Content Marketing Tips for Small Businesses — Content Ideas & Calendar

One of the most demanding challenges facing all businesses with content marketing strategies is producing content. For larger businesses, it is the task of finding a steady stream of topics to write about, while smaller businesses have the added burden of finding time to actually produce the content.

Finding topics can be made less frustrating by knowing where to look, what questions to ask, and by maintaining a digital swipe file. There are also steps you can take to make producing the content easier, but those will be discussed in a future post.

What you first need to do — and this relates to generating ideas, maintaining your content calendar and actually producing the content — is decide what type of content you are going to produce, and how often you are going to publish. Both are influenced by the resources you have at your disposal — skill, time and money — with the principal aim being quality over quantity, followed by consistency.

Once you have established that, you can then move on to creating your digital swipe file, an ideas spreadsheet, and finally, your content calendar.

Creating a Digital Swipe File

A digital swipe file is a variation of a concept initiated by copywriters, who would save copies of advertising and sales letters — that had been tested and proven effective — in their swipe file. In content marketing, your swipe file will be where you save articles and other online content that you feel could be used as inspiration for your own content. As a small business owner you won’t always have time to read through the content you come across while browsing, and a swipe file is also useful for saving relevant content that you can read later when time isn’t limited. You want something that requires minimal effort to save a web page, but also offers some organisation capabilities, such as:

• Dewey — a free bookmark manager for Chrome, with support for custom tags.
• Pocket — a save-for-later service with both free and paid options. Like Dewey, Pocket supports custom tags, but works across multiple browsers and devices.
• Evernote — also similar to both Pocket and Dewey, but branding itself as a note taking app. Evernote works across multiple browsers and devices (paid plan required to use on more than 2 devices), and supports tagging of saved articles for easier sorting.

Creating an Ideas Spreadsheet

The ideas spreadsheet is a straightforward spreadsheet with columns for:

• A rough outline of the idea.
• The form it will take: will it be a blog post, a video, a social media update, an infographic, etc.
• The title — this can change, but having a possible title does help shape the article.
• A column for notes, where you can expand on the idea, and make general notes relating to the content.

The spreadsheet is quite important, because although you are collecting content for ideas in your swipe file, the spreadsheet is where you start putting them together: giving them titles, matching them to specific personas, and identifying common themes. It can be a standalone document, but adding it as a separate worksheet on your objectives spreadsheet works better; that way all information relating to your content marketing strategy is kept together.

How to Generate Content Ideas

Generating a steady stream of topics is — as mentioned earlier — easier when you know where to look, and what questions to ask. Monitoring online content is obviously one of the best steps you can take in terms of looking for topics, and this includes:

• Setting up Google Alerts for selected keywords relevant to your industry and your audience. You can customise the options for these alerts to what works best for you, from the source, through to how frequently you receive them, what region(s) to include, and how many results are included.

• Setting up a traditional RSS feed of your favourite websites and topics. Feedly is a great RSS service, with a simple UI; and adding websites and topics is incredibly easy — you can either search for URLs and topics, or browse their curated collections.

• Use Buzzsumo to search for popular content using keywords or URLs. Buzzsumo allows you to filter results, showing you how many times specific articles were shared across a variety of platforms. This gives you an idea of how in demand certain topics are, and allows you to see what type of content is most frequently shared.

• Search Quora and Reddit for the topics you plan on covering to see what questions people are asking, and what discussions take place around these topics.
• Pay attention to what people are talking about: strangers, your customers, social media, popular news sites. Ask yourself if any of what they are saying relates to your industry. Don’t latch onto trending topics just because they are trending, always first consider if it links to your industry in any way, and if so, how it could affect your business, and your target audience.

Whenever you select topics, always consider how they affect your business, your industry, and your target audience. Don’t rewrite what someone else has already written, but rather tailor each bit of content so that it is relevant to your audience. Focus on specific points, leave out what is irrelevant, and always ask “what parts of the topic haven’t been covered yet?”.

Find which of the above suggestions give you the best results, and then ensure you set aside time — at least once a week — to go through them, and add new ideas to your spreadsheet. Don’t be afraid of adding more ideas than you could possibly use; you will eventually find that some topics can be combined, while others will naturally rise to the top of your list by being more relevant to your target audience.

Creating a Content Calendar

Once you have all of the above in place, you need to create — and populate — a content calendar. Your ideas spreadsheet is a loose collection of ideas, while your content calendar shows exactly what content you are going to share, where you are going to share it, and when.

There are a host of online services offering content calendar solutions, including ContentDJ, DivvyHQ, Kapost, Gather Content and CoSchedule, but most are designed for larger teams, and all of them are paid services. There is absolutely nothing wrong with using little more than a spreadsheet to plan your content posting. The spreadsheet should include the following:

• The day and date on which the post will be published.
• The type of content it is (video, Facebook update, Instagram photo, etc.).
• The title or headline.

You may consider adding any of the following:

• The objective or goal, referencing the spreadsheet you compiled previously.
• Any keywords you are using in the content.
• The results of the post, e.g. the number of views, shares, comments and/or sales the post generated after being published.

The calendar should give you an overview of your content plan, allowing you to

• See any days/dates where you haven’t got any content lined up.
• Match content topics to specific events and/or holidays.
• See that your spread of content is balanced, and that it is relevant to specific buyer personas.

Conclusion

There are many ways to generate content ideas — from paying attention to your customers, to scouring the internet — but it is important that you find what works best for your business, and never stop adding new ideas to your idea spreadsheet. And don’t even think about skipping past creating a content calendar; it doesn’t only add structure to your content strategy, but it will also help you in scheduling time to produce content that is valuable, and generates good results.

More Content Marketing Tips for Small Businesses — Objectives & Personas

For more digital marketing tips, check out our small business digital marketing guide.