62. Refresh Day

[00:00:00] Stephanie: When your schedule gets busy, it's easy for blogging tasks to get pushed onto the back burner. Let's chat about how a monthly refresh day can keep things on track. Welcome back to the podcast. This month we're harnessing that new planner energy that's so strong in August as we get ready to start a new school year, and that's why we're talking about important days that you should be penciling into your content creation calendar.

[00:00:38] This week we're going to talk about refresh day, which I suggest adding to your calendar every month. But don't worry, you're not going to be doing the same task every time this day pops up, you're actually going to rotate between three focus areas, with each one getting its turn once a quarter. This will help you keep things fresh without overloading your to-do list by trying to do all of these things every month.

[00:01:05] So for this episode, I'm going to give you three focus areas that I would suggest for your refresh day, but you can come up with anything that would work best for your business. For the first focus area, let's start where your mind likely went when I referenced a refresh day, and so that would be updating or refreshing your existing blog content. Because that is one of the most common questions I get from people who are interested in my services, or who are taking my course, or who are in my dms on social media.

[00:01:40] It's what do I do with all of this old content? And so once a quarter, I would suggest that your monthly refresh day focuses on looking at some of that older blog content, but rather than just going through your list of old posts from the oldest and working your way backwards, I would suggest a slightly more strategic approach.

[00:02:04] And so this would be a great time to make sure that your existing content is in tip top shape before it's upcoming season because we know how seasonal the teacher space is, and seasonal content definitely ebbs and flows. And so you could be strategic when you're looking at your older blog content and focus on the seasons that are coming up soon.

[00:02:29] Just as an example, your quarter one blog Refresh Day could look through the list of your highest performing blog content from quarter two of the previous year. And you can get this data from Google Analytics, just be sure to sort your traffic list in descending order of traffic so that you can prioritize the posts that will likely have the most visitors during that upcoming season.

[00:02:56] This is especially helpful if you're short on time because it's a great way to maximize your ROI on the time you are able to spend on this task by focusing on those posts that usually get the most traffic. So once you've identified those top posts, you would spend your refresh day reviewing as many of them as you can, working from the top to the bottom to make sure that the links are all still working,

[00:03:25] the soft sell products that you have in there are still relevant, they still make sense with the post, and make sure that you have Pinnable graphics in the blog post, all of those good things. By doing this you are going to ensure a good user experience on your website. And we all know when users are happier on your site, Google is happier with your site.

[00:03:50] Let's move on to another option for your refresh day. I recently did a training at the Teacher Seller Summit, and it was all about how to avoid blogging burnout. And one of the most important things you can do to keep yourself from losing steam with blogging is to set up and maintain a blog post idea bank.

[00:04:11] It's really important to set aside time in your schedule to actively go hunting for blog post topics. You might decide to schedule your idea bank refresh close to your data day because those fresh ideas might be swirling after you've been looking at your numbers in Google Search Console, or you've looked at the posts that are doing well on Pinterest, and so you just have a lot of ideas swirling and so it would be a good idea to go ahead and have that blog post idea refresh day, close to a Data Day.

[00:04:46] When you have bank of relatively fresh topic ideas, it will be so much easier for you to get blog content out the door. If you have a random spreadsheet from a brainstorming session that you did at a workshop two years ago, or you have a desk full of post-its that you never look at again, you're not going to reap the benefits of having a topic bank. Because those ideas are going to be stale,

[00:05:13] they might be irrelevant to your business now, the keyword opportunity that was there several years ago might be saturated now. And so it's really helpful to keep things current and fresh by devoting one of your monthly refresh days each quarter to adding to that blog post Idea bank.

[00:05:36] And just as a side note, if you're thinking about, well, how would I go hunting for blog post topic ideas? I have a guide with 37 places to find blog post ideas. And so you can find that at stephanieroyer.podia.com and I'll also have a link to that in the show note. Refresh day doesn't have to only focus on blogging.

[00:05:59] In fact, I think refreshing your pin templates is a great task to take care of once a quarter. With Pinterest's continued desire for fresh content, it's important that we don't let our pin designs become too stale. It's always a good idea to experiment with design elements, fonts, and colors that are outside of our branding because this is a fabulous way to grab the attention of new people on Pinterest

[00:06:23] and to keep our existing followers interested in clicking over to our websites. Because when we write a shiny new blog post and market it with the same old template, followers are less likely to click on that pin because it will look like something they've already seen before. So instead on a template refresh day

[00:06:46] you can make a copy of your favorite go-to templates in Canva, just copy that design, and then go back through and see if there are some adjustments that you can make to give each of those templates a fresh look. And then if you had enough time, you could even start from scratch if you wanted to.

[00:07:04] But either way, I think you'll find that a quick refresh of your pins once a quarter is going to serve you really well on Pinterest. Now to recap, I suggest that you pencil in a refresh day once a month, and I would also suggest that that day is in fairly close proximity to your data day. If you want it to be immediately after, so let's say I have my data day on the first Monday of every month, then maybe I would do my refresh day on the first Tuesday of every month. Or if I only do those types of tasks on Monday, I might do data day on the first Monday and then refresh day on the second Monday. Whatever it is, just try to keep it in close proximity, because if you think about it, the numbers and things that you're looking at on data day are really gonna help when you go to refresh your old blog content because you're going to see

[00:08:04] Your top performing content that already exists, so it'll help you prioritize the old content that you want to address. And then when you're looking at your numbers, it will probably give you some ideas for your fresh blog posts that you wanna write, and you can add those to your idea bank.

[00:08:24] And then also when you are looking at your Pinterest analytics and you see your top performing pins that might give you some insights into how you want to tweak your pin templates. So that's why I would suggest penciling in your refresh day as close to data day as you can. And so then from there you can choose the different focus areas that you want to have for each of those, you know, quarterly focus areas.

[00:08:52] And so let's just say I'm going to map out the focus areas for my refresh days in quarter one. And so in January, I would probably do the Idea Bank refresh first so that I had plenty of time to map out my content for quarter two. And then I would do the old blog content refresh day in February. And then after I've been looking at blog content and writing blog content

[00:09:22] then in March I would probably refresh the pin templates. And then I'd start the cycle over again with the Idea Bank refresh in April. And so I hope this episode has just given you some ideas for how a refresh day could have a positive impact on your business. And like I mentioned at the beginning, even though I would suggest having those three focus areas for the things that you refresh, it can be anything in your business, whatever makes sense to you.

[00:09:54] But I would suggest pulling out your digital or paper planner right now and looking at how you could incorporate a combination of refresh days into your schedule and then getting them penciled in.