Do you have a content strategy for 2014?

Let’s talk content.

No, it’s not just a buzzword—content creation is one of the most important aspects of online marketing. It helps boost your search engine optimization and, most importantly, helps you connect with your target audience and build relationships through relevant stories, tips, information, links, images, etc.

Here at the Tummel.Me headquarters, we are in the midst of planning our content strategy for 2014. Why? Because we want to keep you, our clients, informed about ways to keep your online businesses thriving. We’ve got some great stuff lined up for you!

So here we are, a small business trying to create meaningful content for our target audience. Well, our target audience happens to be mostly comprised of small businesses. Which leads us to the question…

Do YOU have a content strategy in place for 2014? Or at least for next month?

(And by the way, this is not an acceptable content strategy: “Try to write at least one blog post this year, if I have time, and post a couple of things to our Facebook page, if I can remember the admin login info.”)

Content is too important to overlook or push to the bottom of your to-do list.

Sometime this week, sit down and brainstorm ways that you can really connect with your customers. You know them best—what bits of information are relevant to them?

The content experts at Scripted.com recommend creating a theme for each month. If this makes sense for you, begin your brainstorm by creating themes, and then come up with some story ideas for each theme. If that seems too overwhelming, try creating one theme and coming up with story ideas for that theme. You can do this every month as long as you’re giving yourself enough lead time.

Once you have a list of topics (for a month or for the whole year), create your editorial calendar. Make it simple and easy to share and edit, and designate one person on staff to manage it. Set a realistic goal—maybe you want to write one blog post a month, and two social media posts a week—then start populating your calendar with topics.

Next, set aside a little bit of time each week to devote to content creation. Having a set topic and a deadline will make this process much easier than just winging it every time you have a few free minutes. Shoot for having content prepared two weeks in advance of the publish date.

We’re including a simple content strategy checklist and a sample editorial calendar to help get you started.

Go for it! If we can do it, so can you!