How to Plan a Working 90 Day Content Calendar for Your Business

Have you ever planned one quarter out for your business?

Why would you plan just a quarter then? For me, a quarter is long enough to plan and know what I will be planning and scary enough to get nervous, but not overwhelmed.

Plus, big companies plan in quarters. And if big successful companies are planning in quarters, why aren’t you?

You can easily plan each quarter easily and effectively and I am going to show you how in this blog post. By the end of this blog, you’ll have a quarter of your content marketing planned and organized. That also means your content marketing calendar will be planned too (because remember, your content and marketing calendars go together).

Executing Your Next 90 Days

The first step I make when I plan my next quarter is by planning my content marketing calendar. You should be asking yourself these questions before you begin to plan your marketing calendar:

An example of what your 90 day marketing calendar could look like. This is one I use in my own business. It's simple, but I like it.

My goals that I want to accomplish in my own quarter are working on producing several webinars, creating a few online courses, and finishing my book. These are the three activities I want to accomplish within a period of 90 days.

Since I have a webinar in the works right now, I have that in my marketing calendar, as well.

The bullet points are your activities you’re going to be performing every week and this makes your first quarter manageable and not overwhelming.

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Want your own Marketing Calendar? Click here to download my friend and power partner, Laura Pence Atencio from Social Savvy Geek, awesome Marketing Calendar by clicking here!

Once you’re crystal clear on what you are going to do in your first quarter marketing wise, it's time to move onto your content calendar.

Aligning your Content and your Marketing Calendars

Now that your marketing calendar is planned, let's plan your content calendar. You may have a variety of things planned for your first quarter, but I can only imagine that some of your plans merge together. For example, as you can see in the example above, you may sell your online course you’re creating on your webinar. These activities go hand in hand.

But you need to warm up your audience to get them excited for your webinar even before you announce your webinar. I warmed up my audience for two months before I announced my own webinar. I made sure that every blog post I wrote was in alignment with my webinar theme. I'm still doing this to this day: providing at least 60 days worth of valuable content to my readers before I even promote a webinar!

What are some topics you can be talking about that will get your audience warmed up for your webinar, online course, or marketing activity? The content can come from the webinar itself, portions of your online course (Mariah Coz from Femtrepreneur says it's okay to give 50% of your content from your course to the public to get your audience excited about your course!).

If you remember, I also base my social media content and newsletter content off of my own blog, so I know I am on topic on each platform and am gearing up my own audience everywhere I am posting.

Here’s a mock content calendar using my own free 30 Day Content Calendar that you can download.

Review and Revise

Towards the end of your 90 days, you'll need to pick a day (probably now) where you'll spend an afternoon reviewing your results. As entrepreneurs, everything we do is a tweaking process, but how can we tweak if we don't know what to tweak?!

Take time to review your content and marketing strategy plans. What worked? What didn't? What could you have done better? What is something you need to stop doing because it's not getting you the results you need? What is something you would like to try going into your next 90 days?

When you do this, you'll see where your efforts are most optimal and you'll see where it wasn't. This will help you to plan your next 90 days even better. I have created my own Quarterly Report so I can visually see what I did, what worked, what didn’t, my own celebrations and even income report. I purposely planned it to also focus on my wins, no matter how big or how small. I have realized that I am hard on myself and I need to remember my wins rather than my "failures".

This Report is great if you're planning on repeating your activities from your first 90 days (online courses, webinars, etc). It's vital that you go ahead and plan an afternoon now in your mid to late 90 days to set time to review and revise your marketing and content plans.