If there is one thing that will save you time, stress, and blank moments, it’s planning your content in advance. With a simple calendar you can plan and schedule topics in advance – before you’re in a panic about what to write.

But with a few planning tools you can really do a great job of content planning. Here are the tools I recommend.

Calendar in Word Format – I use the landscape layout, one month per page. Yes, I could keep it on my computer, but I tend to plan in restaurants and on the road. So having a paper calendar with me helps the planning process.

Holiday & Events Calendar – Need an idea for what to promote or write about? This calendar has a lot of obscure celebrations and holidays that will tweak your thinking.

Monthly Planning Pack – Alice Seba and her team provide an excellent planning tool. It includes a content plan checklist and instructions for using the monthly planning worksheet. And if you’re a mindmap user, she includes one of those as well, to illustrate the process.

Now that you have the tools, here is the process I recommend:

1. Block off your own holidays first. These are family birthdays, national holidays (if your family takes them off you want to be available, too), vacation time, business trips.  You don’t want to be writing or posting on any of those days, so you now know when you need to “write ahead.”
2. Using the holiday calendar, block those holidays you want to “celebrate” with your readers and subscribers. So you may have a Valentine’s Day customer appreciation sale, a Fourth of July giveaway, a special discount for Mothers’ Day, etc.
3. Plan promotions of your products and the events that you want to promote.
4. Start writing!

You’ll notice that it’s a lot easier to fill your content machine when you know what to write about – and your planning process has just handed that to you on a silver platter.

Every year starts the same – with lots of optimism and resolutions to change things in your life. And guess what – everyone else is thinking the same thing! That’s why this is a great time of year to profit while you’re making changes.

According to a government survey the top ten most popular New Year’s Resolutions are:

• Drink Less Alcohol
• Eat Healthy Food
• Get a Better Education
• Get a Better Job
• Get Fit
• Lose Weight
• Manage Debt
• Manage Stress
• Quit Smoking
• Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle
• Save Money
• Take a Trip
• Volunteer to Help Others

And if you ask them, most people will tell you they have chosen at least three or four from this list!

So how do you take advantage of these resolutions? Here’s a simple 5-step plan to start your year off with a bang:

1. Research keywords for topics related to the resolutions that most interest you. You’re looking for keyword phrases that are searched several thousand times per month and for which there are domain names to match. Buy a domain.

2. Install a blog on your keyword-rich domain.

3. Publish one blog post per day, using related keywords in the article.

One huge shortcut to getting blog posts is to use PLR (Private Label Rights) article packs. By choosing articles that are well-written you can easily rephrase a portion of the article to make it unique to your blog.

4. Use social media to start a discussion on the resolution you are working on. Naturally you’ll want to share your daily article on the topic, as well as encourage others to comment on the article.

If you’re working personally on the resolution you have chosen, you can easily include your personal experiences, as well as encourage others to do the same. The sense of community will actually encourage people to better stick with their resolution, while it helps you, too!

5. Add monetization to your blog in the form of affiliate links, product reviews, ads, and other methods for generating revenue. Since this is a topic a lot of people are interested in, you will likely have visitors who are looking for solutions to their challenges. Provide those solutions for them and profit when you do.

A New Years Resolution blog is not just a one-time effort. It’s something you can profit from year-round. By adding a list-building mechanism to the blog, you can build a list of people who are eagerly waiting to hear more from you on this topic that interests them.

And of course, you can “re-launch” your Resolution blog next New Year’s Day!

There aren’t many days left in the year – and most of those are already committed. So here are a few ideas to help speed your year end planning:

What to write about on your blog – I really like these ideas. They’re easy to write about and quick – and don’t require any research on your part. In fact, you’ll probably see some on my site right here!

Update your Twitter profile – there have been some great enhancements to the look and feel of Twitter. And it won’t take much to take advantage of these. Social media is becoming increasingly important to our marketing (yes, I admit it) so it’s in your best interest to look good online.

Create a mobile version of your blog – like social media, mobile marketing is becoming increasingly important. Have you gone to your blog on your smart phone? How’s that working for you? You can easily follow this simple process to create a special mobile version.

Those three things should give you a quick facelift and provide a good start for the New Year. So treat your online business to some year end actions and reap the profits next year.

What else can you think of that you need to do here at the end of the year? Add your comments and ideas below.

I’ve found there are a variety of reactions to the end of the Blog Challenge. Whether you participated in the Blog30 30-day challenge or the Mini7 7-day challenge, you are now faced with a dilemma.

Do you keep blogging daily? Or do you back off of your daily schedule?

For some people (Connie Ragen Green come to mind) blogging daily is such a part of her day, that they can’t imagine NOT blogging every day.

But for others, daily blogging is NOT the natural way. I fall into that category.

So if you’re like me and don’t plan to continue to blog daily, what can you do? Here are my suggestions:

1. Stick to a schedule. Try 2 or 3 times a week. You already know you CAN do 7 days a week. Just commit to 3 days instead. And stick with it!

2. Make a list of topics. You did this as you worked through the 30-day challenge. Just keep it up so that you always have a list of 10-15 topics you can write about at a moment’s notice.

3. Write in the flow. Just as you’ve done for the past month, when you are in a writing mood, keep writing. That will always ensure you have articles on hand to post.

4. Continue to market your blog. You do this when you tweet about it. You do it when you post your article to article directories, such as EzineArticles. You do this as you post comments on others’ blogs.

5. Keep using the tools. You’ve been using tools like tweetmeme plugin, twitter tools plugin, socialoomph to pre-schedule tweets, and wordpress to pre-schedule blog posts.

Essentially, just keep doing what you’ve been doing!

Okay, yesterday I asked you to share advice with participants in the next Blog Challenge. Now it’s time to advise the next person to run the Blog Challenge.

What would you do differently for the next Blog Challenge?

Would you communicate more frequently or less frequently?

Would you have everyone keep tweeting their articles to the organizer or do something else?

Would you use a central site as we did with Meet Our Members or would you centralize the activity on your own blog?

Would you provide a handbook to participants as they start or would you trickle out the information as we have done this time?

What other ideas do you have to involve more people?

How can we better help new bloggers in particular?

How can we support our more advanced bloggers? Is there a way to highlight many of them – and split the labor?

The next person to run the blog challenge will DEFINITELY appreciate all of the advice you can give!

If you’ve been blogging for the past 26 days, then you are an expert. You understand the challenges – and you have overcome them.

So what tips and advice would you give to someone considering the NEXT blog challenge? Because of course we all know there will be another one – it’s just a matter of time.

What worked for you? How did you get over that initial “oh my gosh, what have I done” thoughts – to still being with us 26 days later?

Did you already know how to do all of the steps or did you learn along the way? HOW did you learn what to do?

Did you get support from your fellow participants through tweets and comments? Or did you feel like you were still doing in all by yourself? How did you start connecting with others?

The advice you offer now may be the difference between someone joining the next blog challenge – or not. And it may make all the difference on whether or not they FINISH the blog challenge.

One of the observations I’ve made during the Blog Challenge is that many people were confused and confounded by the RSS feed.

First, let’s review WHY the RSS feed is important. It’s used by both individuals and search engines.

Individuals use the RSS feed to subscribe to the list of your blog articles. If they use an RSS reader (or their email program) it automatically updates each time you post an article. It’s an easy way for them to keep up with what you’re writing.

Search engines use the RSS feed to update their records as well. That’s how they are notified that you have a new blog post.

So if your RSS feed is not working properly, you are not getting the traffic you deserve! That’s why it’s so important that you have an RSS feed that works.

One of the aspects of your profile at Meet Our Members (if you were a Blog Challenge participant) was your RSS feed. More than half of the participants do not have an RSS feed that works. There are multiple reasons for this:

1. Some chose not to add the RSS feed to their profile.

2. Some made a typo when putting it in. As much as possible we changed these as we discovered them.

3. Others put in the wrong format. While a standard WordPress blog uses blog.com/feed as the default, some people had a hard time getting that to work. Again, there were multiple reasons for this:

• Some people use feedburner for their feeds. That is fine – you just need to use the feedburner URL for the RSS feed. Again, we tried to correct as many of those as possible.
• A LOT of people have redirected to their blog, either purposely or accientally. The RSS feeds for redirected URLs are problematic.
• A LOT of people use blogspot or other non-wordpress blogs. While these are okay to start, I strongly urge you to move to WordPress on your own hosted account as quickly as possible. RSS feeds from these other types of blogs do not function as well – and you’re losing traffic as a result.

So what action should you take if your RSS feed is not showing in your profile at Meet Our Members?

1. Add your RSS feed to your profile, if it’s not already there.

2. If your RSS feed is not working, ask your webmaster for help in fixing or finding it. If you don’t have a webmaster, post a $5 job on vWorker.com to have someone figure it out for you.

Recognize that if your feed does not show in Meet Our Members, it is not being seen by other entities as well. We are using an industry-standard tool for showing the RSS feed, so if we can’t see it, no one else can either.