Use ‘Theme Days’ to Plan Your Writing Strategy
By: Dawn Bevier
Tags: Writers On Writing, Freelance Writing, Marketing, Writing Tips, Writing

How Writers Can Apply “Theme Days” to Achieve Fast Results

As much as we’d like to believe the simple way to propel our success as writers is to just write more, this tactic alone will not create rapid gains. Marketing and promoting our material is almost as important as the articles we produce. In addition to promotion through things such as social media, reinforcing our bonds with our followers is also necessary to keep the readership we have worked so hard to attain.

And though I mentioned before that simply writing more will not maximize our exposure, it is the backbone of our success. So here’s an example of how writers can use the concept of theme days to incorporate all of these essential elements and see rapid gains in their goal to be a better writer and marketer of their work.

Monday: Planning and brainstorming

This day would revolve around increasing your writing production by doing things such as brainstorming headlines and planning outlines for some of these possible possible articles.

Tuesday: Producing

This day would be used for bringing some of the outlines to completion and producing finished drafts. To speed things along in this area, writers can use simple outlines such as this to help them write these articles more quickly.

Wednesday: Promotion

This day would focus on expanding your readership by posting on various social media channels like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and Instagram. You could use this day to post things to your email subscribers or even brainstorm or experiment with other ways to get more exposure such as looking into things such as podcasting or creating a YouTube channel.

Thursday: More production

The frequency of writing is key, so this would be another day to work on completing articles or ideas in progress.

Friday: Solidify existing readership

This day would be about making sure that you are connecting with the following you already have such as responding to followers’ comments.

Saturday: Reflect on the week, plan next steps, and read up on your craft

This day would involve looking at data on your writing and marketing and analyzing their strengths or weaknesses so that you can revise your theme week if needed.

For example, if you find two days a week of composing new material is not sufficient, you may decide to change your theme plan. You could include an extra day of writing and decide to combine other related theme days, such as promotion and reader relations into one day, as they take less overall time to complete.

Because reflection is also a task that is less time-intensive than some of the other days, you could use this day to increase your overall knowledge by reflecting on your strengths and weaknesses as a writer and spending some time reading books or articles on writing.

Sunday: Rest

Every writer needs a day off to recharge and relax. And you may find that you need more than one day to do this. As a matter of fact, I think all of us do at certain points in our lives. So schedule it in. Your week is all about what works for your individual lifestyle.