When you think about creating a content calendar do you immediately think ugh? I’ve dug up 4 free tools to make building your content calendar fast and easy so you’ll never feel this way again!
Do you find yourself putting it on the back-burner only to “wing it” when it comes to writing your blog post each week?
Or maybe you don’t even blog post on a regular basis because it seems just too darn hard?
Are you looking for tools to help make this easy?
Creating a your content calendar doesn’t need to be complicated or require investing in any tools
In this article you’ll find four free tools to make building your content calendar FAST AND EASY. I’ll bet that you probably already use some of these tools!
Why use a content calendar?
I’ve found that when I lay out a plan with my clients where we determine a topic for each month we get much more traffic than when we jump around from topic to topic each week.
Plus we get enough information by sticking to a topic about whether it is popular enough to continue writing about it. Knowing what content your audience wants will help you build a successful business.
It helped our Therapist Client build a thriving 6 figure practice because we paid attention to what topics his audience was interested in.
4 Free tools to make building your content calendar fast and easy
Tool #1: Google docs to create your content plan
We use google do’s because they are easily shared with our content marketing and our clients. Its pretty simple, we just create a list of the months and then the weeks in each month and add our topics in.
The first step is to decide what is the main topic of the month. For example with our therapist client we may select infidelity or toxic relationships as the topic of the month.
Then we take our topic and go to tool #2 to fill in the topics for each week.
The image above is the exact format I use to create content plans for myself and my clients…see how easy and simple it is to set up and use?
Tool #2: Gather content ideas for each month using Buzz Sumo
I’ve been using BuzzSumo for a couple of years now and it is the FASTEST and EASIEST tool I’ve used to research content ideas.
Since we started using BuzzSumo, I’ve seen clients website traffic double and triple because we were writing content that is popular. This is a HUGE tip! If you implement anything from this post, I suggest you start using the free version of BuzzSumo to research content ideas.
Gather your content ideas and add them to the social media planner. I usually make a big list and then review them and decide which ones I’m going to write about each week.
Tool #3: Time block using Google Calendar
I don’t know about you, but I am pretty busy. I have clients I work with and a family to manage so it is pretty easy for me to push my own marketing to the back burner.
I block time each Monday to write my weekly blog post and that has made the difference between getting it done or not.
Tool #4: Track Your Results Using Jet Pack Site Stats
You can’t make smart decisions unless you track the performance of your content.
I use Jet Pack Site Stats and Google Analytics Dashboard plugins on my website to track the performance of my content and overall website traffic.
I’ve been able to help clients build multiple six figure businesses because we paid attention to what topics their audience was interested in and capitalized upon it in their blog post, on their services pages and created products based upon tracking the popularity of content being published.
It’s as simple as being smart enough to listen and give your audience what they WANT.
Let me recap again, its really so simple to do this: 4 Free Tools to make building your content calendar FAST AND EASY
- Use Google Docs to create your content plan
- Then use Buzz Sumo to research and find the most popular content ideas
- Use google calendar to time block and start writing your blog posts
- Track your results and focus in on what your audience wants
Go get started today!
Trust me you’ll be so happy to have a plan when the day rolls around and you sit down to write your weekly blog post.
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