COMMON MISTAKES WHEN MAKING A CONTENT CALENDAR

What should not be done when creating a content calendar:

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Give up at the moment when it seems to you that all interesting ideas for articles have been exhausted.

On the contrary, it is a high time to take a quality leap forward. If you have professional knowledge of your market and independently work on the website content, then over some time when you inevitably feel the lack of good ideas

It begins to seem that everything possible has been already written on this subject matter.

This is a false feeling; it appears as a result of lack of professional knowledge in some particular niche, or insufficient dipping into the matter. What should be done in such a case? Every time dig deeper and deeper. The deeper you go, the more you learn about the subject, and correspondingly the more your potential expands in terms of the content creating.

Follow the crowd. Temptation to duplicate something that others write is great.

You should strive to or search for the topics where you’ll be able to say something new, or to cover trivial common topics in some surprising way. For instance, you create the content for a travel agency, and you have an article about recreation in Paris in your calendar for the next month. Is it worth to write about local landmarks? Everyone knows about them already. What new can you say to people publishing another one article saying that the Notre-Dame de Paris and the Field of Mars should be visited, and a picture of the Triumphal Arch at the Place Charles de Gaulle should be taken? Maybe, it would be better to write an article about the nooks in Paris the tourists should better avoid unescorted by locals (believe, if desired you’ll put in all necessary landmarks in such article as well). Such article shall have a better chance of being liked and reposted than a trivial description of Parisian antiquity.

Forget about provocativity. Good topic is not always provocative.

You can write fine article not dispelling any myths and not transmitting extraordinary thoughts. But if you manage to express an unexpected idea in your material, reveal the problem in a way different from that the others have used to understand before you, your chances of success with the audience will grow. The main thing is to write honestly and only truth.

Propose the topic not having studied it thoroughly.

When you as a content strategist create an editorial portfolio, you should make it as for yourself. Imagine that in a month you’ll have an amnesia, so you just won’t be able to remember all materials collected on such topic. You have to reflect everything you’ve collected on the topic, in a draft title of the article, in interesting links, in a summary to the topic (brief revealing of the article contents). In order in a month while suffering an amnesia you will be able to understand yourself full well. What is it necessary for? This is your professional attitude to your business and respect to a copywriter who is to write an article on the topic proposed by you.

Try to express your idea clearly in order author could understand your thought. If the content strategist has a creative synergy with a copywriter, the latter will right just what the content strategist wants to see. It is common to well-coordinated teams. But it is not a problem if a copywriter is an independent personality and thinks it better to express his/her own thoughts, rather than to use notes of a content strategist. It is also a case, and it is good as well. Such copywriters simply have to be content strategists by themselves and create topics for themselves personally.

Disregard newsjacking.

Good approach to content creating is to always strive to write on hot topics. Monitor events occurring in the market, and following recent news create hot materials on explosive topics that might cause a heavy tide of interest within first two or three hours. Thus you’ll manage to arouse interest of the audience to your website and significantly increase the traffic in a very short time.

Think that your content marketing strategy success not primarily depends on the quality of your content.

It does not. Your content and its quality is all. Main reason of failure is that it is not interesting. And most often the content calendar is not a problem, but its implementation. One can write much differently on one and the same topic. And this particular is a challenge in content marketing – to create a quality content. It is hard to produce a genius article day by day. It is still hard even once a week. But it is necessary. You should do this by hook or by crook. One week – one fascinating article. No success will be reached without this. Audience has been through everything, today it is interested only in the best stuff.