When you’re serious about the online biz part of your yoga business and want to attract more people to your website, for example to join one of your retreats, I strongly recommend blogging consistently.

Think of it this way: if you have a website for your business, you probably have between 5 and 10 pages of content to offer to search engines like Google, hoping it will stand out against a million other sites with nearly the exact same info. But if you add a new blog post each week, after just one year you have an additional 52 pages with content for Google to find and direct people straight to your services. Plus, a blog gives you the chance to establish yourself as an authority and to connect on a deeper level with your students. And finally, I think blogging is really fun!

Okay, so I got to you and you’re ready to start blogging. One huge problem for a lot of yoga teachers is consistency and coming up with ideas what to write about. This is where a content calendar can be super-duper helpful!

With a content calendar, you plan out your upcoming blog posts ahead of time. I like to do this for at least the next month ahead and I use Asana, my favorite project management tool. Click here to read how to set Asana up – it’s easy and free!

How to set up your content calendar in Asana

Step #1: Create a new project

The first step is to create a new project in Asana for your content calendar. You can just name it content calendar, or if you want to get more creative feel free.

Asana will ask you to choose between a list or a board. For your content calendar, choose board instead of list, because the visual columns are what you need next.

Now that you created your project, add 5 columns:

• Content ideas
• Scheduled
• Drafts
• Review
• Published

Step #2: Start collecting ideas for blog posts

Step number two is to create a new task for each blog post or piece of content you want to create within the column “Content ideas”.

Name the new task the name of your piece of content, for example the headline draft for your blog post idea, the title of a yoga video podcast or whatever you want to create. For simplicity reasons I’m going to assume it’s a blog post.

You can add files, comments or links to websites that will help you later to write the post. You’re not going to start working on the post right away, just keep all your ideas in this board. Have a good fun brainstorming session and come up with at least 20 content ideas.

If you find this difficult, it’s totally okay to look elsewhere for inspiration. Blogs like www.mindbodygreen.com or www.doyouyoga.com are doing a fantastic job at coming up with catchy headlines. You shouldn’t copy someone else’s blog post obviously, but it’s a great way to get some ideas flowing.

Step #3: Schedule your posts

Next you are going to schedule posts for the next 4 weeks. I recommend publishing a new blog post weekly, so you should decide on 4 blog posts that you want to publish in the next month. Simply choose them from your pool of amazing content ideas and drag them over to the “Scheduled” column.

Then go ahead and make the due date the date by when you want to get it published. In the calendar view you can see all scheduled posts at a glance, making it really easy to keep up to date with everything.

Lastly assign the task to yourself so it will show up in your to-do list, or to whoever is managing your content process.

I recommend organizing your blog posts into categories and then try to come up with 1-2 blog posts for each category in the next month. For example, if you have a yoga blog your categories could be yoga videos & sequences, yoga poses explained, yoga philosophy 101 and meditation tips. You don’t want to publish 3 blog posts about meditation in a row, instead mix it up to keep your blog interesting.

If you want you can give each category a tag with a different color in Asana and add this to the task, this makes it more visual.

Step #4: Create your draft

As soon as you start working on a blog post, drag your task to the “Draft” column. You can now add subtasks, notes and files to the task so everything you need to do to get this blog post live is in one place.

You can also add subtasks for example for writing or filming your content, creating images for the post and social media, setting everything up in your website backend and SEO (search engine optimization). Don’t forget to give the subtasks due dates and assignees as well based on your process.

Step #5: Review

When your content piece is finished and ready to be published, drag the task into the “Review” column.

This is the place to save everything that’s ready to go live and to have a good hard look at it before publishing it. Images for social media? Check. A key word for Google? Check. All links working? Check.

When you’re using WordPress, I recommend the free Editorial Calendar plugin to schedule your posts for the dates you set here in Asana. And if you’re super organized, you could prepare 3-4 blog posts in advance and then relax for the coming weeks…

Step #6: Publish your content

After you’ve published your great new blog post, drag your task into the final “Published” column, click the “done” button and make yourself your favorite hot drink to celebrate.

Extra: Create a new task to act as your template.

Instead of starting from scratch setting up all to-dos and subtasks for each blogpost, you can create one perfectly set up task and use this as a template for every blog post you want to create.

Simply create a new task and name it “Blog Post Template”. Set up all the subtasks and to-dos you need to do. For example:

• Write blog post
• Edit
• Decide on keyword and add SEO content
• Create blog images
• Create social media images
• Set up blog post in WordPress

To copy this task for another blog post, simply click the three dots in the right corner, and then select make a copy. This is how you’re going to use something as a template over and over again.

If you’ve been looking for a way to get more organized, be more productive, and just get things done, try out Asana. From the largest project to the tiniest detail, Asana will help you keep up with everything.