How To Plan Your Business Year

If you feel unorganized, know you move in and out of consistency, and are guilty of not staying with your plan when something new comes along, stick with me.

How can you plan your business year to have more consistency? The answer is to plan your quarterly, monthly, and weekly content goals to feed into your overarching business goal, which is to get more clients.

We’ll review how to create your best content plan for this year by quarters, months, and weeks. Then, I’ll show you what I have done over the last six years to create a business that runs efficiently and continues to grow.

Do you want to know what you should do to attract potential clients for your business next year?

Prefer video? Check this out.

Plan your business year

I think the best way to go through my yearly business planning is to show you exactly what I do, and then you can plug into your plan the pieces that are right for you.

I know you may be frustrated. There are so many ways to be organized and to plan. You have to choose what works for you in the way God designed you, or you will not stick with it.

But, I will tell you, this method to plan your business year has worked for all my clients, from those who are coaches like me to those who are creative artists.?There is a way for you to have annual content goals that will make your business life easier and more productive.

Imagine opening your planner for the quarter and already having an outline directly from your annual plan. Envision setting up monthly goals and breaking them down into weekly tasks. Picture knowing exactly what you need to do to make your business run smoothly.

Planning your marketing

Let’s start by first talking about everything you do in your business to get people into your program, subscribe to your membership, or download your course. You know, gain clients.

Make a list of all the ways you market.

• Social media content on various platforms
• Videos on YouTube or LIVES on other platforms
• Masterclasses and webinars or maybe workshops and classes
• Meetings with potential clients
• Other event invites

Take a quick audit?of what you were doing last year at any given time.?Write out your activities to get people to know about you and your offering.?Don’t worry if you didn’t do it consistently. Just write out what you did at any point.

I have seen that we get a great idea and try it once, maybe twice, and if there are no immediate results, we stop doing it.?It takes consistent pushes to get something moving. Only once you get it moving at a steady speed will there be little or no effort on your part.

Planning your content

This is where you start.?Content creation?is the bane of our existence, right? But it doesn’t have to be. Knowing the content, you want to create is really the foundation for client attraction.

Here is what I have been doing for years.?Think 12,?twelve months to every year. Then, brainstorm all the things you want to ‘teach’ your audience about how you solve their problem, what they need to know about you, and what is inside your offering.

After you write out everything you can think of, look to the emerging themes. These overarching themes become your anchors for everything you talk about, post, and let others know about you.

For example,?if you wrote procrastination, habits, and routine. . . they are all under the theme of staying consistent.

Once you see these more significant themes for each month of the year, you already have your weekly topics ready. So, suppose for February, you decide your theme is consistency. In that case, you now have at least three weeks’ worth of topics for that month: procrastination (keeping you from consistency), habits (creating them for consistency), and routine (advantages of creating one for consistency).

Break down your themes into bite-sized pieces

Each day is broken down into pulling apart and giving bite-sized pieces of information to your audience.?I have found this way of thinking has:

1. Given me great content for my Facebook group
2. Gives me focus, so I am not scrambling about what to post
3. Kept me from forgetting if I had posted something before
4. Allowed me to plan faster because I repeat themes and topics each year

This is something I am very passionate about. I have an entire module in?Calling Clarity? dedicated to creating this system because it works. With this system, I can plan one month of content in about 15 minutes.

I would love to chat ?with you more about how?Calling Clarity?can give you the focus you need to have the perfect business. A business built around God’s design of you and moves you in a direction that makes business easier.

Planning your distribution strategy

Once you know what you want to talk about, it is important to know where to put that content. The BEST strategy is to choose one main platform, create your content there, and then distribute it to the other platforms.

I have found that video is the way to go.?It can be a?YouTube channel , LIVES on?Facebook , or Videos on?LinkedIn ?(or wherever your audience is hanging out). So start with your weekly topic with some videos.

Use your script or transcript to find quotes from that video for written posts on FaceBook,?Instagram , and?Pinterest . And create video snippets for your stories, idea pins, and shorts.

Once you have your themes and topics for each month and each week, it becomes easier to think through and decide what you want to present.?

And one essential part of this strategy to plan your business year is to ensure every piece of content has a CTA (call to action). For example, answering a question, clicking on a freebie, inviting an event, getting on a call, etc.?Never post without asking the person to do something to engage in some way.

Planning free problem-solving offerings

We all want people to become clients. That is the goal. So just putting content out there is the start. Next are the events you provide to get your potential clients to know more about you and your offering.

That means creating masterclasses/webinars/workshops?or whatever you want to call them. These are still FREE offerings that give people something they need based on the problem you solve.

Planning out a year of these is easy. First, look at your calendar year and decide how often you can or want to give a masterclass. For the last 2.5-3 years, I have offered a 60-minute masterclass each month. They are always at the same time, 2 pm EST on the same day of the month, the third Wednesday.

I rotate through four different masterclasses that hit other parts of what I want my clients to know about me and the problem I solve for them. I give great content to let them know what is required and provide solutions that scratch the surface of the deeper solution so I can present my offer.??

The rinse-and-repeat routine

Knowing that I will be doing the masterclass each month means the PowerPoint slides are ready, the scripts are typed and printed, and?there is no last-minute stress because I know the routine.

If you are not consistently doing a workshop/masterclass/webinar, I suggest you begin soon. It can be once a month or once a quarter. First, decide when you will do it, prepare what you need to do, and then execute it on the dates you have chosen throughout the year.

You can create many other types of events where you can invite your potential clients. For example, I have slowly added some events that I consider lead magnets. But, again, these things would attract your ideal clients and the things you want to teach them and have them know about you.

My goal is to attract Christian Women who are stuck in a transition of some sort and are looking for direction.?Therefore, I have added Oikos connection meetings, Bible studies, and Roundtables to my offerings.

Commit to trying, refining, and trying again

Remember, trying something once or twice and not getting the desired results doesn’t mean you should abandon an idea. So my team and I decided to work through this next year to find out what works and what does not (that means reviewing your numbers and knowing your analytics).

With all these added events we gradually added over this past year, we have created next year’s schedule to include the dates and times in each quarter these events will take place. So now it is just a matter of creating invites to each event.?

Mini-workshop for you

I have an extensive whiteboard-type calendar on the wall in my office. In addition, I have color-coded everything I do during the year to provide value and attract clients.

I want to start at the bottom and show you how to build up to plan your content and have it ready for an entire year.

Let’s workshop this a little:

1. Decide on your monthly themes and weekly topics, and create a calendar for putting those into writing (analog or electronic) for daily posting ideas
2. Choose a video platform to create weekly content around your topic, and use this content as your basis for posting across other platforms
3. Create a masterclass/webinar/workshop to bring specific value to potential clients, and schedule that content consistently each month or quarter
4. Determine if you have other events you want to start including in your marketing content and begin to schedule those events into your quarters or annually

Once each of these items is in place,?your daily work is to reach out to potential clients in a more personal way.?Those in your Facebook group (if you have one), those on your email list, and those you have connected with in some other way.

Change your thinking

It is not about thinking:?what am I going to do today to find people??Your thinking becomes:?how can I engage with the most people today? You have more focus on your business goal and?get more clients because you have taken care of the content goal for the entire year!

Daily, weekly, monthly, and quarterly activities have meaning and purpose when these content goals are solved. It will be your best business year when you implement these strategies.?

A lot of information, I know! But what did you need to know? Let me know in the comments.

I know this strategy to plan your business year can be overwhelming. Let me help. Let’s get on that?clarity call ?today to see if?Calling Clarity?is right for you.