Lúgh Studio’s Ultimate Guide To Content Planning And Organization

Content planning and organization is an important part of your content marketing. But what are the most important steps to the process, and how do you go about it for the best possible results?

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Today we are breaking down what you have to do to plan and organize your content most effectively. We will also provide some extra insights into the creation process. Let’s get started.

Why Planning And Organizing Your Content Is Important

Planning Your Content

Organizing Your Content

Creating Your Content

Tools That You Can Use To Plan And Organize Your Content

Conclusion

Why Planning And Organizing Your Content Is Important

Let’s start with the entire reason behind planning and organizing your content. As we point out in our ultimate guide to content marketing, creating educational content for your audience has a ton of benefits. Do it right, and content can:

  • Position your brand as an expert guide to the problems faced by your customers
  • Introduce your product or service as a solution people are willing to pay for
  • Deepen relationships and trust with people over time

However, to get the biggest bang for your buck, content creation also needs to come with a fair amount of planning and organizing. This keeps you more consistent, makes collaboration with various team members much easier, ensures important steps of content creation aren’t forgotten, and saves your business time and money.

So, the million dollar question: how exactly do you do it? Let’s find out in the next section. 

Planning Your Content

We will start the ultimate guide with the planning stage. This is the first stage of creating content that gets results for your company, and it’s important to intentionally go through each step.

1) Conduct keyword research

The first step to planning your content is also the most important. Keyword research is where everything should start. Skip this step and your content marketing is more of a guess. Sure, you might hit the mark sometimes, but the topics you are educating your audience about are more “feelings” instead of a response to demand.

A great tool that you can use is Ahrefs. This is one of the best keyword research tools on the market. That’s because you not only have access to data regarding a search term’s total monthly search volume and overall difficulty to rank for, but so much more. Using data from features like content gap and backlink checker, you are able to create a content calendar on topics proven to be of interest and value.

2) Fill out your content calendar

Once you have your topics, it’s important to make a calendar. While this doesn’t need to be so high tech, a software that allows you to share with other people, drag and drop as you see fit, and make changes quickly and easily can really streamline the content creation process. 

That’s why we use the tool Trello. With this software, it’s easy for us to coordinate, share resources, and add who is responsible for what in our content creation. This ensures that we not only keep content planning top of mind, but stay organized when doing so.

Of course, while a content schedule laid out ahead of time can help you with planning, there’s no reason to stick too much to it. There will inevitably be events that come up that you might want to write about. Perhaps there is a development in your industry that you want to make a video about, and you know your audience would find a lot of value in it. Just because it’s not written months ahead of time in your content calendar doesn’t mean you can’t make it!

3) Map out the process

After you’ve organized your content across your content calendar, it’s important to have a detailed process in place for each piece you create. For example, it’s not enough to assign somebody the task “Write a blog post about content planning.” Instead, there are multiple components to this task that can be mapped out ahead of time. This might include:

  • Research exact keyphrase for post
  • Draft outline
  • Get feedback on outline
  • Create post
  • Get feedback on post and implement
  • Reach out to all sources mentioned
  • Email to relevant subscribers
  • Post on social media accounts

Do you see how these are all steps that maximize the value of the blog post? Unfortunately, without a detailed list of “To Do’s” for your content, your process will be disorganized and often neglect to include important steps like the one above. This is something to consider when planning your content.

Organizing Your Content

Once you have your content planned, it’s worth reflecting on how you will organize it. It’s important to note that this process can have some overlap with the initial planning stage, as some of your progress in organization can influence what you decide to plan in your content calendar.

First, though, let’s go over some of the reasons that clear organization of your content is so important. While there are numerous reasons you should think about the organization of your content before you start the creation process, here are the main three:

1) Organized content makes the content consumption process more enjoyable for your audience. When you are able to not only provide them quality content, but do it in a way that is both organized and connected to the other content you offer, your results will be much better as a result.

2) Organized content is preferred by search engines. When you have a clear structure to the content that you put on your site, your website is seen as more professional and Google will give it preference in search results compared to similar sites. This naturally brings more traffic to your website

3) Organized content shows you other topics you might cover. Structure, in many ways, is the catalyst to creativity. Organizing your content shows you not only what you have already created, but what you might still make. This is valuable for your ability to consistently produce valuable content over the long term. 

Now, as for how you organize your content? Let’s take a look at three of the most common approaches:

Content pillars. Big “pillar” pieces of content, with smaller and more specific pieces of content that link to each other and back to the pillar piece. For more information on this strategy, check out our post on content pillars. In it you will read about why this is an important strategy and how to approach it.

Hub and spoke. Think about what a hub and spoke on a tire look like – this is a pretty good representation of how this model works. Here is a somewhat simplified way of thinking about the two kinds of content you will make with this approach:

  • Hub pieces of content: The main piece of content that covers a topic in detailed depth.
  • Spoke pieces of content: Covering the smaller topics that the hub piece covers, but in much more detail.

While this is quite similar to the “pillar” approach, there are in fact differences. Check them out here.

Buckets. The “buckets” approach is also similar to the previous two, but it’s based on a unique question: what are the questions that my audience keeps asking me? These questions should form the main three or four topics that you create content on. This is a good strategy because you are basing your content creation on questions that your audience has actually asked you. That means it’s of proven interest instead of something you merely “think” might be good for them. 

Of course, you still want to base your content planning on keyword research, as this is likely a higher guarantee of success. That said, if you are going to follow the bucket approach, always be on the lookout for questions from your audience. While these can be asked directly to you, you can also find good material for content in things like Amazon reviews.

Creating Your Content

Now that you have both planned and organized your content, it’s time for creation! While we point out some of this advice in our ultimate guide to content marketing, below you will find a useful refresher on the most important points.

1) Stick to a schedule

People want consistency in the content that they consume. This is why you see some of the biggest brands sending a newsletter, creating a YouTube video or publishing a blog post on the same day (or days) each week. Of course, how often you create content is also important. After all, the best results with content marketing usually come with a relatively consistent output. That said, far more important is consistency. So create a schedule that you think you can stick to…and then stick to it! 

At Lúgh Studio, for example, we stick to a fairly strict schedule of “one blog post each Thursday, one ultimate guide per month.” This is just some of the content that we produce, but it seems to make sense for our blog. 

2) Mix up the format

While content creation is essential for a lot of businesses, it’s also worth thinking about the formats that your audience has grown accustomed to. Do you only have a blog? Is your only production a steady stream of YouTube videos? Do you only publish white papers or deep dives into a topic that take a ton of time and research?

While these are better than nothing, it’s also important to remember that people like when you mix things up. It is refreshing to see a new format and also appeals to a wider variety of people. This builds your audience over time and raises awareness of what you have to offer. 

So think about what you normally don’t do. Maybe it’s time to start a podcast or publish a weekly newsletter. However you decide to branch out, make sure to measure the results of your content. No use sticking with something new if it doesn’t get results! 

3) Reuse content you have already made

You put so much effort into creating high quality content; why not simply reuse it? This can take many forms. Here are two of the most common ways to do it:

  • Publishing the same piece of content, but in a different format
  • Breaking a piece of content down into smaller chunks and publishing those individually 

Of course, this isn’t to say that you should simply copy exactly what you did onto a different platform. Instead, you will want to make a few changes based on the new format you are working with. For example, perhaps you take a longer blog post that you wrote and break it into separate Twitter posts. You might also take a YouTube video you recorded and shorten it into a podcast episode. Whatever you do, make sure you are still first and foremost providing value. 

4) Update your content

Over time, you will start to build up a solid collection of content for your company. These are blog posts, videos, pictures and infographics that will help your audience, deepen the trust they have in you, and introduce your solution as naturally as possible.

However, content only stays competitive if it’s updated relatively frequently. Think about it: the number one post on “keyword research” in 2012 would be outdated by 2022 if it wasn’t updated. The topic has changed enough in the past decade that updates, edits and additional information are a requirement to retain the top spot.

The same goes for your content. While some of the content you create may indeed be evergreen, it’s worth it to always be thinking about how you can make your content even better. Give this post a read for the best ways to consistently update your content when it’s most needed.

Tools That You Can Use To Plan And Organize Your Content

Now that you have the three stages of content mapped out, it’s time to get started. Unfortunately, it can be difficult to know how best to approach the process. Things can feel overwhelming, and maybe you’re not entirely sure which tools you should be using. 

With that in mind, we will end our ultimate guide with a section on the best tools that will help you plan and organize your content both easily and effectively. 

  • Ahrefs. While we already mentioned this tool, it’s worth a reminder. Ahrefs really is the best tool you can use to get started with keyword research. It will also help you with competitive research. Check it out!
  • Trello. Another tool we mentioned. While we will link it again here, here is a handy guide for using Trello. It’s a powerful tool for organizing content if you know how to take full advantage of it.
  • Asana. One of the best project management tools out there, Asana is also great for a company that prioritizes content creation. With an emphasis on “tasks,” Asana is especially useful for “mapping out the process” of content planning.
  • Google. Specifically Google documents. This is a tool used by tons of companies for a reason – collaboration on content is both quick and easy.
  • Buffer. If you use social media at all, Buffer is a great tool for both planning and publishing all of your content from one central platform.

Conclusion

Knowing how to effectively plan and organize your content can have great results for your content marketing. And with how important content is to the growth of your company, these are two skills worth mastering!

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Follow our guide and suggestions and let us know if you ever have any questions!

Are you an enterprise, nonprofit or small business looking for help on your website? Give us a shout! We provide a free consultation. Email us at info@lughstudio.com or call us at (718) 855-1919!

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