2.3 Organize your content topics list

It’s time to prioritize!

This part of the process is crucial to help you generate your potential clients’ interest in your business. For the next exercise, you’re going to need the following items:

Take three blank post-its and create the following headings:

• Knowledge / Education
• Inspiration / Aspiration
• Promotional

Make three columns with these headings on the surface of your choice. It should look something like this.

Take your post-its and place them in the first two columns accordingly. 

• Knowledge / Education: Actionable tips and knowledge that helps your audience immediately. That’s everything you brainstormed in section 2.1 and the additional topics you identified in section 2.2 when searching for keywords and top questions.
• Inspiration / Aspiration: Content that motivates your audience to think, reflect, and act. These are topics you identified in the “must-read/watch” part of section 2.2 are also relevant here.

Out of all the content you create, 80% should belong in these two categories. They represent the free value for your potential clients to get to know you and recognize you as an expert who can help them.

Let’s look at what my content topics for my ideal client, Alice, could look like within those categories.

The remaining 20% and last column belong to the Promotional category. These are the concrete sales pitches and promotional material for your products and services. You’ve got something to sell, and you share with the world what it is you have to offer. 

Take your post-its again and write down ideas for promotional content. But don’t just say, “buy this.” Here are some examples of promotional content:

• Your product or service’s concrete benefits 
• Special offers or promotions you’re currently running 
• Testimonials from past clients (not stories, but direct quotes) 

Some of my promotional items to attract Alice could be:

The final step in prioritizing your content topics are production and publishing. Let me tell you; this could be a difficult step. I know it is for me because my content is very close to my heart, and this part of the process sometimes feels like picking my favorite child.

But it is a vital step to create your content calendar.

Grab a pen (I would not recommend a marker if you’re using your wall or floor as a surface) and assign points to each topic based on the criteria listed below:

 *Examples of these are fixing some typos, removing references to an offer past due, changing an image.

Here are a few examples of how I assign points to two of my content topics for my ideal client, Alice:

Once you have assigned points to your content list, sort them from highest number to lowest number of points per category. When you’re ranking these topics on your list, you do not assign more value to specific topics over others. You are giving scheduling and production priority to your content. 

The top of the list represents your “low hanging fruit,” or the content that will take you little to no time to produce. This is the content that will buy you time in creating the stuff at the bottom of the list and still make you look to your audience like you’re a bonafide content machine.

My list of content topics ranked from highest to lowest looks something like this:

Considering a regular social media publishing schedule (that doesn’t require daily posting), this list of topics should be enough for about six weeks of content.

You can repeat this process of brainstorming, organizing, and prioritizing once a month to ensure you always have a steady stream of content ready to implement. The more you do this exercise, the easier it will be to generate ideas. I dare say you’ll be getting so many ideas all the time; you’re going to need a special idea file to capture them.

In the next section, we’re going to put all of this into action. It’s implementation time!