When you’re blogging, it’s important to plan ahead for the content that will appear on your blog. This should be based on the season, as well as the products and services you plan to promote or launch.

Survey your audience

Just because you’ve studied your audience once doesn’t mean you shouldn’t survey them occasionally to make sure you’re still delivering the information they need and want. Try a quarterly survey so you can find out what they think and get deeper insight into their issues.

research your niche

Stay up to date in your niche. Read industry news and study the periodicals for clues as to the state of your niche. Look to the future for killer technologies that could turn your niche on its head.

Take a look at the competition

You should always be aware of what your competition is doing. Not to copy them, but to stay one step ahead in whatever way you want to compete with them.

know what’s coming

Not all businesses are seasonal, but their entire audience is. They think of things in terms of certain seasons depending on where they are in their life. For example, if you have school-age children, they think differently during back-to-school than they do during the summer. Also, if you have a product or service launch or other event coming up, you should plan for it in the quarter before the event.

Know your realistic schedule

If you have a regular job, kids at home, or other responsibilities that will get in the way of your blog, be honest when creating a schedule for yourself. If you have a lot to do, build a realistic blogging schedule around these other responsibilities.

Brainstorming Topics

Once you’ve got some of this other information set up, it’s important to take some time to think about topics based on the information you’ve previously collected, plus events you know are coming. At this point, nothing is wrong, just write it down.

organize your topics

Take the brainstormed topics and categorize them for your blog. Throw out everything that doesn’t fit. Then organize and match them to the seasons, events, and products you want to promote.

Create a posting schedule

Add everything to a posting calendar. Here you enter the information so that during the times you have reserved to write and produce content, you can get down to work.

Take time to create

Now that you have everything ready for you, whenever you have time to work you can pull the information from the publication calendar and get going. You can also easily look ahead to see if some content needs to be outsourced.