Map out a content calendar to work with the seasons of nature and your business, to make your life easier.

Day to day life is hectic when you’ve got kids and animals, let alone throwing a business into the mix, with all the to-do lists taking up headspace. It can be hard to think ahead to help your business grow the way you want it to. Anything you can do to work smarter, not harder, is a winner.

That’s why it’s worth taking the time to map out a content calendar so that you can work with the seasons, your busy seasons, as well as nature's seasons. It’s important to map out a plan that works for your life specifically, so that you feel good about it and you want to implement it rather than be daunted by it.

By doing this in advance, you will avoid staring at a blank screen because you don’t know what to write about. It takes the pressure off your creativity by giving you a starting point.

Start by writing in the busy seasons with your hands on work, such as school holidays, lambing, harvest, those kinds of things, so that you can plan your promotions in balance with your work. There’s no point trying to do something content intensive like launch a product or promote a course during lambing.

Instead of feeling like you have outdoor jobs and desk time where you create content embrace bringing them together and use what’s going on outside to create content. That way it’s natural and authentic, and you don’t have to be in a specific mood or tidy clothes to feel like you can show up. Show up as you are. It’s relatable.

Getting people’s to remember a message takes time. On average, you need to talk about something regularly for 6-8 weeks before people remember it and take notice. This is why consistent posting is so important. If you post well in a little flurry and then get busy and don’t post for weeks or months all the momentum you were beginning to build is lost.

It also means that you need to start talking about seasonal products a lot earlier than you think to ensure people are aware of them. So when building your plan, plot in when seasonal items will be ready to purchase and remember to start trickling the information into your content weeks, if not months before. If you have a couple of seasonal item you will probably find that between posting about them and the stories of day to day life, you fill up a content plan quite quickly.

Posting without an idea of the purpose of each piece of content means you’re more likely to have scatty content where you jump from topic to topic. It could all fit into your brand and general message, but it won’t give your audience a path about what exactly they need to do next or how you can help them specifically.

All posts need an intention, which is important so that you balance sales and nurture content I do this using my CHICK framework, you can find out more about that here. But once you know this you need to decide what the next step you want a reader to take after reading individual posts. It could be too join your email list to get notifications, or is it to comment and have a conversation. These call to actions can vary from post to post as long as you can see how it feeds into the overall objective you have at that time.

By making a sustainable plan that sees you embracing your everyday activities as part of your content and promoting big things in times when you have more time to spend on your marketing, you will find it much easier to maintain the health of your online presence.

Now you’ve thought about you in the plan, with your objectives, and the practicalities of creating, you need to switch and think about your audience. Because your content isn’t about you!

What’s going on for them at various points in their calendar? What do they need to hear from you at that time that will be helpful? For example, if your audience is mums and you have a solution to help them over the holidays, you need to be posting about it well in advance, they might be too busy dishing out snacks to notice it in the thick of the holidays themselves. In the holidays themselves, it might be worth sharing more relatable content that helps them through those full-on days.

It might naturally match with your own calendar but it might not and that’s ok because you can plan around it when you notice it in advance.

So what are you waiting for get on with hatching a plan, if you’d like more help to map it out. I have can help you with either a DIY workbook or a 1-1 content power hour.