Do you use monthly content themes to fill your annual editorial calendar?
Do you feel like you’ve covered every possible element of your core content hubs?
Are you bored of your own writing?
Then let monthly content themes help you eek out content marketing on a regular basis. Even when your brain feels void of new ideas and you’re staring at a blinking cursor and a blank screen.
How do they work?
Take a monthly content themes approach to your annual content marketing. Reassess the content you created and updated during the past year. By going through your existing content marketing, you see what resonated best with your audience and which content can be updated for future use.
This streamlines your content marketing and blog creation process with monthly content themes for better performance!
Why Use Monthly Content Themes?
Monthly content themes help you to lay out your content marketing for an entire year.
They started with print magazines. They use themes to plan and coordinate their editorial and advertising.
For example:
- Women’s fashion magazines publish their mega-fall issue in August.
- The Economist publishes a Technology Quarterly.
By creating specialty issues, these magazines use a content hook to lure additional readers and attract targeted advertisers. In turn, this results in broader reader interest and more revenues.
What does this mean for your content marketing and blog?
Use these hooks to create or update existing content.
Specifically, a content hook is the idea or story that lures readers into your content. To maximize the impact, integrate it into your headline, subtitle and keyword phrase focus.
I borrowed the idea of content hooks from Brandscaping author Andrew Davis. He defined a content hook as:
“A [content] hook is, quite simply, a unique content concept that is designed to ensnare and trap your unsuspecting audience into consuming and sharing your content.”
A content hook is sticky in the Chip and Dan Heath Made-To-Stick sense of the word.
Adapting the term more broadly to your monthly blog content yields themes. The use of monthly themes is grounded in traditional magazine publishing to supports editorial creation and related advertising.
3 Ways monthly content themes support your blog content creation:
- Reduce content ideation. The monthly themes focus the process of brainstorming blog post ideas. (BTW—Here are 125 free blog post ideas to inspire you.)
- Create easy-to-replicate content frameworks. Content doesn’t need to be created from scratch each time. You have a blog post architecture.
- Ensure you revise and repromote evergreen content when appropriate. This long-playing content is low cost and helps provide time for longer new content.
3 Steps to create monthly content themes
Use monthly content themes to vary your blog content through out the year. They keep your blog and content seasonally fresh and consistent.
1. Gather your content planning information
Examine the following strategies and plans to ensure that your blog doesn’t exist in a vacuum.
- Blog or content marketing mission statement and/or goals. Ensure your content is aligned with your business needs.
- Marketing persona. Meet your audience’s information needs, when where and how they want it. At a minimum, answer these questions:
- WHO needs information (role)?
- WHAT information do they need?
- WHY do they need information?
- WHEN do they need information?
- WHERE do they seek information?
- Product offering by month. Give prospects and customers product information they actively seek and answer their pre-purchase questions.
- Marketing promotions by month. While your blog posts should be promotion-free, help prospects and customers with how-to information.
- Other conferences and/or business events. Assess the content needed by other areas of your business (not just marketing). Where appropriate create related content for your blog.
2. Select your monthly content themes
Ideally, select a theme for each month. Before creating monthly content themes from scratch, review the past year’s content.
- Do you already have monthly content themes? It may be masquerading as holiday content. If so, does the holiday make sense for your business?
- Do you have long-playing content you update and/or repromote? If so, schedule it. Long playing content requires less resources than new posts. (Here’s an explanation of the 5 core types of content your blog and business need. It explains long-playing content.)
- Do you have content related to monthly content themes elsewhere in your organization? It may be unused in another department like sales or customer service. Like long playing content it needs to be updated or repromotion to be effective.
A good rule of thumb is one theme per month. Give your blog calendar structure while allowing for other types of content.
Let your marketing promotions, product offerings and events be a guide. People within your business will need content for these efforts. Therefore, why not create all related content at the same time to reduce resource use and to maintain consistent branding.
Here are some suggested monthly content themes most businesses can use. They’re based on seasonal or monthly events.
- January: Fresh Start or Get In Shape (Think beyond weight!)
- February: Groundhog’s Day (February 2), 14 Days of Love (Valentine’s Day) or President’s Day.
- March: Patrick’s Day Green (March 17), Spring Cleaning, or Plan Your Garden (Use the image of “seeds”).
- April: April Fool’s Day (April 1-Show Your Fun Side), Taxes (April 15 –Don’t worry–We’ve got you covered with 99 Titles that don’t tax you) or April Showers (Consider the things that can rain on your customers’ life.)
- May: Mother’s Day, May Flowers, Graduation or Memorial Day (The Unofficial Summer Kickoff)—Here are 50 Summer blog post ideas.
- June: Father’s Day and School’s Out
- July: Independence Day (July 4), On The Beach, or Summer Vacation
- August: Back-to-School (Educate your audience)
- September: Fall
- October: Fall foliage or Halloween
- November: Thanksgiving
- December: Holidays (12 Days of Christmas) or Winter
Include related conference content in your monthly content themes. (BTW—Here’s how to create conference content before, during and after. You can apply these ideas to any company event.)
3. Schedule weekly blog posts aligned with your monthly content themes
Once you have a set of monthly content themes, brainstorm a set of blog post ideas for each theme. These blog posts can be individual content servings or a related series.
Roger Parker has a very useful methodology for creating a blog post series (or any content for that matter). Once you have your monthly content themes, you can adapt it to brainstorm weekly articles or a related series of content. In a nutshell, the 3 key points are:
- Focus on one of your audience’s unmet needs. Examine your marketing persona and your mission statement to find areas of overlap.
- Determine the result you want. What do you want your reader to do as a consequence reading your series?
- Structure the blog post series. Think beginning, middle and end. Introduce your idea in as a problem-solution and outline each core idea with a brief summary. Craft a separate post for each idea using the same post structure. Conclude with a summary post and your call-to-action.
Depending on your business and current content offering, determine your blog or content frequency.
- Small businesses, not-for-profits or solopreneurs and/or slow business periods: Publish fresh content weekly since resources are at a premium.
- Larger businesses and/or busy business periods (like the holidays): Publish more frequently. One advantage of monthly content themes: They provide an unstated rational for breaking with your regular content scheduling.
Monthly Content Themes Bottom Line
Monthly content themes structure to your content marketing to keep your content blog content and keep your blog looking visually fresh.
Even better using monthly content themes enables you to batch your content creation. This can reduce content costs while allowing for broader distribution through the use of related content.
Monthly content themes also reduce redundant work.
Happy Marketing,
Heidi Cohen
Editors Note: This post was originally published on December 8, 2016. It has been updated with new content.
Get Heidi Cohen’s Actionable Marketing Guide by email:
Want to check it out before you subscribe? Visit the AMG Newsletter Archive.
Photo Credit: https://unsplash.com/collections/431336/calendar?photo=IUY_3DvM__w (Creative Commons Zero)
5 Responses to Monthly Content Themes: How To Get Your Blog Content On Track