Get a Blueprint for Your Business Blog

September 30, 2009 by yelena
Filed under Building Better Blog, blog

I wouldn’t be the first to say that one can learn much more from failures than from successes. When I started my first business blog, I failed pretty miserably at it, but learned a few good lessons. Some were strategic, some – tactical, and others – operational (yes, it was a bit of everything).

One of the tactical mistakes was relying 100% on spontaniety when writing blog posts. Here’s what happened. I had a very good idea (or so I thought) of what to write about. I jumped in and banged out my first 10 posts in my first 2 weeks.

Then it got a bit harder to come up with fresh ideas for blog posts. As a result my posting frequency plummeted. I don’t think I managed to post more than once a week after the first month. And then there were weeks when I didn’t write anything at all.

Oh, I remember sitting in front of my computer just staring at the blank screen… Then again, I would get a really good idea in a car on the way to pick up my son or while I was shopping or at a networking event. Guess what – by the time I’d get home and turn on my PC, I’d forget most of my ideas.

That was before I learned about mindmaps and editorial calendars. I previously wrote about using mind mapping tools to stay organized. The same concept can be applied to organizing ideas for a blog. So even before I set up this blog, I spent time creating a blueprint for it – a mindmap (click on the map below to enlarge).

Over time this mindmap went through several revisions and changes. My first map was more of a “brain dump” than a blueprint. But that’s the beauty of a mindmap – it can be very flexible and will, if well-maintained, reflect changes in your ideas, strategies and steps you plan to take.

If you need a template to build your blog’s mindmap, then I highly recommend checking out Dragos Roua’s blog mapping post. As you can see, my map closely matches his (unintentionally). There are several differences though:

Posts section – I used to put all my posts (and ideas for the new ones) into the mindmap, but quickly gave up. It was simply too cumbersome and time-consuming for me. Plus, for balancing and scheduling purposes I needed something more linear than a mindmap when it came to tracking individual posts. More on this a bit later.
Headline section – again, not something that I use (but it’s a great idea). I only open my map about once every couple of weeks, so I keep the headline in a different document (again, more on this – later).
Far-out ideas – this is something I added very recently to my map (and for several reasons prefer to keep very private). These are strange, untested, unthought-through, very ambitious and otherwise “far-out” ideas that I might implement in some form in the future. Essentially, it’s a future-oriented brain dump.

One thing I mentioned was that keeping individual posts’ titles and ideas in this map did not work for me. Instead, I now keep a separate editorial calendar. An editorial calendar is simply a calendar of topics (and possibly titles) you want to blog about over the next few months.

I prefer keeping mine in Google Docs so I can access it from anywhere. Also, I prefer to keep it as simple as possible. I update this calendar with actual titles and post URLs once a week (see below).

Even if you only post 2-3 updates each week to your blog, you’ll find that an editorial calendar can help

Keep track of ideas - remember how I said I’d get some good ideas and then forget about them before the day was over? Not any more. Now I jot them down on pieces of paper (post-its, backs of business cards, etc) and transfer into my calendar at the end of the day.

Brainstorm – once I start putting post ideas down in the calendar, new ones start popping up. It’s kind of like microwaving a back of popcorn – takes a bit to warm up, but then it’s like pop-pop-pop – next thing I know, I have enough ideas for a couple of months.

See patterns and balance – reviewing the calendar will help you notice interesting patterns in your posts. It helped me come up with an idea for the Best for Last category a few months ago. You also get a bird’s eye view of category usage – which ones are being neglected and which ones get too much attention.

Keep your marketing channels in synch – if you use several content-heavy channels in your marketing – newsletter, direct e-mails, articles, online groups, etc - it makes sense to synch them with your blog. You’ll get a couple of benefits from this. One is by re-using, repurposing, and expanding your blog posts you’ll spend a lot less time coming up with content. Another one is the message you send to your audience will be a lot more consistent.

In my experience, it really pays off to take some time upfront to draw a blueprint for a blog and build an editorial calendar for at least a couple of months.

Technorati Tags: business blog, mind map, editorial calendar, blog calendar