How to Plan Your Veterinary Blog Posts

Once you’ve started your veterinary blog, it’s time to start writing posts. But if you start without a plan, you could fail. Blogging is a business, and you need to have a plan to succeed. In this post, I’ll show you everything you need to plan your blog posts for your first year of blogging. The post follows my free blogging planner, which you can get here: You’ll also be signed up for my weekly emails where I give you more freebies and exclusive content to help you be successful! Keep reading to find out how to organize your veterinary blog posts!

Make Goals

Before you can start planning your blog posts, you need to make goals for your business. What do you want to accomplish? This will determine what you write about and what types of posts you write. Your primary goals for blogging should include the following:

• Email subscribers
• Number of blog posts
• Number of guest posts
• Social media followers
• Traffic
• Income

To really push yourself, add dates to each goal. In the blogging planner, there’s a section devoted to creating yearly and monthly goals. Plus, there’s a goal tracking sheet so you can see how close you are to reaching your goals.

Decide Post Frequency

The first thing you need to decide is how often you post on your blog. Consistent posting is something search engines look for, so once you pick a schedule, stick to it! I recommend posting at least once a week when you’re just starting out, but aim for 16 posts per month once you get rolling. It’s better at the beginning to have less content going out as you’re learning the ropes. Later, you’ll want to work on getting more content out there. In the blog planner, you can see there are four posts per page so you can fit a month of blog posts on one page. If you print out the planner, you can print as many of this page as you need. Once you know how often you’re going to blog, you can start brainstorming post ideas.

Brainstorm Post Ideas

Get out a pen and paper or open a blank document (or spreadsheet, which I prefer!) on your computer. There’s a handy page for this in the blog planner, too! It’s time to start coming up with ideas for your blog posts. Write down as many as you can think of. Consider who your audience is and what they may want to know. What do you want to teach them? If you get stuck, there are a few ways to come up with new ideas.

Other Blogs

Don’t be afraid to look at other pet and veterinary blogs for ideas. See what they’re writing about and find a way to put your own spin on it, or present additional information on the subject. If you feel like you need to, you can always link to the original article as the inspiration for your post.

Google

Start typing anything into Google and what happens? Search suggestions pop up. These are great for using as blog topics since you know it’s something people are actually searching for. Once you’ve typed in a topic, you’ll also find these handy “People also searched for…” boxes. These are another source of article ideas you can use.

Answer the Public

This website uses Google’s search suggestions and related questions to come up with a list of potential topics for you. Just type in a keyword and you’ll have endless ideas.

Friends and Family Members

Don’t be afraid to ask people you know for ideas about blog topics. When you’re just starting out, these could be your only audience, so you might as well write about what they’re curious about. And, chances are they’re not the only ones with those questions.

Pick Your Pillar Posts

The first posts you should include on your blog are the pillar posts. You can learn more about those and other types of posts here. These are the most important posts you’ll write, so take your time when deciding what they should be. Go through your list of blog post ideas and mark the ones that stand out to you the most. In general, these will deal with broad topics, like “dog care” or “cat communication.” Keep in mind that you should be linking back to this post often, so each point in your pillar post can have its own article written to thoroughly cover each topic. For example, if you’re writing about dog care, one point would be about how important exercise is. In your pillar post, you don’t need to go into all the details about how much or how often to exercise your dog. Instead, plan on having a separate post that’s all about exercising your dog. Then you can link to that article in the post.

Start Scheduling Posts

Next, you need to start plugging the rest of your blog post ideas into your schedule. The first five or so should be pillar posts. After that, you’ll want to include mostly email list building posts and then some affiliate posts. If you already have a product or service in mind, you can start promoting that as early as you’d like, too. I tend to not schedule guest posts in because I think of those as extras and don’t want to be counting on them if they don’t work out. However, you do want to plan on writing at least three in your first year, so you may want to leave some space for them. How you schedule your posts will depend on the type of blog you’re writing and how it’s set up. If it’s a personal blog covering a variety of topics, you may want to alternate topics to make sure there’s something in each category. For teaching blogs, you may want your posts to follow a process. This website does the latter. I started by covering types of veterinary blogs, then covered how to start a blog, and now am going through blog organization. After this, there will be posts on marketing and monetizing blogs. On the blog I run with my husband, we alternate topics with every post.

Label Blog Posts

Once your blog posts are scheduled, you’ll want to label them so you know what type of post each one is. Use symbols recommended in the blog planner or create your own system to indicate the purpose behind each post. At this point, you’ll also want to note how what each post will promote. Will it be a freebie to get people to sign up for your email list? Is it an affiliate product to earn money? Or, is it a pillar post for improving your search engine rank? There’s a place for this as well in the blogging planner which you can use to know exactly what each post will promote. This is helpful for knowing what else needs to be done in addition to creating the content itself. And that’s it! Now all that’s left is to put in the work and follow through with your plan.

Need the Veterinary Blogging Planner?

Now you know what you need to do to plan out all of your veterinary blog posts for the next year. As you can see, it’s pretty straightforward and will save you a lot of time in the long run. If you haven’t grabbed my free veterinary planner yet, you can here: Also, if this seems like too much work for you, then feel free to check out my services page and let me plan out all your blog posts for you!