61. Outlining Day

[00:00:00] Stephanie: You've got blog post ideas, products to promote, and maybe even a schedule mapped out. Now it's time to make your blog posts easier to write and more likely to rank. Welcome back to the podcast. We're going to continue harnessing our new planner energy this August by talking about important days that you should pencil in on your calendar for a more successful school year of organic marketing.

[00:00:37] We're going to talk about a day that I only added to my own calendar within the past year, but it has made so much difference in my business. If you're new to the world of Stephanie Royer Solutions, I'm a freelancer who blogs for TPT Sellers as a ghost writer, and then I market those posts on Pinterest for my client.

[00:00:58] And I was starting to feel the mental load of blogging day in and day out. Especially when the blogging involves thinking like someone else. It really does take a toll on the old brain power. So one day I was trying to think of a way to make my daily writing take less mental energy. I would do anything.

[00:01:18] I didn't know what it was gonna be, but I was definitely trying to figure it out. And I wondered if it would make much of a difference if I did the keyword research and outlining in a different work session than when I actually wrote the post, because the way I was doing it is I would just focus on one client at a time.

[00:01:36] I already kind of had an idea of what their blog post was going to be because I'd looked at that in advance, but then I would sit down and I would really fine tune the keyword research, and I would outline, and then I would move on to writing the post, and then I would upload it to WordPress all in one day.

[00:01:53] And so I was trying to figure out, okay, how could I break this up to make it just a little bit easier on my brain? So I decided to give it a try. I blocked off one day on my calendar to do all of the keyword research and outlining for all of my client's blog posts for the upcoming month. It was a task.

[00:02:13] I mean, it was a big day of outlining and keyword research, but I'm not exaggerating when I tell you that this one adjustment to my workflow completely changed my life. And so, I'm going to talk about how adding an outline day to your calendar can make such a difference to your blogging workflow.

[00:02:35] Now we're not gonna talk too much about the benefits of outlining in general since we dove into that topic way back in episode eight of the podcast. You can definitely go back and listen to that as to why I am a huge proponent of outlining and why I don't think anybody should write a blog post without doing an outline.

[00:02:57] For this episode, I just wanna share why batching all of my outlines in one day has been such a game changer and why it could be the same for you. So we'll start with the most obvious benefit of batching your outlines, which is saving time. In my own workflow, keyword research and outlining really don't take that long, and that was why I had tacked it onto the main workday for each of my clients.

[00:03:24] And that was kind of why I was hesitant to put all of my outlining onto one day. Is it really worth quote unquote losing a day of work to do all of the outlining here when I can just tack it on to each of my work sessions throughout the month? Anyway, it was just a real juggle that I personally had, but I was shocked by how much quicker I was able to get a blog post written and published when the outline was already

[00:03:50] done and ready to go. And I think the reason for this is that I had zero decisions to make because the target keyword had already been decided and the format of the post had already been set up. So the only thing that was left for me to do was to fill in the blanks to write the content. And if you are a person who struggles with the blank page overwhelm of a new blog post,

[00:04:16] then batching your outlines is going to be a huge time saver for you. Another benefit of an outlining day is that it helps you create more cohesive content clusters. When you're working on posts on a similar topic, it's very common to need to go back through your old posts from that pillar to see if you've covered certain points yet or not.

[00:04:41] Like did I already say this recently? And maybe you have an amazing memory and you don't have to do that, but I definitely have to do that. And then when you batch your outlines, you'll have all of the major talking points from your cluster of upcoming posts right in front of you. And so this can also be helpful with your internal linking since you'll know what all of your upcoming posts are going to be about and the main content that you're going to cover in each of those posts. And so you can make notes in your outline about internal linking opportunities like be sure to link to, you know, x, y, Z post. And that will just help you so much as you're writing the post. It'll help you save time, it'll help you not have to backtrack, and it's just gonna be really helpful when you pull up the outline later.

[00:05:34] Now that we've talked about some of the benefits of an outlining day, let's address the one major hesitation that I had when I decided to do all of my outlines and keyword research at once. I've mentioned in previous episodes that I like to have my outline next to me as I'm doing my keyword research because I jot down

[00:05:55] things that I wanna include in my headers as I find keyword variations in my keyword research- to me, keyword research and outlining just go hand in hand. And I have always liked to go straight from that process, right into writing the post, because I'm in that world, I have all of those keywords swimming in my head,

[00:06:16] and I just feel like it was natural to just go right into writing the blog post. And so I was really hesitant and I thought, is this going to impact the quality of the post that I'm able to write because I did this keyword research a couple of weeks ago? But as it turns out, my brain has been able to handle the keyword research and outlining in one day and then writing the blog post after a pause.

[00:06:44] And like I just mentioned, my memory really isn't all that great sometimes, and so this was a pleasant surprise. It turns out that the notes I take in the outline as I'm doing keyword research and then seeing the overall format of the post, that's enough for me. I'm able to refresh my memory and just get started on the blog post. And if not, it just takes me a couple of minutes to take the target keyword from the outline,

[00:07:12] plug it into Google, and I remind myself of the angle that I was planning to take with the post, and I'm able to find other keyword variations that I wanted to use pretty quickly. It all comes back to me once I'm able to just plug that keyword into Google. so overall, the time and brain power that I save by outlining in advance, it far outweighs the occasional backtracking that I might have to do

[00:07:41] to refresh my memory just a little bit. If you wanna put outlining day on your calendar, the most important thing is to choose a frequency that works for you because this particular day is not a one size fits all type of day. Because we all have different content creation schedules. You don't want to outline so far in advance

[00:08:01] that your outlines feel like they were written by a stranger by the time you look at them again. And you also don't wanna plan an outlining day for once a month if you really only plan to write one blog post per month. For me, it makes sense to sit down once a month, sometimes I do it twice a month depending on how the first outlining day goes.

[00:08:22] If I'm only able to get through two weeks of content, then that's what I do, and then I do another one a couple of weeks later. But that's because I write a lot of blog posts every month. You might decide that every other month is great for you, once a quarter, whatever it is, just pick a frequency that works and then get those penciled in on your calendar.

[00:08:47] If it seems like outlining day isn't something you really need in your business right now, you might decide to swap it out for social media mapping. You could create an outline for your social media content that you wanna create for the upcoming month, and you can decide, okay, what pillars am I gonna talk about on social media?

[00:09:08] How many reels will I need to film? How many carousels? What B roll will I need to capture? Those types of things. You could also swap out your outlining day for an email mapping or outlining session. It's just that the main point of outlining day is to take some of the decision fatigue out of the equation when you sit down to create your content.

[00:09:30] I use it for blogging, but you might decide to use it for email marketing or social media instead. But remember, by outlining in advance, you'll save time and create more cohesive content for your brand. I hope that this episode has given you some helpful food for thought, and if it has, I would love it if you would consider leaving a review on Apple Podcasts.

[00:09:53] This helps me create more of the types of content that you're enjoying.