60. Big Picture Day

[00:00:00] Stephanie: Your content should be doing more than just filling a calendar. Let's make sure it's actually working towards the goals you've set for your business. Welcome back to the podcast. This month we're channeling the new planner energy that hits hard this time of year. I'm sharing a few key dates to pencil in

[00:00:31] while your Flair pens still have plenty of ink and your motivation is high. Last week we started with Data Day because it's helpful to know what's working and what's not before you start planning the next steps for your business. But today we're going to talk about adding Big Picture Day to your calendar.

[00:00:52] So when I talk about Big Picture Day, I'm talking about the opportunity to zoom out and make sure that your blogging strategy is actually supporting your business goals. Sometimes we can get just stuck in the trenches of the day-to-day blogging tasks and just lose the perspective of why we're blogging in the first place.

[00:01:16] I like to think of big picture day, kind of like syllabus day for your business. I don't know about you, but I loved receiving the syllabi from my professors at the beginning of a new semester. I was able to gauge what my semester was going to look like by glancing through the topics we'd cover in each class, the assignments I was going to have, and then how many tests I would need to study for.

[00:01:43] But now let's step out of college and back into your business. By taking one day per year to just look at the big picture of your content creation strategy and your business goals, and then revisiting it each quarter, you'll be able to ensure that you keep things on track and you only pour your energy into the true needle movers of your business.

[00:02:05] Let's chat about what to put in this syllabus of sorts for your business. What should you look at on Big Picture Day? I would say the first thing that you would want to include in this planning day would be the content pillars that you plan to focus on for the next year. So maybe you've discovered when you looked at your data that you have a particular topic that seems to be doing well on Google and Pinterest, but you don't actually have a lot of posts in that content pillar.

[00:02:37] And so you might decide in your big picture day to figure out where that topic could go in the upcoming year. How are you gonna focus on that? What is that going to look like? And then choosing your content pillars can also just help cut down on some of the decision fatigue of blogging. When you know you're going to be focusing on a few particular content clusters over the course of the year, it narrows your focus when you're trying to come up with blog post topics.

[00:03:07] So now, instead of trying to decide what to write about from literally any possible topic, you have a nice tidy menu to choose from because you know what content pillars are your priority for the upcoming year. The next thing to consider in your big picture planning are the different, um, seasonal, I guess I would call them, pushes that you're going to have throughout the year.

[00:03:32] Are there specific holidays that you want to address with your content? Do you have any other obligations during particular seasons, and you just know that you're going to be really spread thin during certain seasons of the year, and it's gonna be challenging to get content created during that particular period of time?

[00:03:50] It's good to mark those things down in the big picture of your business for the year. The other thing to consider, are you launching any new TPT products and you want to have fresh blog content to feature those shiny new products? As you think about the different seasonal pushes you'll have throughout the year, go ahead and jot them down so you can make a plan for what content you'll need for these periods of time.

[00:04:17] Now that you've kind of looked specifically at your needs when it comes to your blog, it's good to pause and look at your big business goals as a whole. A lot of times we don't necessarily have a big goal when it comes to our blog, but instead our blog serves

[00:04:36] these overarching goals that we have in our businesses. And so just really take a moment once you've figured out, okay, the numbers are telling me I need to create this kind of content, and my calendar is telling me this about my content creation, it's time to just pause and think, okay, how is that going to fit into the big picture that I have for my business?

[00:05:00] And then once you've taken that moment to decide like where blogging and pinning is going to fit, how much content I need to create, then it's time to pick a pace for the year. Because once you have that general idea of what your year is going to look like, it's just time to choose a pace. Because when you just have an open ended

[00:05:24] criteria for yourself of, I hope to blog this year, most likely, you're not gonna blog very much. But if you set that pace of I plan to blog once a month, I plan to have a fresh post every other week, whatever that pace is, that is going to just help drive the rest of your planning. When you set aside time to create that content, you are way more likely to create that content.

[00:05:52] Instead of creating just a blanket goal for yourself of one blog post per week, because that's what you think the world at large expects of you, really take a look at a blogging pace that makes sense for you and for your business. And then once you've chosen the pace, you can map out the blog posts and the general topics that you'll be covering with those posts.

[00:06:14] For example, I might decide that I'm going to write a weekly post for my website, and I'm going to focus on SEO for the first quarter of the year. And so because that's my focus and I've determined that with my content pillar planning, from there, I might say, okay, January, I'm going to focus on keyword research, and then February I'll focus on on page SEO, and then so on.

[00:06:42] I don't necessarily need to have all of my individual post topics figured out at this point because that's what keyword research is for and all of those things. But having that big picture will go a long way in keeping the content machine humming along nicely. But what do you do when that content machine comes to a screeching halt?

[00:07:04] One of the phrases I remember hearing a lot during my college days is pull out your syllabus, we need to make a few changes. Now, in this day and age, I'm assuming these adjustments are made in a digital format. But for those of us from an earlier generation, we knew that it was important to keep our syllabus with us, keep it in a notebook so that it was handy whenever those inevitable date changes popped up during lecture.

[00:07:32] So when you're mapping out your plans on Big Picture Day, make sure to do it in a format that will allow you to easily revisit it and then revise it if necessary. So if you're a big fan of Google Calendar or Apple Calendar, you might create a separate little big picture calendar that you can easily just toggle on and off when you're wanting to take a step back and look at your business plan as a whole.

[00:07:59] If you use Asana, you might devote a certain task color to your big picture planning, and then add those big picture items to Asana. If you like paper, you could just type it up or you could write it in your planner. There really is no right or wrong way to document the big picture of your upcoming content creation.

[00:08:25] You just wanna make sure that you keep it somewhere that allows you to actually revisit it. Otherwise, it's just a glorified brain dump that you're never gonna come back to. And so that's why it's so important to pencil in your big picture day, but then also pencil in, once a quarter, a day to revisit that plan because you might discover, you know, things just are not working.

[00:08:49] I've discovered I need to focus on a different content pillar because it better aligns with this new product that I decided to launch. Because we all know that plans change and that's okay, and that's why it's so important to revisit your big picture throughout the year. But no matter

[00:09:07] what it looks like for you, I hope you do set aside some time for a big picture day. Take that time to zoom out, just for a bit, and look at your overarching content strategy from a different perspective, and how it fits into your business goals. It will make your content more cohesive in the long run, and it will take away a lot of the decision fatigue that is so common in organic marketing.

[00:09:35] Now we are rapidly approaching Q4, which would be a great time for a big picture day as we look towards 2026. I can't believe I'm even saying that, but I challenge you to add a big picture day to your calendar. Then pencil in your quarterly dates to revisit the big picture and make sure everything is on track.