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.
Episode Highlights:
The Benefits of Outline Day
Keyword Research with Outlining
Choosing an Outlining Frequency That Works
Resources Mentioned:
Episode 8: The Lifeline of an Outline
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Transcripts
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[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.
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[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.
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[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.
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[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.
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[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
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[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.
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[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
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[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.
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[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
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[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.
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[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?
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[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.
