The Small Business Owners Guide to Creating an Online Content Plan: Getting Started

If you are a small or medium-sized business or nonprofit, creating content for your website can be a challenging task. But the rewards can be great. Online content can be a great way to solidify your brand, get new customers and keep old ones. Producing great website content will keep your site fresh and up-to-date and will also give you a building block for social media content. Here’s how to get started.

What’s online content anyway?
It’s all the stuff you post on your website: news, blog, articles, videos, whitepapers, etc. to share information and let viewers know who you are and what you do.

What do you want to happen?
Although this post deals with content for the web in general, I’ll use the most popular form of content for this example: blogging. Many folks stumble blindly into the world of blogging, knowing or thinking they need a blog for their business, but not having clear objectives. Unless your blog is created purely for the love of blogging (a perfectly great reason), you’ll want to start at the end: what results do you want to achieve from your blogging or content creation? Do you want to increase traffic? Book more clients? Get more phone calls? Create some objectives to get started and a way to track and evaluate them.

How can you add value to your online viewers/customers?
What types of information would your clients or customers find useful and informative? What questions do you get frequently and have a great answer for?These questions are a great starting point for creating a content plan.

What do you need?
This is where you decide two important things: what format will your online content take and what resources do you have to get it produced? As I mentioned earlier, online content can come in many formats: blog posts, videos, whitepapers, articles, visuals – and for many businesses it makes sense to deliver information in various formats. Make a list of the types of content and topics you can create content around and then inventory what you need to get it done. Do you need to buy a new camera to produce videos? Do you know you need content, but want to hire a writer or editor to help produce it? Don’t forget you can always repurpose speeches, presentations, articles and more – just keep in mind you may have to tweak the content for your online. And most importantly, know when to ask for help.

Planning and Doing
Finally, create a calendar to help schedule your content. Allow room for flexibility and breaking news, but also identify content you can create in advance! Create a regular schedule for posting. Happy creating?