Content plans are a vital tool for entrepreneurs and content creators who want to make and share content regularly but don’t want their lives to center around the question: What should I post next?
Whether you’re an entrepreneur, blogger, vlogger, podcaster, or another kind of online creator, you’ve likely faced this question. Along with it comes the stress of feeling left behind because someone else is always making something better, faster.
You know that the way to stand out is to be yourself and create content that you’re passionate about, but you can’t be yourself when you’re overwhelmed by the never-ending cycle of coming up with original ideas and producing great content.
This constant state of stress is often called the content treadmill. You’re always running, but you’re getting nowhere. As soon as you hit Publish, you’re scrambling to figure out what’s next.
If you haven’t tried using a content plan before, you need to make one… now! Generating content ideas and planning out your publishing schedule in advance will unleash you from the content treadmill and let you focus on what you love most: creating.
In this post, we’ll dive into the 5 main reasons why you need a content plan. If you’re not quite sure what a content plan is or how to make one, stay tuned. We’ll talk all about that in the next post. You can join our email list at the bottom of this post to get notified as soon as it’s published.
Anyway, let’s answer today’s question: Why do you need a content plan?
1. It Keeps You Organized
As a creative person, you probably have dozens of ideas bouncing around in your brain at totally inopportune moments. At least, that’s what happens to me. Hoping that those ideas stick around until you sit down to work is a game of chance you shouldn’t have to play.
When you have a content plan, you can capture the ideas that pass through your mind as they come up. Anytime you need some inspiration or you want to get ahead on your content, you have a backlog of ideas to help get you going.
You can even group similar ideas together to help you stay organized. If you’re a book reviewer, you can group your ideas by book genre or author. If you make DIY videos, you can separate ideas by holiday, season, material, color, or whatever else makes sense for you.
If you work on a team, your content plan lets you easily share your upcoming projects and overall vision. Everyone’s on the same page. If you work alone, you’ll never lose an idea, and you’ll never start your next piece from zero.
2. It Makes Your Work Intentional
When you’re on the content treadmill, the pressure to get to the next piece of content can scramble your work into a random and disjointed mess. It’s easy to value getting something, anything out the door over making sure that what you’re creating is actually valuable for your audience.
One of the many problems with that frame of mind is that you could be missing out on some amazing opportunities. For example, let’s say you have a podcast about finance. You break down tax codes and accounting in simple terms for people who want to invest and grow their savings, so they can retire early or start a business. You’re creating a content plan to capture your ideas and get ahead on writing your episodes, and you see that you have an episode idea about filing taxes for small businesses.
If this idea came in a frantic I-have-to-get-something-up-by-Friday moment, you’d probably be able to throw something together that’s useful. But planning your content ahead gives you more time to engage with what you’re writing.
It turns out you’ve got a friend who does freelance accounting for startups who might agree to an interview. He could help clear up some difficult concepts and maybe tell a story or two about some companies he’s helped (or that failed miserably). And, you remember that a former colleague recently left the corporate world to start her own business. Her perspective could add a ton of value for your listeners, who are looking for advice from people who have taken the leap.
So, what started out as a useful podcast episode has turned into a goldmine of value with two perspectives outside of your own. By shaping your content ideas in advance, you have space to think things through and provide inspiration and advice to your audience in a way that you couldn’t before.
I think of this as being intentional with your content. What do you want to make? What do you want to say? Who else can offer a perspective that will benefit your audience? Spend less time scrambling and more time finding the best ways to give your audience something special.
3. It Helps You See the Bigger Picture
Intention is about figuring out what your content says, but the bigger picture is all about figuring out what it means. What drives you to create? What do you hope to achieve over the next few years? What content will get you to where you want to be?
It’s hard to see past your next piece of content when you’re in a constant slog. A content plan lets you take some time to align your content with your passions and tune in to the bigger picture behind what you do and why you do it. You may find a renewed sense of excitement for your work. When you create something close to your heart, you create something meaningful—to you and to your audience.
4. It Lets You Maximize Your Time
The most tangible benefit of content planning is that you can sit down for a
If you’re not naturally a planner, this may sound painful to you. It may even sound like a waste of time. Finding a block of time to spend just on thinking isn’t for everyone, but I recommend trying it to the extent that makes sense for you. You might not enjoy the full routine of listing ideas, organizing them, prioritizing them, making titles, jotting down some quick thoughts, and setting a schedule. But it’s possible that you’ll enjoy listing and prioritizing your ideas, or simply deciding your next ten blog post titles. You may find that going through some kind of planning process will help you come up with more ideas than you knew you had in you.
You might be thinking, But then what? I’ll eventually have to go through this all over again! How does this save time?
Here’s where the value of a content plan truly shines. You do have to come back to your plan and update it periodically, but the time commitment to update something that’s already there is way smaller than coming up with a new plan from scratch every time.
When you’re working off no plan at all, each time you sit down to create your next piece of content is like that one big planning session. You’re starting from nothing (or very little). Your content plan gives you a head start. All you have to do is look at what’s ahead and course correct if necessary.
You decide how much time you want to invest upfront, and what you want to do with that time. That one initial planning session can feed your content schedule over many months. You never have to question what’s next because you’ve already done the thinking ahead of time.
But what happens when plans change?
5. It Lets You Be More Spontaneous
Yes, creating a plan to let you be more spontaneous sounds counterintuitive. But I believe that having a general content plan lets you more easily move things around when something inevitably pops up, whether it’s an opportunity, a news story, a life event, or a random burst of inspiration.
If you’re a video game blogger, for example, your content plan might change in six months when four major games in your niche are
Without a content plan, a surprise like this can set you back. You were on a roll but something threw you off course, so now you’re faced with another “what’s next” moment. But with a content plan, you can shift your plans around whatever’s popped up and then get right back on track.
Get Off the Content Treadmill
A content plan frees you from the content treadmill because it helps you stay organized, intentional, and aligned with the bigger picture. It also lets you figure things out ahead of time so you can plan once instead of every time you sit down to create. When surprises force a change in your schedule, you can adapt your plan and get back on track.
At this point, you might be wondering what exactly a content plan looks like and how it can apply to your work. We’ll talk about that in the next post.
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