Content marketing should be a key part of your online wellness business strategy. But if you are like many people in the online business world, you struggle with consistency. A wellness business content plan can help.
When I worked as a health coach, I always struggled with consistency for my content. And this hasn’t changed since I became a virtual assistant. As a VA, I’ve spent much of my time working on other peoples content and not enough time on my own content. I decided I needed a plan.
Content is key
Before we get too far, let’s make sure we’re on the same page about content. For this article I’m referring to free content, but you can also create paid content for courses and coaching. Gated content is another type of content where you provide the content in exchange for an email address or phone number. An example of this would be a free guide that you send when someone signs up for your email list.
Free content is one way to gain awareness for your business and your products. Content can be anything from written word, images, audio and video. In the case of video or audio it can be live or recorded.
It can live on any platform. This can be your website, social media, video hosting platforms (YouTube), or podcasts. Some examples of free content could be YouTube exercise videos, educational blog posts, or a podcast interview with an expert in the field.
Choose platforms for your content based on where you like to be, what type of content you like to provide and where your ideal client is hanging out.
What is a content plan?
A content plan is a way of planning out your content including your long form content and social media content. It’s not created in a vacuum but takes other events into account.
You can work your content plan around:
- Your long form or pillar content
- Your promotional calendar
- Anything else you have going on in your life
What Tech Do You Need?
To start and grow your wellness business
What is your pillar or long form content?
Traditionally long form content has been blog posts, podcasts or YouTube videos. Short form content has been on social media platforms. But with social media platforms allowing longer content and different forms of content this has changed. Long form video can also exist on platforms like Facebook and instagram, but generally people are looking for shorter, more entertaining content on these platforms.
Long form content can be the basis for other content. You can take snippets or quotes out of your long form content, or use the social media platform to promote your long form content.
Include a promotional calendar
If you are launching a coaching program or a new ebook you’ll want to include these dates in your content plan. That way your content can work around your promotions.
Don’t feel that you are being too salesy by promoting your products. Many coaches don’t promote enough and are surprised that their followers have no idea how to work with them.
Your promotion calendar should include:
- product launches
- free offer promotions. If you have more than one, then add these to the calendar for each week
- flash sales, Black Friday, etc
- Holidays and other important events (this helps you to make sure you’re not trying to promote something the week before Christmas)
Reuse content
Once you have long form content created you'll want to use this as the basis for your short form content. From this blog post I could create Instagram posts, a Pinterest Idea pin or an Instagram story. And of course an email newsletter.
If you have evergreen content, you can also continue to promote this content sometimes. You could use it for small snippets of social media content at any time. Or promote it in an email again when the timing seems right. Don’t worry that it seems like you are repeating yourself. chances are there are new people following you, or they didn’t see it the first time you posted it.
Using the idea of having a workout video on YouTube, you could post short clips from this video on social media.
Using Trello to plan content
I’ve found several Trello board ideas for blog content and several social media planning boards, but many of these don’t tie everything together. I created a board that ties things together and lets you plan weekly content all in one place. Stay tuned this board will be available for you to use soon.
Although Trello isn’t my primary project management tool, I decided to try it to get back into the habit of creating and publishing my content.
Here is what I found.
Having the weekly content lists was essential for me to visually see what I needed to get done for each week. I could quickly see how far out I had planned. Then I added a tag for each type of content so I could see how much was planned for each week. I also added a scheduled tag so I knew what needed to get done.
Planning content on Trello can make procrastination easy. When I found that the first week was half over and nothing was done yet, I just moved everything to the next week. On the other hand this is better than seeing a bunch of overdue notices.
I liked being able to work on everything at once. Having everything in one place made it easier to work on things, like pulling a snippet to use for an email or social media post.
