Save yourself time and effort by using your promotion schedule to plan your content.

In my quarterly planning workshops, and when I do that work for my own business, we start with what we’re promoting for the next quarter. Doing that means we can write less, but still have the content we need when we need it.

Step 1: Decide what to promote and when

If you’re going to make sales, you need to promote your products and services (so I don’t have to keep repeating ‘products and services’, I’ll focus on services below; if you’re a product-based business, just mentally replace ‘service’ with ‘product’). If you only have one product or service, it’s really easy to decide what to promote. If you have more than one, you’ll need to create a promotion schedule.

If you try to talk about all of your services at once, you’ll confuse yourself and your audience – as a result, fewer people will become customers. To avoid the confusion and improve your conversion rate (sales or signups), focus on one service at a time.

Since you’ll need 2 to 3 weeks to raise awareness of the problem your service solves and how it solves it, and a week or two for the launch or sales period, I recommend spending about 4 weeks on each service. Which means you’ll promote 3 services per quarter.

If one service leads naturally into another, the order in which you promote them will be obvious. For example, in February 2025, I promoted a new mini course called "Write Engaging Blog Posts the Easy Way". This led naturally to the group Quarterly Planning Workshop I used to run - I'm changing that to a 121 workshop; if you're interested, email me for details. So February's content focused on the mini course, while March's focused on the workshop.

If your services don’t lead into each other that way, you’ll have to use something else to determine the order, like your own preference or other deciding factors in your business. I’m doing this next quarter by focusing on my book-writing programme, There’s a Book in Every Expert, in June. 

Step 2: Use your promo schedule to plan your blog post topics

Once you know what you’re promoting and when, choose the topics for your 3 blog posts. That’s right, you only need 3 blog posts per quarter.

Nikki Pilkington, the SEO coach whose course I’ve been taking (that's an affiliate link), explains this in a LinkedIn post debunking the myth that SEO requires punishing publishing schedules. As Nikki says, despite what the SEO "gurus" say, you really don't need to churn out a post a week.

Both the search engines and your human readers value quality over quantity. So for your 3 promotion cycles in a quarter, you need just 3 blog posts.

When you choose your topics consider these questions:

• What do your readers need to know to make an informed decision about working with you?
• What older blog posts do you have that you can repurpose in this promotion cycle?
• What topics do you need to cover to have material to repurpose in your social media posts?

For the question on repurposing, check out what I wrote in ‘How to make repurposing your blog posts quick and easy’.

Steps 3 and 4: Write and repurpose your blog posts

The third step in the process is to write your blog posts. For help with the writing process, read ‘How do you decide what to write?’ The most important thing to remember for your first draft is that its only job is to be done, so write it as quickly as possible and then go back to polish it.

The fourth step is to repurpose your blog posts on your socials and in your newsletters. I discuss how to do this in ‘How to make repurposing your blog posts quick and easy’ and in ‘Repurpose your post’.

Following these steps will save you time and effort

You’ll save time and effort by following these steps. First, following these steps ensures you produce only the content you actually need for your promotions. Second, considering the questions in step 2 will help you remember to think about what content you already have that you can use so you don’t write something you’ve already covered in detail elsewhere.

When you break down your content and promotion work in this way, you break it down into smaller, achievable chunks. That means, instead of having ‘promote service x’ on your to do list, you have more specific tasks like:

• Decide when to promote service x
• Choose a blog post topic related to service x
• Draft blog post
• Polish and publish blog post
• Repurpose blog post

Setting yourself more specific tasks like these increases the chance you’ll actually do them. Why? Because you’ve reduced the intellectual load by breaking the task down before you even start. That means you won’t waste loads of time staring off into space wondering how to ‘promote service x’.

If you’d like help sorting your content plan for next quarter, email me for details of my 121 quarterly planning workshop - it's currently £125.