This morning, I listened to a terrific episode of the Email Marketing Show with Janet Murray of Courageous Content.

In this podcast, Janet spoke about how to plan content for a year without becoming overwhelmed.

I can already feel people getting overwhelmed.

No worries. It’s simple…sort of. But it does involve planning.

Let me explain by pretending I am the content director for a company that creates bamboo coffee cups.

Niche, I know.

Start by asking yourself what BIG thing is happening in each quarter that your business needs to get ready for. The big thing in each quarter can be related to a sale, to seasonality, to an event, the sky is the limit.

Here’s an example:

Quarter 1 (Jan-Mar)

Quarter 2 (Apr-Jun)

Quarter 3 (Jul-Sep)

Quarter 4 (Oct-Dec)

Given that my fictional bamboo coffee cup company is sales-driven, 3 of the 4 big things are related to sales cycles.

Let’s focus on the first quarter for this example.

I need to sell 1,000 tickets to this conference on sustainability that I am putting on, but selling 1,000 tickets takes time.

So where do I begin?

First, I need to know when the conference is and then work backwards. In this example, the conference is March 1, 2022.

All of my content should work towards ‘selling’ this conference to interested parties. Here are a few ideas I came up with to help achieve that:

That’s a pretty good start and a number of those ideas (E.g. sharing the bios of 12 people/businesses in attendance) can fulfill a month’s worth of content on its own.

You can replicate this checklist of ideas for the week leading up to the conference (Final push for sales) and after the conference (highlights).

My audience will become annoyed if all I post about is this damn conference. While the conference provides me with 30-40 pieces of social media, blog, and email content, it can’t be the only thing I share with my followers.

My suggestion is to tackle one big idea each quarter as well, and break it down into smaller blogs, videos, emails, and social media posts.

As an example, my big idea for the first quarter could be How companies are tackling global waste from single-use items.

This can spawn content about:

You get the point. There’s a lot there.

The progression of how we got from one quarter down to content for the week and even day of the month should be obvious by now.

Your big piece(s) of content act as pillar(s) for the smaller pieces of content.

This is called pillar content or hub-and-spoke content. Here’s an example from the home remodeling industry this I found to be clear and helpful.

You can easily see how one broad industry/term can be broken out into a number of different ideas that are all related to the main business.

Also, you can build spokes off of spokes! Break that content down even more.

If you follow this strategy, I guarantee that you will have 4 pieces of content across email, social media, blogs, videos, and podcasts every single week.

Speaking of pillar content, this email could’ve been broken down into a series of emails that were far more comprehensive than what I’ve shared here today.

Oh well.

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Adios amigos,Andrew