Interesting and compelling content is the fuel needed to power every successful inbound marketing strategy. Fresh and timely content is the most valuable kind and is what people online are mostly looking for.
Regardless of which industry you’re in, content benefits your online presence in 3 ways:
- Gives search engines additional material for which you can appear in the search engine results when people are searching using your target keywords phrases
- Gives your website visitors informational and educational material that helps to demonstrate your expertise and authority in a particular subject area
- Gives people a reason to contact you to get access to information that can better help them define or solve a particular problem
Content marketing is the process of using content to establish yourself as a thought-leader in your industry through publishing an interesting blog, submitting articles to online article directories, and making relevant updates to your social network accounts.
These various activities will have a much better chance of helping you achieve your marketing goals, if they are coordinated through a content marketing plan that describes what and when you should publish online.
Using an Editorial Calendar for Content Marketing
The backbone of a content marketing plan is the editorial calendar. It contains a list of article topics distributed throughout the year that you can plan to publish to your blog and article directories. You should specify topics that are related to your industry, but are also relevant to the time of year so they will be relevant to that particular season.
Some good seasonal themes are:
- New Year’s Resolutions
- Spring Cleaning
- Summer Vacation
- Back to School
- The Holidays
- End of Year Summary
Take content topics related to your industry and organize them around these themes and you will have a solid editorial calendar around which you can execute your content marketing plan.
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Free Inbound Marketing Plan Template
As we kick-off 2011, it’s important for business owners to make sure they have a solid inbound marketing plan in place.
If you don’t have one already, here is a free template that will help you make sure you have clearly identified and aligned your business objectives and marketing activity.
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