to share pretty fast if you try to only post from your own blog or website every time.

So, you might want to make your posting schedule a mixture of the following:

• Humorous/useful observations
• Insights from your day (while staying relevant as possible)
• Niche/industry news
• Links to other articles or posts that you found interesting – especially if these are channels you’d like to work with in future
• Promotions regarding partners
• Occasional promos for your own content
• Old posts that you published previously
• Images or posts about topical hashtags
• Responses to questions or comments
• Questions or comments of your own, for other people
• Polls, questionnaires etc.
• Opinion
• Tips and tricks

There are a ton of options, which should keep you busy!

But also keep in mind this little rule:

Only one of every three of your posts on social media should be promotional in nature.

Your audience will respond much faster and better if you keep promotions to a minimum, and instead, aim to offer a lot of value.

To offer enough value that your audience feels that their time spent on your site has been worthwhile, you need to make sure that you are posting regularly on things that interest them.

AT this point you have 1-3 posts on three social media platforms a day. Each will only make up a few sentences. Let’s just average it out and say you have 6 total posts every day, and a few can be the same post published on different social channels. This is just fine to do because each platform has its own audience.

So, maybe it is only 3 unique posts daily but published in 6 different places. Not too hard to manage because if you really break that down, it’s only about 6 sentences a day, which should equal around 120-200 words.

Is this all starting to sound manageable? I hope so.

One of the hardest parts of this strategy will be sharing your own content. This will obviously mean you need to make and have your own content and that takes a considerable amount of time longer than writing 3 to 6 sentences a day.

How often should you share your own content?

This will depend on the nature of your blog and how you plan to get traffic to it. But, I should note that no matter what your strategy is, content marketing on social media is important for building your SEO and growing brand loyalty and authority in your niche.

Most people aim to publish 1-2 blog posts per week, where 2 is the optimal and ideal number. But, if you can really only publish once a week, thats perfecrtly okay too! Of course, having more content will mean growing your audience, SEO, and traffic twice as fast – making all the difference.

Of course, in order to make that happen, those blog posts should be completely SEO optimized, written well, are engaging and genuinely interesting to your audience. So, I bet publishing two blog posts a week is starting to sound more difficult by the second.

The ideal length for each post?

Most bloggers and marketers are reporting that longer posts are much better for SEO and for engaging your audience, with the ideal number of words being 1800.

But seeing as we’re going with the minimum here, that bare minimum is much less at 800 words. The essential marketing you can get away with then (but still see significant growth) is a single post of 800 words per week and 3 social media posts, every day, on the three big platforms.

Bonus Points

Now, if you want extra bonus points – and who doesn’t – then one of the best things you can do for your content marketing is to add some form of video content.

There are countless advantages to video marketing when it comes to making yourself known online. Here’s what video can do for any brand, blog, or business:

Raise your level of authority by looking less like an amateur by posting the video with high production values. Of course, this takes skill, equipment, software, and time. But let’s keep going …

Massively enhance your engagement. One of the awesome things about video is that it has the ability to instantly capture the attention of our audiences.

Increase your conversions to sign up forms and product sales. Not only is video incredibly effective at getting people to watch, like, share, and engage – it is also great at getting those same people to go and click around on your site or landing page. This is due to the fact that video brings you face-to-face, which written content just can’t do. They can see you right there on the screen which brings up very different emotions and feels as compared to reading some written persuasive call-to-actions.

Video lets your audience get to know you, allowing you to stand out and start building trust.

Ideally, you would be able to pre-record all of your videos, but we shouldn’t forget that LIVE videos enhance the outcome 10x’s. So, with this in mind, it’s best to focus on both but don’t overwhelm yourself. Stick to a once a week strategy.

Now that’s an ideal minimum of 3 unique social media posts daily, shared out over the three big social media platforms, with one 800 word post per week. On top of that, one video every two weeks and one live event per every two weeks.

Batch Create Content

All in all, this amount of content and marketing we’ve covered is a small amount of work but it has still added up pretty quickly.

All that’s left to do is the actual work and that’s usually best done in batches. Now, if you’re fast, you could probably spend one working day per week on all this, but you’ll need some tip. Write your blog posts, your social media updates, and even your video scripts as quickly as possible using voice-to-text.

Despite the voice-to-text method being super easy, it’s also fairly accurate. Yes, you might need to add in punctuation, take the time to check grammar, and add some formatting, but this can seriously shave your writing time in half – if not more.

Google Docs has a tool built specifically for voice-typing and I use it constantly!

links marked with an asterisk * next to them are affiliate links

Schedule and Automate Your Essential Content Marketing Plan

Once you have your content marketing plan ready to publish, you may not want to sit around and wait to hit the publish button. This is where automation tools and scheduling comes in handy.

Once you’ve created a piece of content, you should go ahead and schedule or post it right on the platform you intend to share it on, if at all possible. This will usually result in better performance of your content with more engagement from your followers. But, for some platforms, it’s not possible (like Instagram – yet).

There are multiple platforms and management tools for scheduling, so I’ll just run down the list of my favorite referrals:

Email Marketing, Automation & Scheduling

The features of an Email Marketing Services are really important to me, which is why I made the switch from MailChimp (I was with them since 2012!) to Seva. The features that  ConvertKit were obviously built by bloggers, for bloggers.

• Convert Kit – Click here for try it out or compare it for 14 days

Automation and Scheduling for Instagram and Pinterest

• Tailwind* – Click here to use it free for Pinterest & Instagram
• BoardBooster* – Click here to use it free for Pinterest
• Later – Click here to start using it free on Instagram.

Automation and Scheduling for Everything

From the ability to fully manage all of your social media accounts in one place, or finding a way to for your apps, services, and devices to start working together. There’s no reason to waste time logging into multiple social accounts when you use any of these:

• IFTTT
• Zapier
• Buffer
• Hootsuite

One last thing

Keep in mind that the links you post to your content don’t need to be new when you post them! In fact, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with sharing an old post from your blog.

In fact, I wrote an entire blog post on how to take one old blog post and turn it into 13 new pieces of content. Click here so you can read or bookmark that for later reading too!

Looking for more ideas to increase traffic to your blog and website? Click here to check out some of our other posts.