America In Transition: Get a Head Start on 2016 by Mapping Out your Promotional Calendar

Monday, December 21, 2015

Get a Head Start on 2016 by Mapping Out your Promotional Calendar

Today’s challenge for the #TodayNotSomeday series is something I do regularly at the end of every year, and that’s to map out my promotional marketing calendar for the following year. It’s one of those things that can easily get lost in the crush of the busy end-of-year time (and also gets put on the backburner in favour of general day-to-day blog tasks), which is why I’ve included it in the challenges for this series.

When I first began creating these calendars I would do it on my own, but nowadays the team and I spend a few hours on our team retreat creating a map of our marketing efforts in the coming year. It’s seen real results for me (rather than doing it throughout the year as we go), and I believe if you want to build a profitable and sustainable blog, you need to put effort into thinking about how to make your blog do just that. Put aside some time today to think about how you’re going to monetize your blog in 2016.

In this episode I invite you to look back on how your blog has performed this year in terms of income streams, launches, products, and affiliate promotions, and also what times of year saw the most results. It’s also a good time to think about what products you could update, extend or retire.

So grab a calendar of choice (paper or online), a spreadsheet, or a whiteboard and get to work visualising how you want your income to look in 2016. 12 months is a long time, so have a good think about how the year might flow. In the podcast I talk about what you should give priority status, how you should consider your launch strategies across the weeks and months, other advice about how to create a realistic and successful calendar, and a description of how we create ours for Digital Photography School, which you can see a version of here: