Content Strategy: The Ultimate Guide to Preparation, Production, Publication & Promotion

In short, Emil identified the lucrative keyword, “Employee Wellness Programs”, that had significant search volume and which he was confident he could write a more comprehensive piece of content.

By writing a remarkable piece titled “121 Employee Wellness Program Ideas for Your Office”, he was quickly able to rank number one in Google for the term “Employee Wellness Ideas” bringing their site 10,000 visitors per month consistently and translating into $100,000 in monthly reoccurring revenue for Snack Nation.

So, when creating your own content strategy, take into consideration which pieces of content are going to be 10% posts and which will be 10x posts. Both are important and both are necessary aspects of a successful content strategy, but just understanding which articles are which will help you allocate your time, effort and money appropriately.

To help you to determine the difference, in our experience, 10x content is content with high search volume for the target keywords and content that’s “cornerstone content” for the blog, which basically means it’s foundational information for the blog overall.

Word Count & How to Know When a Piece of Content is Done

Word count is often a topic of conversation that comes up when creating content. There is no such thing as an ideal word count, or a perfect word count, for blog posts but there are some best practices to take into consideration when producing your content:

• Word count helps get your content recognized by search engines like Google, and the more competitive your word count is the more competitive your content will be. There’s really no minimum or maximum word count as all content is indexed by search engines, but in order to get your content on the first page of search results, your word count needs to at least match or exceed the word count of content that already exists on the topic.
• Speaking from our own experience, we aim for our blog posts to be around 2,000–2,500 words because that’s the best fit for our audience and the type of content they like to read and the in-depth nature in which we cover our topics. We do, however, occasionally publish super-posts (10x) that reach anywhere from 5,000 to 15,000 words. It completely depends on the article, the topic and how we want to approach it.
• We also write 2,000+ word posts because, in our industry, it’s nearly impossible to rank for most keywords if our content’s word count is less than 2,000 words per post. When creating your own content, pay attention to the content in your industry to understand the minimum length of content you should be writing. Generally the longer and more comprehensive the content, the better—provided it’s not just filler content and is actually answering user’s queries on Google.
• So to be competitive on the first page of Google, oftentimes the word count needs to be at least at par with what’s already ranking or it needs to exceed it. If you’re interested in your blog posts reaching the front page of Google for specific keywords, find out the word count of the current top-ranking articles and then write an even better post that’s more thorough and has a more robust word count.

From our perspective, when you go beyond the minimum word count you have more opportunities to create content that will continue to be useful to the reader for years to come, so we recommend focusing on creating valuable, word count heavy pieces of content. This may not work for your brand, though, so find out what does.

Proofreading Content

A small note to end off the publication section of this article, and also the last step in the publication process: Proofread.

Proofreading is the act of reading through your content at least once, if not a couple of times, before you publish it to the public, so you can correct any errors whether they’re spelling, grammar, punctuation or formatting errors.

Proofreading is hugely underrated and highly important. It’s your last chance to make sure you’re putting your best foot forward and providing the best possible content for your audience, which should always be your ultimate goal.

Some proofreading tips:

• Have an Incubation Period: This is a well-known technique used in the writing community where you take a break from your content after having written it by either stepping away from your desk for an hour or two, or even leaving your content for a more extended period of time such as overnight or for a full 24 hours. After stepping away from your content for a fair amount of time (usually, anything less than an hour is too short, overnight is best) you then go ahead and proofread your content. This gives you a fresh set of eyes on your content as your brain has somewhat forgotten what you’ve written and you’ll be able to pick out your errors more easily. Without the incubation period you can often miss minor (or major!) errors you would have otherwise caught.
• Read Your Content Out Loud: When reading written content in our heads it’s easier for us to glaze over any strange sentence structure or awkward wording, so try reading your content out loud as your proofreading. When you come to a section where you’re stumbling over the words, you know the wording is awkward and you should consider correcting it.
• Get Someone Else to Read Your Content: Sometimes when we write something it makes sense to us, but if anyone else were to read it they wouldn’t necessarily understand what we were trying to say. Someone else can help you find and fix any errors or awkward formatting that you may not have perceived as a problem in the first place.

One last final piece of advice: Proofread. Always proofread before publishing. Even when you don’t think you need to proofread, proofread. Don’t ever neglect proofreading because of the time or effort it takes, it will save you from publishing silly errors that are so correctable before you push your content live to your audience.

Content Strategy Step #3: Publication

The next step in the content strategy process is publication, which basically entails everything to do with publishing content, the process leading up to it and what to do immediately after. There’s actually a lot more that goes into the publication process of the content strategy than just hitting the “Publish” button, so let’s jump into it.

Developing a Posting Schedule & Posting Frequency

First, and absolutely foremost, is planning a posting schedule and determining what your posting frequency is going to be. This is an absolutely imperative step to the success of your blog because it helps keep you accountable and ensures that you’re pushing content out as regularly as you can.

The most important part of your posting schedule is to actually stick to it. Do not create a posting schedule that you can’t keep up with, because you ultimately won’t be able to keep up and you’ll spend most of your time worrying about posts that aren’t getting published and guilting yourself into working on posts just for the sake of your publishing schedule. This is not an effective way to develop a posting schedule.

If you know you can definitely commit to publishing one amazing blog post per month, then set one day per month where your articles must go live by. Once a month is better than never and it’s better to consistently post once per month than inconsistently four times per month.

Other options include publishing a post once every two weeks, once a week or two posts per week; it’s really up to you and how often you can consistently publish high-quality content.

Here are some tips to help you develop your posting schedule:

• Your best day(s) to post are the days your website has its highest traffic, so create your posting schedule around your highest traffic day(s). This will be different for every website, so look into your analytics to see which days incur the highest amount of visitors. If you’re a new website you may not have this information, so just pick a publishing day and then reevaluate a few months later when you have some data to draw from.
• Consider publishing every article a day before you promote your post to your email list so that the post can accumulate some organic social shares, thus generating social proof before your email list sees it.
• When creating your blog post schedule, separate it into the quarters of the year (Q1 being January, February, March; Q2 being April, May, June; Q3 being July, August, September; and Q4 being October, November, December) so you can easily keep track of the articles you want to post and when, and you’ll be able to focus your attention on the right articles at the right time. At the end of this article we break down our posting schedule, and you’ll see that we structure it in quarters.

Conducting a Final Review for Formatting, Structure & Errors

Even though you’ve already proofread your article by this point in the content strategy process, make sure you do one last check to make sure everything is as it should be. Make sure you view your article in “preview” mode so you can clearly see any formatting errors, and double-check your SEO section to make sure everything is optimized as it should be.

This may not seem like a very important step, but just like the proofreading stage it’s where you’re going to catch any silly and easily correctable mistakes, so make sure you take the time to do one last check over before publishing every post.

Including Author Bylines & Headshots

Consider including author bylines and headshots with each article you publish. It’s not a compulsory requirement, however, it gives the readers the ability to learn more about who has written the article, their credentials, and their background.

If you’re working with guest contributors to create content for your site, you’ll most definitely want to include author bylines and headshots with their articles. It helps to put them in the spotlight and gives them credit for their work. It’s also best practice to give guest contributors at least one link to their website, blog or social media platforms in their author byline to help boost their SEO and to give readers an easy way to find them online.

Author bylines and headshots can be added to your article either at the beginning of the article or the end. Typically, most websites name the author of the article somewhere near the beginning of the article and then include the full bio and headshot at the end of it.

Dating Your Publications

When it comes to pushing content live, the date matters. The date that a post was published indicates its relevance, which is all that matters in today’s fast-paced world.

• Each article should include its publishing date so the reader knows when the information was at its most recent
• If you want to make your content more evergreen, you could consider not publishing a date or you could remove the year from the date and just include the day and month
• When content becomes buried on your blog beneath new content, if it’s still up-to-date and relevant information then consider re-publishing the article to bring it back to the top of the pile. All you have to do is change the publish date, you don’t have to change any of the content unless you want to update anything.

Content Strategy Step #4: Promotion

Finally, after all the effort of preparing, producing and publishing your content, it’s time to promote it! But, don’t underestimate the promotion part of your content strategy—it’s been said by industry veterans that promoting content is just as important as publishing it, and should take just as much time and effort as it does to create the content.

In this section, we’ll discuss the ways in which you can promote your content, how you should approach the promotion process, the necessary elements of promoting content, and more.

Content Promotion Optimization

The first thing you need to do before you start promoting your content is to know what action you’d like your audience to take after engaging with it. For each piece of content the action might be different, so you’ll have to take each article into consideration individually.

The action could be for the reader to share the article with their peers and social following, it could be to subscribe to your email list, it could be to check out a featured resource, it could be to sign up for a webinar, it could be to buy a product, etc. Whatever the action is, identify it first before you start promoting the content so you know which direction you need the promotion strategy for that specific article to be headed. Taking this into consideration will give you a better return on investment (ROI) on the content.

Remember the most important lesson of this content strategy article, though: Give value first, then ask for the sale. In your promotion strategy don’t get so preoccupied with asking for your readers to take a certain action that you forget to give value to them.

Content Promotion Copy

Before you actually start promoting content on the various promotion channels (which we discuss in the next section), it’s helpful to come up with some copy so you have useful, well thought out promotional messages to share with your audience.

Copy is what’s going to sell your content and convince your target market to click on the link and read it, so your copy has to be good. Very good.

Generally speaking, copy needs to capture attention, be short and punchy and give accurate insight into what the reader will find on the other side of the link. Copy that’s not interesting, engaging or truthful will likely deter the audience and be a detriment to your content.

Here are some tips for creating copy for your content promotion strategy:

• Keep it Short & Sweet: The more concise, the better. Some promotion channels allow for longer word counts than others but in general, it’s best to keep your copy as to-the-point as possible.
• Make it Interesting: You want your readers to wonder what’s on the other side of that link, so make them want to click on it! Try to stay away from clickbait copy, though, as it’s likely to prevent your readers from engaging with your content in the long run.
• Brainstorm: Don’t just publish the first sentence of copy that comes to mind. Take the time to write out as many iterations of your copy as you possibly can. Maybe write 20 different copy promos for an article, and then pick the best ones. Likely the first bits of copy you come up with won’t be the best ones.
• Write Multiples: When promoting your content, you’re likely to promote it more than once, so come up with more than one set of copy for it so you can promote the same piece of content multiple times without the copy becoming repetitive to your audience. They don’t want to read the same copy over and over—it’s not interesting—so have multiple different sets of copy prepared.
• Proofread: Just like with creating content, creating copy is subject to the same proofreading rule. Always proofread your promotional copy before you schedule or publish it on any of your content promotion channels.

To help you write and create copy for your content promotion, we recommend using resources such as the CopyHackers website or copywriting lessons on Skillshare.

Content Promotion Channels

Next in the content promotion strategy is to actually start promoting your content. This is where the main bulk of your effort is going to be put into, and this is the part of the process that’s going to take the most time. This is where the magic happens, though, so take your time promoting your content through as many channels as you can.

The more channels you promote through, the more exposure your content gets and the more discoverable your content becomes.

These are the different channels you can promote your content through:

• Create an email list and send out content to your list frequently
• Publish on Quuu Promote to tap into new but relevant audiences
• Promote your content to visitors on your own website with an updatable newsfeed by using Beamer
• Use a service like MissingLettr to create year-long social media campaigns
• Promote on industry content & resource sharing sites like GrowthHackers
• Post to your Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, Instagram & Instagram Stories
• Pin to your Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+ and save to your Instagram Highlights
• Use a scheduling service like Buffer, SmarterQueue or Meet Edgar to push out promos consistently on your social platforms
• Post your articles to relevant subreddits (but be aware of & abide by Reddit’s rules. Check out the first tip in our How to Get Backlinks to Your Store article to learn how to promote your content successfully on subreddits)
• Post your articles to your own subreddit (check out the full explanation of this tip in our How to Get Backlinks to Your Store article. It’s tip #10!)
• Use Facebook Ads to boost your content to your audience or similar (lookalike) audiences on Facebook
• Create a profile, select posts, and syndicate on Medium (submit to their top publications)
• Create a profile on Quora and answer questions that are related to your content. In your answer, summarize your post and add a link back to your article. Also, consider doing the same on Yahoo Answers and Stack Exchange.
• Reach out to influencers in your niche and share your article with them in the hope that they’ll share it with their audience
• Reach out to individuals or businesses you may have featured or linked in your post and let them know that they’ve been featured. They’ll be more inclined to share your content on their social channels.
• Do a search for the top 5-10 articles currently ranking for your target keywords. Post a thoughtful comment on each commentable blog post or article with a link back to your post. This will potentially give you a backlink and may make your post discoverable to the author and readers checking out the comments section.

Beyond the more traditional promotion methods listed above, there are other methods you can use to get your content in front of larger or more diverse audiences. These methods take a little more time, effort and consistency to make worthwhile, but when they work they really work.

• Target Influencers: While traffic may be the main priority, people should be at the center of all your efforts. With this strategy, the aim is to develop high leverage, mutually beneficial relationships with thought leaders in your industry and ultimately, get in front of the audiences they’ve built
  • Create a List of Influencers to Partner With: This can be done using Google (search for relevant thought leader roundups), Instagram (find top influencers in your niche), YouTube (find the top content creators in your market), Amazon (find authors who’ve written about topics similar to yours) and tools (like Buzzsumo).
  • Social Touchpoints: If you want other influencers to share your content with them, you need to share theirs. You can do this by setting up a Feedly account of all your target influencers and sharing all their new posts. You can even automate this process with IFTTT or Zapier.
  • Direct Touchpoints: Comment on your target influencers’ posts, engage with their content by liking and commenting and sign up and reply often to their newsletters. Get their attention and make yourself known. They’ll eventually begin to recognize your name.
  • Provide Value First: Where relevant, add links out to target influencers in blog posts you’ve previously published. These links can either be added within the body of the content itself or at the end of the article in a “Recommended Reading” section. You could also create thought leader roundup blog posts where you mention and link out to the influencer’s content. This is a nice way to open up conversations with influencers and show them you’re willing to promote their content to your audience, too.
  • Make Contact: Reach out to influencers directly over email after having mentioned them a couple of times on your social platforms or in your content. You could be asking them what they think about your new post, or suggesting partnership opportunities (such as featuring each other on-site in ads, co-creating content assets, writing a guest post, sending out messages to each other’s email databases, etc.) This email could also be in response to an email they’ve sent through their newsletter which can come across as a little more natural and less forced.
• Submit your article to bloggers who do weekly roundups related to your article’s topic.
  • Make yourself known to other creators in your niche who shoutout other brands and share other creator’s content.
• Find people who are sharing similar content and let them know about an upcoming post
  • Perhaps your content could be relevant for them to link in their content, maybe they’d like to share your content with their audience on social media, or maybe your content could feature in their newsletter.
• Find out which sites are linking to the posts ranking highest on Google for your topics or keywords and reach out to them
  • You can do this using SEMrush.
  • Let them know that your content is similar and a relevant resource to link out to as well.
• Find the people who comment the most on your competitors’ sites and tell them about upcoming content.
  • Clearly, these readers are very engaged with online content like yours, so what’s to say they wouldn’t also enjoy reading your content? Let them know you exist!
• Monitor conversations happening around your article’s topic using Awario and suggest your post.
  • You’ll be sharing your article with people who are already interested, thus reaching out to hot leads.
• Find and reach out to the most influential people who’ve shared your content in the past and ask for a share or a comment
  • Let them know that you’re still out here making great content and you’d love to have them back to read, share or engage with your latest posts.
• Find other syndication and guest posting opportunities
  • We recommend checking out this resource on 150+ Sites to Guest Post.

Creating a Content Promotion System

The final most important part of the promotion section of your content strategy is to create a content promotion system and methods to track the growth of your system.

Creating a content promotion system is important so you never forget to put the work into promoting your content. It can be tempting to mentally check out of your content strategy after publishing an article, but just because you publish a piece of content doesn’t mean the masses are going to come flocking, so you have to put in the work every time, all the time.

Your content promotion system is simple and it’s going to be the same as every other content creators’ promotion system:

Every time you publish an article, execute each promotion method.

Done. Simple as that.

Establish the content promotion methods you’re going to employ now, and then set up a spreadsheet or something similar (we show you ours in detail down below!) so you can check off each promotion method you’ve completed for each article once it goes live. This way you’ll visually be able to keep track of your promotion strategy and ensure that you never forget a promotion channel for each new article you publish.

The next best thing after establishing the promotion methods you’re going to complete as part of your content promotion strategy is to be consistent. Consistency is the key to gaining traction and building your readership, so even when checking off each step in your content promotion strategy feels futile, keep going. Consistency will bring value to your readers and it will bring success to your content.

Next, don’t forget to follow up with influencers and the people or businesses you feature or link to in your posts. Follow up a few times to make sure they see your post. You want to develop and maintain a relationship with them and seeming eager is the best way to do that (beyond publishing great content that’s relevant and valuable to their audience).

Finally, in order to understand whether your content promotion strategy is working, where it’s working best and what may need some improvement—you need to track your growth.

Data is one of the few ways you can be sure about the success of your promotion strategy, so beyond creating a checklist that keeps track of each promotion method you use for each article, create a spreadsheet or something similar to keep track of the relevant promotion metrics for each post.

Here are a few examples of the metrics you could keep tabs on:

• Traffic
• Social Shares
• Comments
• Inbound Links
• Email Subscribers
• Leads
• Sales Driven by Promo Channels
• Article Page Views
• Email Campaign Open & Click-Through Rates

There will likely be some that are more successful than others, but you won’t know for sure until you track them! It might surprise you which promotion methods work the best for you and which ones don’t work as well as you thought they might.

Our Content Strategy, Schedule & Spreadsheet

This section is going to delve into the system we’ve created at A Better Lemonade Stand to plan, organize and manage our content, and we’re going to be sharing the exact tools and templates we use to manage our content strategy.

But first, a little backstory on our founder Richard Lazazzera’s journey of creating content, not only for A Better Lemonade Stand but also for Shopify when he worked for the Shopify Growth Team. This should hopefully give you some insight into Richard’s perspective when creating content, his goals for A Better Lemonade Stand’s content strategy and why content marketing is so effective.

His first piece of remarkable content was one of the first blog posts he wrote for A Better Lemonade Stand: Reverse Engineering the Perfect Ecommerce Product.

For just over a year, I worked on the Shopify Growth Team. In particular, I drove growth for the company by inspiring and educating entrepreneurs to build and grow their online business. I did this through insightful and insanely practical blog posts.

In my time there, my team and I grew the Shopify blog from 200,000 readers per month to 2 million readers per month (in fact, I believe we hit 2 million just a few days before I left the company). I always try to measure my work by the impact it has on others, however, there are numbers I can’t share, but one thing I can share is that if you’re unsure whether content marketing is important or effective, know that just my top 5 blog posts alone on the Shopify blog (in the 13 months I was with the company) racked up a total of 98,000 hours (10.4 years) of on-site read time.

Now, to be absolutely clear, we were a team and there were many contributors to the blog from several departments that all deserve credit and a standing ovation. While I can’t speak to the contributions of others, I can tell you that over the last few years I have gone from someone who never wrote and barely passed my English classes to an online writer who has millions of pageviews under his belt and hundreds of thousands of hours of on-site read time.

It’s taken time, but I’ve developed a content strategy that enables me to consistently create competitively ranking content that inspires, engages and helps our audience and I’m going to share it with you right now.

Why am I sharing our content strategy with you? I debated this for a while because the fact is, my competition can use this against me. But, there’s a greater cause here: Content marketing is extremely important and so many creators are still doing it wrong. I want to help fix this and make it easier and more accessible for people to create, manage and systemize their own content strategy so they too can create remarkable content and get it in front of the eyes of eager readers.

Let’s jump into A Better Lemonade Stand’s very own tried, tested and true content strategy.

How We Plan, Organize, Manage & Systemize Our Content

First things first, and possibly the most integral part of our content strategy, is the spreadsheet tool we use called Airtable (Airtable Review). Before this begins to turn into essentially it’s own blog post describing every tiny detail of why we love Airtable so much, we’ll try to keep it short and sweet by saying we don’t know how we ever created content without Airtable. We would never be able to manage our content strategy without Airtable and when we first discovered Airtable around April of 2017, it’s completely revolutionized our content strategy.

Initially, we just used Google Sheets to organize, plan and manage our content strategy, but once having discovered and used Airtable to its fullest potential we pity the content creator who still uses Google Sheets to organize and manage their content schedule. Airtable completely blows Google Sheets out of the water in every aspect, including functionality, design, and innovation.

Here are just some of the reasons why we love Airtable so much:

• It Creates Smart Spreadsheets: Airtable spreadsheets can be anything you want them to be. Keep them simple and straightforward or connect them to one another so you have a full-fledged web of spreadsheets that update instantly any time you make an edit.
• It’s Completely Customizable: With Airtable, your spreadsheets don’t have to just be spreadsheets, they can be checklists, they have single or multiple select options, you can add dates, numbers, links, and emails, or you can group the spreadsheet into categories by column, you can inter-link to other spreadsheets, you can view the sheet by grid, form, calendar or kanban view, you can create separate views of the same spreadsheet for different users, etc. The customization options are limitless.
• It’s Free: Airtable offers a very generous free plan that even we’ve been able to manage an extensive content strategy without having to upgrade to one of their premium plans. Their premium plans do offer more features, but we’ve never felt limited with the free version. If you are interested in some of their premium features, though, Airtable’s Pricing Plans are very reasonable.
• It’s Completely Adaptable: You can create any type of spreadsheet you want with Airtable. No matter what you have to manage or organize, Airtable’s features will be able to organize it in the best possible way.
• There are Free Templates: If creating your own spreadsheet from scratch on Airtable sounds daunting, they offer templates to help get you started. If you want to transfer over any of your Excel or Google spreadsheets too, you can import them as well.
• Organize By Base, Tabs, and Tables: Organization is much easier on Airtable than any other spreadsheet tool we’ve used. Within Airtable there are “Bases” that house spreadsheets, and within each base you can have as many spreadsheets as you like that are all neatly organized into tabs.
• You Can Embed Spreadsheets: The Airtable spreadsheets are embeddable so you can add them to blog posts or pages on your site.
• There’s an Airtable App: Both for mobile and desktop, there’s an Airtable app so you can access everything easily from any device.

Airtable can be a bit of a learning curve to get used to initially, especially when transitioning over from other spreadsheet tools, but trust us when we say that once you’ve used Airtable to its fullest potential you’ll never go back to using any other spreadsheet tool. It’s the Cadillac of spreadsheets and it’s the future of spreadsheet innovation. They also offer lots of helpful videos through their Airtable YouTube channel and other useful guides, videos, and a help center right in the app as well.

Our Content Topics SpreadSheet in Airtable

Our content strategy revolves around two main aspects of our Content Strategy Airtable base: Our Content Topics tab and our Content Schedule & Promotion Strategy tab. These two separate spreadsheets are the foundation of our content strategy as well as our promotion strategy.

Our Content Topics tab is the main hub that our content strategy preparation revolves around. It’s the place where we input any ideas or inspiration we have in regards to content we want to create, guest contributors we want to collaborate with and generally the future of where we want our content to go. This Airtable tab is basically a dumping ground where anything and everything related to content topics goes, and we generally like to keep it fairly unstructured so that we can easily copy and paste title ideas, links, images or anything else that has inspired us.

The main way we organize our Content Topics tab is into various “Content Categories” such as these:

• To Be Organized
• Posts to Write Soon
• Drafts Almost Ready to Be Published
• How-To/Instructional
• Longform SEO
• Reviews
• List Post
• Resources Post
• Opinion/Passion/Inspirational
• Guest Post
• Emergency Posts
• Case Studies

This way we can easily scroll to a category, see the content topic ideas we have for that specific category and then create a post based on the topics we find listed there.

This is our main hub that we refer to when planning our content strategy each quarter so that we can be sure that we’re creating content based on the topics we want to feature on the blog and content that our readers have asked to see on our site.

We like to keep it very open-ended and in a perpetual state of flow as we add new content ideas and remove ones we’ve completed, so there aren’t many rules that we follow within this tab.

Our Content Schedule Base in Airtable

CLICK HERE TO USE OUR TEMPLATEThe first tab houses, essentially, our day-to-day operations here at A Better Lemonade Stand. Content is key for us here as we help entrepreneurs to build, launch and grow better ecommerce businesses, and the main way we do that is through the free, accessible, actionable, informative and engaging content we create for our audience.

In order to create great content for our audience, we need to consistently be publishing relevant content, so we have a carefully planned and curated content schedule to help us be consistent, timely, organized and prepared to publish content on our blog regularly.

Without this Airtable tab, we would be directionless and unorganized, so it really is very important to us.

Let’s dive into each column of our Content Schedule:

• Post Title: This column simply lists the title of each post we have in our content schedule.
• Status: For this column, we’ve chosen to use Airtable’s “single select” feature which gives this column a drop-down menu of choices for us to label the progress of each article with. The 3 options we’ve chosen that any post can be labeled as are: “Published,” Ready to Publish,” or “Not Ready to Publish” which helps us to understand at a glance the status of each article in the schedule.
• Content Type: This column helps us get an overview of the content we’re putting out on a quarterly basis and includes categories such as just standard blog posts, case studies, roundup posts, reviews, super-posts (lengthy and often SEO focused or very important posts to our overall content strategy), annual campaigns or announcements so we can generally see the type of content we’re putting out regularly.
• Purpose/Goal: This column helps us to set the intention for each article so we can understand our purpose for publishing it. We discussed the importance of understanding the overall goal of each article earlier on in this article, and that’s what we do with this column.
• Category: Each article that we publish on our blog falls within our predetermined categories, which we keep track of in this column to see what type of content we’re putting out in which category and how often.
• Day: In order to keep a sense of which days of the week we’re publishing our articles on, we’ve included this column to help us easily keep track. In some quarters we’ve experimented with publishing on Tuesdays and Thursdays and in other quarters we only publish on Tuesdays, so this column helps keep track.
• Publish Date: This column keeps tabs on the actual date of publishing. It helps us to plan our content in advance and keep the articles organized in a chronological fashion.
• Email: This column includes the date that we send out our email newsletter to our audience, featuring the article as our main and newest blog post. As you’ll be able to see in our content schedule, we typically publish our articles on Mondays and then send out the article to our email list on Tuesdays. As we’ve mentioned earlier in this article, it helps to give the article some time to acquire social shares which acts as social proof when we later showcase the article in our email newsletter.
• Author: This column helps us to keep track of who the author of our content is, whether it’s our founder, regular contributors or guest authors.
• Keyword: As we discussed thoroughly in this article, keywords are the foundation of well optimized and competitively ranking articles, which is what we strive for, so this column is entirely dedicated to noting down our intended keyword for each article.
• Search Volume: This column works in conjunction with the Keyword column, and keeps track of the search volume for our target keyword. Keeping tabs on this metric helps us understand the size, volume, and importance of the article.
• SEO Optimized: This column is just a checkbox reminder for us to ensure that we’ve completed all the necessary SEO optimization requirements for each article, including the meta title, meta description, featured image, alt tags, URL slug, social titles, and descriptions, etc.
• Add to SERPWatcher: We keep track of all our major keywords in SERPWatcher to keep tabs on how our articles rank, so each time we publish a new article we add the keyword to SERPWatcher so we can keep tabs on it. To learn more about SERPWatcher, check out our SERPWatcher Review.
• Blog Post Link: To keep track of our articles and to ensure that they’re easily accessible to us, we add the blog post URL for each article into our content schedule.
• Google Doc: We typically create the draft of every article we write in a Google Doc first, so we also add the link to the Google Doc into the content schedule as well just so it’s easily accessible.
• Image Assigned?: Every article we publish gets its own unique feature image created by our in-house illustrator, so to ensure that the image is always ready to go for publishing day we have a checkbox in our content schedule to remind us that the feature image for each specific article has been assigned to our illustrator.
• Feature Images: When we receive the feature images from our illustrator (we have a main feature image that serves as the hero image for the article, and then two social media optimized images for Facebook and Twitter) we add them into our content schedule just to know that we have them, and then the images are easily accessible in case we need to access them again at any time.
• Images in Blogpost: Each blog post we create includes images within the body of the article, so in this column, we upload all the images used in the article just to make sure they’re accessible again in case we need them in future.
• Email Header: This is another column dedicated to images, but this time for the image we use as the feature image in our email newsletter for each article. It’ll be the same featured image that was used for the article, just a slightly different size. Again, we include it in our content schedule just for easily accessible reference.
• Author Bio: Occasionally our articles are written by guest contributors, so to keep track of their information, we have a column dedicated to saving their author bios so we never misplace or mix up an author and a bio.
• Author Image: In addition, we also keep tabs on their author headshot in our content schedule, again, just to keep track of them and to make sure we have the correct headshot for each contributor.
• Quarter: The very final column of this Airtable tab is the “Quarter” column. We organize our entire content schedule by quarters which makes planning and organizing content easier. We first started using Airtable for our content strategy in Q2 of 2017, so that’s why our content schedule starts there. We use Airtable’s “Group” feature to group our content schedule by the quarter, so it’s even easier to view and keep track of. When one quarter is done we’ll simply collapse the entire group so we can move on fresh to the next quarter.

Not only do we schedule all of our content in this Airtable tab, but we also have our promotion strategy checklist in this tab as well so we can easily access it and check it off for each blog post when we need to. Having it in this tab helps us to keep on top of it and make sure that the necessary promotion has been completed for each article.

Here are the columns that are dedicated to our promotion strategy:

• Email Campaign: This column helps us to keep track of our email newsletters for each article, we simply add in the link when we’ve created the campaign.
• Quuu Promote: Quuu Promote is another service that we frequently use to share our content across other relevant social platforms, so once we’ve added our latest article to Quuu Promote we can check it off in this column. This is a great tool to use to promote content across social platforms via influencers in your industry, no matter your niche.
• Post to Reddit: Reaching out to the Reddit community and posting content to relevant subreddits can be a great way to promote content. It takes a bit more work than other content promotion methods because it’s generally against the rules of Reddit to post promotional content and the audience there isn’t very receptive to it, but if you find the right niche (or subreddit) on Reddit and give value to the community while finding a way to share a link to your content, it can be a very worthwhile promotion method.
• IG Post: Posting to Instagram is part of our content promotion strategy, so we upload our Instagram image here for each article once it’s created.
• IG Story: As well as posting to our Instagram feed, we also publish to our Instagram story as it’s an easily accessible way for our audience to access our content because they can just swipe up on the link.
• Buffer: To automate our social media posting on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google+ we use Buffer. When we’ve scheduled in social posts for each article, we check it off in this column.
• FB Boost: Facebook ads are a powerful way to get our content in front of our audience, so we post about our content on Facebook and then boost the post.
• Link Building: For some of our content, in particular, we’ll work on specific link building tactics to help boost the article’s exposure and SEO value, so any of the link building techniques we’ve used we’ll keep track of in this tab.

So that’s our content schedule and promotion strategy explained! It’s something we’ve developed through trial and error over time, and something we adjust to favor our successes and work on the areas we can improve on. It’s likely something we’ll continually adjust as we learn new tactics and discover new tools, but this is what it’s looked like for a while and it’s what we’ve been most consistent with and brought us our current success.

Conclusion

Overall, content is about communicating a message and providing value. As a brand, once you’ve done those two things successfully, you can then ask for the sale.

Bear in mind that our content strategy took us years to develop, so we recommend starting slowly and building up your own content strategy one piece at a time. Use this information to your advantage to help you avoid pitfalls and to prepare for success, but ultimately, pick and choose the parts that work best for your brand and implement the parts of the process that fulfill your ultimate goals as a company.

We hope the information and advice from our content strategy can help you establish your own successful blog so you too can provide remarkable content and value for your audience.