When you’re blogging, it’s important to make your plans ahead of time for the content that will appear on your blog. This should be based on the season as well as the products and services you plan to promote or launch.

Survey your audience

Just because you’ve studied your audience once doesn’t mean you shouldn’t poll them occasionally to make sure you’re still delivering the information they need and want. Try a quarterly survey so you can find out what they think and gain deeper insight into their issues.

Research your niche

Stay up to date in your niche. Read industry news and study regular news for clues about the state of your niche. Look to the future for killer technologies that could turn your niche on its head.

Take a look at the competition

You should always be aware of what your competition is doing. Not to copy them, but to stay one step ahead in any way you want to compete with them.

know what’s coming

Not all businesses are seasonal, but your entire audience is. They think of things in terms of certain seasons depending on where they are in their life. For example, if they have school-age children, they think differently during back-to-school than during the summer. Also, if you have a product or service launch or other event coming up, you should plan for it in the quarter before the event.

Know your realistic schedule

If you have a regular job, kids at home, or other responsibilities that will get in the way of your blog, be honest when creating a schedule for yourself. If you have a lot to do, set a realistic blogging schedule around these other responsibilities.

Brainstorm Topics

Once you’ve set up some of this other information, it’s important to take some time to think about themes based on the information you’ve gathered earlier, in addition to events you know are coming up. At this point, nothing is wrong, just write it down.

Organize your topics

Take the brainstormed topics and rank them for your blog. Throw out anything that doesn’t fit. Then organize and combine them with the seasons, events and products you want to promote.

Create a publishing schedule

Add everything to a publishing calendar. Here you enter the information so that during the times you have set aside to write and produce content, you can get down to business.

Take the time to create

Now that you have everything set up for you, whenever you have time to work you can pull the information from the publication calendar and get going. You can also easily look ahead to see if some content needs to be outsourced.