You will build a 30-day calendar with themes, formats, channels, owners and dates you can actually meet.
You have themes from lesson 9.1, a weekly rhythm from lesson 9.2 and a way to turn one piece into several from lesson 9.3. This project puts them on one calendar for the next 30 days. When it is done, you will know what you are publishing every day of the month, where, for whom, and why, and you will know it fits the hours you have.
Allow about 45 minutes.
The brief is to build a 30-day content calendar for your business. Every slot should be filled with a working title, tied to a theme and a stage of the customer journey, and checked against your weekly hours. Set a date at the end of the month to review what worked.
Open a spreadsheet, or a tool you already use, and create these columns:
Date Channel: where it will be published, such as blog, Instagram, email or WhatsApp broadcast Theme: one of your themes from lesson 9.1 Journey stage: early, middle or late, as in lesson 9.1 Working title: a rough title or hook, which you can change later Format: blog post, short post, email, poll, image, video Status: idea, drafted, edited, scheduled, published Link once published
A spreadsheet is enough. If you already use a tool such as Notion, Trello or a shared calendar, set the same columns up there. The tool matters far less than the columns.
Start with the substantial pieces. Using your rhythm from lesson 9.2, place your main pieces first, such as one blog post a week or one a fortnight. Spread them across your themes so no theme gets everything, and across the journey stages so you are speaking to readers at different points.
Then add the shorter pieces that come from each main piece, as in lesson 9.3. Each blog post feeds a hook post, an email tip, a poll and an image, spread over the following days. Write a working title for every slot. A slot with no working title is not a plan. It is a gap you will have to fill in a hurry later.
Then mark any seasonal hooks in the month, using the dates you looked up in lesson 9.1, and connect each one to a theme.
Leave one slot open each week, as lesson 9.2 suggested, for a timely topic or a reply to a customer question.
Add up the time the month needs. Use the figures you measured in lesson 9.2: how long a main piece takes, how long a short piece takes.
Here is Priya's check, with her own times as examples. Her first draft had four blog posts at 3.5 hours each, which is 14 hours, and sixteen short pieces at half an hour each, which is 8 hours. That came to 22 hours. She had about five hours a week, so four weeks gave her 20. The draft was two hours over before she had written a word.
She cut the short pieces to two a week, eight in all, which brought the planned work down to 18 hours. The four open slots, one a week, take half an hour each when she uses them, so even a month in which every open slot gets filled comes to 20 hours and fits.
If your month needs more hours than you have, cut. Do not plan to find the time. Remove short pieces first, then reduce the main pieces, until the total fits with some room to spare.
Put a date at the end of the 30 days in your diary, and add it to the calendar itself. On that date, go through every published piece and note which brought replies, enquiries or sales. Not likes or views alone, but the actions that show a reader moved closer to buying.
Look for patterns by theme and by channel. If one theme brought most of the replies and another brought none, the next month should lean towards the first. If one channel brought enquiries and another only brought views, adjust.
Marketing analytics: GA4, attribution and testing covers how to measure this more precisely. For now, a simple count of replies, enquiries and sales by theme is enough to make a better plan next month.
You have a 30-day calendar with every slot filled: a date, a channel, a theme, a journey stage, a working title, a format and a status. The total hours fit your weekly time with room for the open slots. A review date is set in your diary and on the calendar.
Priya's finished calendar had 16 rows. Four were blog posts, one per theme, and eight were short pieces adapted from them: four social posts built on hooks and four emails built on tips. The other four rows were the weekly open slots. She had drafted the first week before she finished the plan.
Start by placing your main pieces, because everything else in the month hangs off them. Then fill the rest, check the hours, and book the review before you close the file.
Complete a 30-day content calendar in a spreadsheet or tool of your choice, with every slot filled and a review date set.
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