How to Write Unique Blog Posts for a Whole Year - Exact Blueprint for Quality Blog Content Ideas
If you struggling to decide what to write about to have quality blog content, read how write unique blog posts for a whole year. I share with you my exact blueprint for quality blog content ideas:
The “How”: How to trigger your creativity to plan unique blog posts for a year in just 1 day.
The “Why”: Have clear intent & purpose to create a blog content plan with unique blog posts:
Transform your blog posts from information to value for your audience.
Achieve value for both, you & your audience with your content writing.
The “What”: How to define your blog posts ideas for a full year.
Step 1: Big picture first! How to choose 4-5 distinct content writing categories
Step 2: How to research trends, keywords & seasonality to define quality blog content.
Step 3: Why it pays to be different, be you.
The “When”: How to define your blog content calendar for a year to reach your goals:
How to make your blog content calendar for a full year!
You need visuals for quality blog content.
You need to write blogs but… What to write? Why do you need a blog posts plan…
You feel anxious because you want to create more unique blog posts to drive traffic to your website.
You are running out of ideas. You think you have already published all you had to say…
You don’t know what to publish in your free content compared to your paying course. Are you giving away your paying course??
You need to produce consistent, evergreen content but can’t manage to do it week on week.
You feel you have run out of creativity…
Others write what you had in mind before you… or it has already been written, so what’s the point, you think.
Or maybe you keep on generating blog content ideas but your blog does not attract your ideal community/ clients.
You have zero comments. Little organic traffic. Is this all worth the hustle? And, anyway, is blogging dead?
So how to create great quality blog content?
Plan it once a year, review it monthly and stop running out of blog posts ideas. Let me share you the exact blueprint for quality blog content ideas for a whole year.
The “How”: How to trigger your creativity to plan unique blog posts for a year in just 1 day
What did you say, Isabel??!!! Quality blog content ideas all generated in 1 day?? Really?
Yes, you can. It is easy and simple. And when I tell you how, you will think, “Oh, that’s much easier than I thought”!
You can absolutely plan your whole year blog content calendar in less than 1 day.
The right time is now. This is no longer the time to think, it is the time to do. You personally can make a huge difference to your results. You will feel so much better once you have your blog content ideas planned for a year!
To start your blog content creation and content planning, you need the right environment. Let’s have a look at an everyday example.
1. Create a different environment around you than your daily one
OPTION 1: Ideally, go to a completely different physical setting.
If your budget allows it, go to a different location for the day (by the beach, by the mountains, by the park, to a different zone in town).
You can also keep it simple and go to your favourite coffee shop for the day if they allow you to stay that long.
OPTION 2: If you need to stay home, get yourself set in a different room for the day (or the garden or the balcony if you have one and the weather is good).
OPTION 3: If you have no option to escape your everyday working space, create some difference. Put music on, move your desk around, make some easy changes to what’s on your desk, sit differently…
The point is, create an environment that breaks your routine. You are putting your brain into a different gear, and the changes will help trigger creativity unconsciously.
2. Avoid unwanted interruptions
Get off your emails for the day. Scary, I know. You will like it so much that you will do it more often! Hahaha!
Put your phone on plane during the periods of work. Catch up with things during the breaks if you have no other option.
Tell others around you that you can’t be disturbed.
And…
3. Schedule regular mini breaks (10-15min every 90min or so)
There is no point in working non-stop for the day!
When you are working on your blog content ideas it is exactly the same. You need the right environment to help your brain get into gear.
So what is the right environment?
There are 3 key things to set you up for generating a content planning calendar.
You need a different environment (we’ve covered that already).
The brain needs breaks to get back to maximum creativity. So take breaks regularly. Usually 90min to 2 hours of work followed by 10-15min breaks is a great combo.
During your breaks, do routine activities that don’t require your brain to think hard. For example, sorting out papers, even doing some house work.
Doing something repetitive, easy and almost boring during your breaks is scientifically demonstrated to create connections in your brain that trigger creativity. A super cool finding!
So don’t be afraid to take breaks and do something very different that does not require you to think. They will help a lot!
To sum up how to get ready to plan unique blog posts in just 1 day:
If you haven’t read it, check out my Do-not-Disturb Code in my blog about How To Be Productive Working From Home Series - Blog 1: Set Yourself Up For Success.
The “Why”: Have clear intent & purpose to create a blog content plan with unique blog posts
Well… get ready for something different to what you have heard before…
Usually the advice you get when thinking about blogging is: “Write about what you are passionate about, what you like.”
The fact is that the sentence should not stop there.
Transform your content plan from information to value for your audience
If you want to make of your blog your business, it is a real mistake to write about something just because you like that subject. Wait, no, no, I am not going crazy!
If your blog is your content strategy, and you want it to attract your ideal customers to your website, and then bring them to your sales funnel… you need to be thinking about what they are interested in reading.
Consider what your ideal client is interested about. What are their pain points, the problems they want solved.
The magic happens when you find the common zone between your passions and knowledge AND your ideal client interests and needs.
At that point your blog pots transform from content to value.
Achieve value for both, you & your audience
Is that all? Not really. You are in a great place now because, above all, you need to provide what your audience needs.
However…
You also need to truly align your products / services to the value your audience gets from your content.
What do I mean???
So. even before you start considering what you are going to create blog posts about... answer the question of why you are doing it.
What are you trying to achieve? What are your goals with your blog content ideas.
So…
You don’t create content just because it is your passion.
You don’t create content just because that’s what people are interested in.
You don’t create content just because you are trying to sell this product.
You DO create content with full intent, based on your goals, covering the areas of interest that both your audience and you have in common.
You can bring value with your passion and knowledge to help your audience with their needs / problems and as a result will achieve your goals (for instance, sell a certain product).
The “What”: How to define what blog posts ideas to write about for a full year
The struggles about blog content ideas come very often because you have the impression you have already shared all what you have to say about a certain subject. The main subject you originally decided to create your content about.
So then the anxiety comes… You need to generate your next piece and… you really just do not know what to write about. You seem to have run out of blog content ideas. You feel your brain is dry.
There is a much easier solution than you think.
Here is my exact blueprint for a full year of blog posts content in 3 simple steps.
Step 1: big picture first! How to choose 4-5 distinct categories
First of all, stop this big mistake: just creating content on one specific subject only.
As a general rule, work to create content about 4 to 5 different and inter-related categories of subjects for your blog posts. Here is an example, my own example.
A few things to highlight from this example are:
When defining your related content categories, go for categories that naturally drive into your product / service / affiliate product.
Content needs to naturally weed in what you want to sell, not the other way round.
If you define categories that do not link easily to your products, you will always struggle with including your product / services / affiliate products within in your content. And then you will not attract your ideal customers to your sales funnel.
Don’t be too mono-thematic (for example you only create content on one single theme). It is restrictive.
The reason to avoid this is that you will attract different people with different content.
This maximises your traffic growth.
Select categories that are different but related to maintain consistency.
If you select 5 completely unrelated areas for your blog posts categories, it is likely that Google will not understand what your content is about.
When Google does not establish expertise on a subject from the content in your website, it will not help with your SEO (how high in the Google searches your content will appear).
Think wide but don’t be random into too many different themes.
If you pick 5 unrelated categories of content, you will be creating confusion in your audience.
Experiment with related categories for your content.
Don’t be afraid to introduce something that shows more a personal interest (travel, in my case).
This helps create more of a personal touch and link to you.
It can really help promote some very different affiliate products yoo.
You can decide to be very niche but you still need 4-5 categories within your niche.
For example, you can decide to only create blog content ideas that address internet marketing for new mom bloggers…
If you decide to be very niche, still define different categories within your niche.
Remember if you want to monetise, some niches generate more money than others.
While you need to take sometime to decide on the categories, don’t spend days and days on it.
Decide your first view of the 4-5 categories in 1hour. You can always refine it or change it if there is something that does not work for you.
What’s important is to put some thought on the common space between these 3 key elements:
How your content will link to your products / services
What your audience is interested in:
Their struggles, their problems
Their dreams, their goals
What your passions and knowledge are
Step 2: How to research trends, keywords & seasonality to define quality blog content
Your next step is the one that will help you make blog posts that can go viral…
Why?
Because instead of creating what you think you want to say about the 5 categories you have defined…
… you are going to do some research on what your audience is really interested in consuming as content.
What? Research at this stage?! Yeap!
You will keep it simple but to the point.
The next step is to find 10 blog ideas per category. At this stage, it does not need to be perfect.
You are spotting ideas. In fact, you are brainstorming, and for your brainstorm you are going to look at a number of sources of ideas, to spot trends and opportunities.
And if you are wondering why 10 blog posts per category, it is to ensure you post weekly.
Spend some time (let’s say 1h per category, with a break between categories) to look at the following:
Amazon:
Type your chosen content category in Amazon and look at what ebooks are selling a lot recently.
Be mindful, some best sellers could have been published a while ago. So look at recent publications specially.
Look at the table of content to give you further ideas of content.
Other content creators:
Look at others in your category (their content, their social media…) and see what is their content about recently.
None of this is to copy what others are doing, it to spot trends and get inspiration.
Pinterest:
If you have already content in Pinterest, look at your analytics:
what pins are working well (repins and clicks).
what boards have more traffic.
If you are not active in Pinterest, don’t worry, you can still get plenty of insights from Pinterest:
Look at what Pinterest gives you when you type your category in the search bar.
Look at what the Pinterest dropdown search menu suggests.
Look at the pin subjects the search gives.
Pinterest is great to spot seasonality too:
Are there content subjects that are more important to cover at a certain time of the year?
For instance, on dieting, January shows a peak of searches driven by the new year resolutions.
Use Pinterest to do keyword searches and spot trends and seasonality. It is a great source of inspiration to define your blog ideas and get your blog content writing going.
Look at the dropdown menu in the the Pinterest search bar to see suggestions for more blog content ideas.
Google Trends:
Type your category in Google Trends and look at what people are typing as questions in Google.
Use Google Trends to find what people are searching related to your keywords for your blog posts ideas.
In this example, you see in the bottom right table the Related Queries to the keyword: vegan recipes. Because Thanksgiving is a few weeks away at the time of writing this blog, a Thanksgiving related search is trending.
Google Adsense (this is a bit more advanced method):
Google Adsense will help you do keywords searches and see how much that keyword is searched in Google.
If you haven’t got a Google Adsense account, you will need to create one. Don’t worry, you don’t need to pay.
For guidance on the step by step process to create the account, YouTube has plenty of easy to follow videos.
There is plenty of information in Google Adsense. At the beginning, while you get familiar with it, keep it simple.
Type the blog posts keywords you have identified in Amazon, other content creators, Pinterest and Google Trends and see what is driving more searches.
Make a note of the keywords you spot.
Your community:
All of the above is great… but there is nothing like having it direct from your ideal clients and your community.
Use your social media community and larger community to ask them questions. 2 key ones:
What are you struggling with that stops you from reaching your goals?
What do you dream of achieving in an ideal world with no limits?
The above list will help you identify 10 blog content ideas per category your audience is interested in. This last piece is the most important: blog ideas “your audience is interested in”. This is the reason this step is focused on research.
Here are a few bonus hacks to define quality blog content and blog traffic:
Spot gaps.
Gaps are blog ideas that are not yet well covered... but your audience is interested in. Gaps are gold. Don’t hesitate. Blog content writing of posts not yet much covered gives you clear differentiation.
Create evergreen content:
To maintain the traffic coming over time from a piece of content, create evergreen content.
Evergreen content is relevant year after year.
If what you create is just interesting for a short amount of time, once that moment goes, people will not go back to your content, and to maintain your traffic you need to keep on creating more posts.
Repurpose and update content:
Not every piece you publish in a year has to be a brand new blog post.
You can refresh and update old posts to give them a new life.
You can also repurpose your contents in different platform, which will make the life of you blog posts much longer.
Capture keywords and seasonality.
When you research the different sources, you will come across important keywords & seasonality. Cool. Make a note of this.
Don’t trying to define your killer title when you are defining your 12 month blog ideas plan.
Don’t spend time thinking exactly how you will name your different pieces of content.
You are simply defining what they will be about.
Step 3: Be different. Be you.
FANTANTIC!! You have now blog content ideas for a whole year of blog posts! 50 blog posts ideas. Are you done??
Spend now some time thinking about your approach:
At this stage of planning, think how your content will be different to all the information out there.
How you will provide value.
And don’t over do it. You will refine this in the future, when you will start creating the content.
Wow, I know, that’s a tough one.
One simple secrets: don’t be afraid of having a different opinion than most of the content on that subject!
Controversy is gold.
Avoid being a parrot, to just repeat what others say and that’s it.
Yeah, quite certainly you will have plenty of things in common. There is no need to reinvent the wheel every time.
Add your voice, your opinion, your angle in your blog posts. People choose to read your posts because of your personal approach.
It is about consciously daring to approach your content from a different angle. It is ok that some people disagree with what you say.
The advantage is that you will attract the right people, and they will be far more likely to become your best superfans.
Being different makes you more memorable.
Being different drives more engagement and comments.
Being different differentiates you and demonstrates your value.
Being different doesn’t mean being revolutionary.
It is ok to write about something that has already been written: put your spin to it.
Don’t be different for the sake of it. Be different because you want to share your views, your approach. Be YOU.
The “When”: How to define your blog content calendar for a year to reach your goals
So now you have:
4-5 categories of content.
10 quality blog content ideas per categories.
You have captured some keywords.
You have a view on the seasonality of the content.
You have identified old posts that you are going to refresh.
You understand the importance of evergreen content.
How to make your blog content calendar for a full year!
Time now to plan your blog content calendar. The calendar will define WHEN you will publish what content.
You can use tools or apps to summarise this (Google calendar, Google drive, Trello…) or simply post-its or just a piece of paper. Use the tools that work best for you.
What you want to make is a table that shows the 12 months of the year and your 4-5 categories.
Ideally, it will be very useful and highly strategic if you have the view of your planned product launches / campaigns too.
The video above shows the blog content calendar process visually:
Last, ensure you can refer to your content plan calendar easily.
It is great if you can see your blog content plan when in your desk. It will help you enormously drive your priorities for the month.
You are done!!! Super well done! Now you know exactly what you will publish when.
Finished the overwhelm or the lack of creativity.
You need visuals for quality blog content (photos, videos, pins...)
This is something that you don’t need to plan a year in advance, relax.
Though it is essential that you don’t underestimate the impact of visuals throughout your content writing. So don’t have visuals for your content as an afterthought.
I’ve got you for this one!
I have a great collection of free visuals for you to get you started. Canva templates for pins, photos, video for your posts, animations… even a template for a lead magnet checklist. Grab them all today for free:
Your BONUS tip: Don’t be afraid to change the plan!
Do you want to know something very strategic too?
Don’t be afraid of changing your content plan… What? You might think… “What’s the point of planning blog content writing for a year and then change it!??”
As a general rule, you might not need to change most of it.
Change can give you opportunities.
Lack of change could leave you behind (see 2020 as an obvious example).
There might be trends emerging that you did not spot when you define your blog content ideas plan, so when you see the trends, go for it, adapt your plan!
Have a plan and… don’t be afraid of changing it!
Fantastic! You can now easily plan your quality blog content for 1 year!
You can now create your blog content ideas plan for the whole year in just 1 day.
Go ahead and get your blog ideas planned today!
It is easier than you thought and you will feel soooooo much more in control as soon as you have a plan to follow for your blog content ideas.
What next?
Have fun and create your blog ideas plan today!!! Don’t try to achieve perfection.
The key is to have intent and purpose.
You will see quickly the results in your traffic and conversions.
Don’t forget to tell me:
It is a real privilege to have your time. A million thanks for staying with me until the end of this post. I really appreciate you choosing to read my blog!
Don’t forget to get your Free Visuals Collection if you have not got it yet to help you with your content visuals.
Hi! I’m Isabel!
Visual content creation is my passion
The sea is my happy place!
find me very often with my cameras and tripod out and about!
My passion: to help you with your online presence and drive business growth through my blog and visuals collections (marketing templates, styled photos & video).
Ah, I have also worked for 24+ in the corporate world, leading quite a mix: transformation, marketing, coaching, sales, productivity, programme management, investments and product management.
I love sharing all these skills with you in my blog.
I am also founder of Agavea Properties, our family holiday rental business. My husband and I lead it with the passion with one goal in mind: serving our customers to create a memorable holiday experience for them.
So there you have it, that’s me! Ah... I almost forgot, my happy place is by the sea.
Thanks for being here with me!
