M5.L4 · Content Marketing
The 30-day content plan
What you'll be able to doDesign a complete, calendar-ready 30-day content plan built on pillars, your committed cadence, and a stated funnel job for every item.
Learn
A plan the size of your life
"Post consistently" fails the way "eat healthy" fails: it's a wish, not a shopping list. This lesson converts your ideas, channel and cadence into a dated list of specific items — so that next month you decide nothing daily. The deciding is done tonight; the month just executes.
One principle governs everything on this page: a sustainable cadence beats an ambitious one abandoned in week three. Nobody's funnel was ever moved by a heroic fortnight followed by silence. The plan you build today is deliberately the size of your actual life — Tomas's version fits inside three hours on Sunday evenings, because that is what exists. If your plan needs a version of you with more hours, it is fiction, and the cadence arithmetic below refuses it.
Pillars: three to four, no more
A pillar is a recurring theme you are known for — derived from your positioning and your moats, not from whatever crossed your feed. Every item in the plan belongs to one. Pillars do two jobs: they keep you recognisable (an audience learns what you're for through repetition), and they kill random-topic drift, the slow death where each post is about something new and the whole adds up to nothing.
Three or four. Fewer and you repeat yourself weekly; more and you're back to drift with extra admin.
Cadence maths
Items in the plan = your committed cadence × 4.3 weeks. That's it. Do this multiplication against the number you committed in Lesson 5.3 and refuse anything that doesn't parse — twelve items a month does not come out of "twice a week", and a plan that starts with broken arithmetic ends in week three. If the count feels thin, good: thin and shipped beats thick and abandoned, and you can raise the cadence next quarter from a position of having held this one.
The 40/40/20 mix
Roughly 40% of items are differentiated — the hero asset and its slices, the material only you could publish. Roughly 40% are lighter, channel-native touches that stay on-pillar: a photo, a quick answer, a team moment. Roughly 20% convert: they point plainly at the landing page you built in Module 4.
Both failure modes are common. A plan that is 100% promotion is an advert with a posting schedule, and audiences treat it accordingly. A plan that is 0% promotion is a hobby with brand colours — Lesson 5.1's warning made monthly. The mix is a rough target, not a quota; the point is that all three kinds exist on purpose.
Batching, and intent on every item
Two mechanical disciplines complete the plan. Batching: items are produced in one or two working sessions a week, not daily — daily creation alongside a day job is the single most common way plans die. Assign each item in your plan to a batch session. Tomas has exactly one real session a week, Sunday evening, so every item of his sits in Session A of its week; that is a legitimate configuration, not a compromise.
Intent: every item carries its funnel job and its call to action — even when the CTA is honestly "none — trust building". This line is what separates a plan from a posting schedule. And the plan must serve the plan: at least one item per fortnight promotes the hero asset, because distributing the differentiated piece beats novelty — a rule Lesson 5.5 turns into doctrine.
Herzog's month, in full
Tomas's plan: pillars Real recovery data (the records), Inside the clinic (the team and the work), Straight answers (the data-backed opinions). Cadence, as committed in 5.3: two short items a week on the clinic's own site, one substantial blog post a fortnight, one email to the ~140-address list — eleven items.
One absence is deliberate. Tomas has an unclaimed Google Business Profile sitting there with 23 reviews on it, and it will turn out to be the single cheapest win available to him — but he doesn't know that yet, because he hasn't done Module 6. This is what real sequencing looks like: you plan with what you currently know, and a later module tells you what you missed. Note it when it happens to you.
| Date | Pillar | Item | Format · channel | Job | CTA |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mon W1 | Data | Hero: "How long does recovery really take? What 2,000 patient records say (2014–2026)" | Blog post | Trust | Book a Check-up |
| Wed W1 | Data | The 3.6 vs 6.1 finding, as one chart | Site note | Attract | none |
| Sat W1 | Clinic | Meet the six physios, one photo | Site note | Trust | none |
| Wed W2 | Answers | "Do I need an MRI before physio?" | Site note | Trust | none |
| Sat W2 | Clinic | Exercise of the week, 40-sec video | Site note | Attract | none |
| Sun W2 | Data | Email #1: the hero, in 150 words | Convert | Book a Check-up | |
| Mon W3 | Answers | Blog: "The cost of waiting: same injury, three arrival dates" (consented cases) | Blog post | Convert | Book a Check-up |
| Wed W3 | Clinic | A patient's comeback, with consent | Site note | Trust | none |
| Sat W3 | Data | Hero slice: why waiting adds sessions | Site note | Attract | Read the full data |
| Wed W4 | Answers | "First 48 hours after a sports injury" | Site note | Attract | none |
| Sat W4 | Clinic | The north-west clinic has same-week slots | Site note | Convert | Book at Nordwest |
Read the shape, not just the rows. Eleven items. The hero appears once whole and three times sliced. Three items convert — one of them pointed at the second location running at 51% capacity, which is where conversion is worth most. Every item has a pillar and a job. Total weekly load: one Sunday session.
Now the same month done badly, as it usually is: eleven interchangeable items — "5 stretches for back pain", "Happy World Physiotherapy Day", an inspirational quote over a stock photo. No pillar, no hero, no CTA anywhere, every item Attract, every item producible by any clinic's chatbot on earth. It would feel like marketing to make. It would be indistinguishable from silence to receive. The module project's rubric fails it by design.
The risk note
Last field, most predictive field. Name the thing most likely to stop you executing — honestly — and the countermeasure. Tomas's: "A busy Sunday kills the session. Countermeasure: the week's items are drafted the Sunday before, so one lost evening costs polish, not the plan." A plan that has met its own most likely failure in advance is a different species from one that hasn't.
Now build yours.
Do
Exercise 5.4.1 — Your 30-day content plan
Build your 30-day plan. Define 3–4 pillars, then fill the calendar to match the cadence you committed to in Lesson 5.3 — no more. Every item needs a pillar, a working title, a format and a job. Your three anchor ideas must appear; at least two items must point at your landing page.
Write these down — in your plan document, or on the worksheet at the end of this lesson.
| What to write | Guidance |
|---|---|
| Your 3–4 pillars | For each: a name (up to 5 words), a description (up to 25 words), and the moat it links to — research, experience, opinion, or none. At least two pillars must link a moat |
| The month's items | One row per item, and the count must equal your 5.3 cadence × 4.3 weeks, give or take two — no fantasy. Each row: a date within the next 45 days · its pillar · a working title (5–15 words) · format · channel (your primary, unless there's a reason) · funnel job (attract · trust · convert) · a CTA up to 10 words, or "none" · its batch session (A or B, week 1–4) |
| Check the plan | At least two items with the job "convert" pointing at your landing page · each of your three 5.2 anchor ideas appears at least once · if over 60% of items share one funnel job, rebalance |
| Your risk note | Up to 30 words: what will most likely stop you executing this — and what's your countermeasure? |
Lay the items out as a real calendar, and check the mix against 40/40/20 as you place them — roughly, not religiously.
Where this goes: section 6.4 — 30-day plan — of your Marketing Plan. This is deliverable 1 of the Module 5 Project, and Lesson 5.5 starts with item #1 of it.
Check
Rubric
Mark your own work against these criteria, with your 5.3 cadence and 5.2 ideas in front of you.
| Criterion | 8–10 | 5–7 | 1–4 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pillar discipline | 3–4 pillars from positioning and moats; every item belongs | Pillars exist; some items drift | No pillars, or pillars invented to fit items already written |
| Cadence honesty | Item count matches the 5.3 commitment; load fits stated weekly hours | Within tolerance but optimistic about hours | Fantasy calendar — daily output alongside a day job |
| Mix | Differentiated, lighter and converting items all present, roughly 40/40/20 | One category token | 100% promotion, or 0% |
| Intent per item | Every item carries a job and an explicit CTA decision | Jobs present, CTAs an afterthought | A posting schedule wearing a plan's clothes |
| Risk named | The likeliest failure named honestly, with a countermeasure | A generic risk ("time") without a countermeasure | Blank optimism |
Pass: 5+ on every criterion. Distinction: 8+ on all five.
Quiz — four questions. Pick an answer to see whether you were right.
1. A student's 30-day plan is 14 items, all Attract-stage tips posts, none linking anywhere. What's missing?
- a) More items
- b) Hashtag research
- c) Conversion intent — roughly 20% of items should point at the landing page, and the differentiated hero content is absent entirely ✔
- d) A second channel
Why: it's the 0%-promotion failure plus the commodity failure in one plan — a hobby with a schedule. The mix exists so that attention, trust and conversion all happen on purpose.
2. Why does the plan force every item into a batch session?
- a) Platforms reward bulk uploads
- b) Producing in one or two weekly sessions is sustainable for a person with a day job; daily creation is the most common way plans die ✔
- c) Batching improves search rankings
- d) It reduces software costs
Why: the calendar shows when items publish; the batch sessions show when they get made. Plans fail at the making, not the publishing — so the making is what gets scheduled.
3. In Lesson 5.3 you committed to 2 items a week. Roughly how many items belong in your 30-day plan?
- a) As many as you have ideas for
- b) 26 — ambition is free
- c) About 9 — cadence × 4.3 weeks, and no more ✔
- d) 4 — one a week is plenty for anyone
Why: 2 × 4.3 ≈ 9. The multiplication is trivial; honouring it is not. A plan that starts by breaking its own arithmetic ends in week three.
4. What do pillars do for a content plan?
- a) They organise the spreadsheet by colour
- b) They guarantee each post reaches more people
- c) They keep you recognisable through repetition and stop random-topic drift — every item belongs to one ✔
- d) They replace the need for a positioning statement
Why: an audience learns what you're for by hearing it in variations, on purpose, for months. Eleven items on eleven unrelated topics add up to nothing, however good each one is.
Advance
A month of content exists on paper: dated, pillared, batched, every item carrying a job. You will make no daily decisions in the next 30 days — you already made them all tonight.
Next: M5.L5 — Create, publish, distribute. Item #1 gets made and shipped — with AI doing the labour it's good at, you doing the part it can't, and distribution treated as half the job. Half your Module 5 Project is already sitting in this plan.
Mark your own work
| Good | Not yet | |
|---|---|---|
| The maths holds | Items = committed cadence × 4.3, give or take | The calendar assumes a better-resourced you |
| Pillars everywhere | Every item belongs to one of 3–4 pillars | Items that belong to nothing |
| The mix exists | Hero-derived, lighter and converting items all present | All promotion, or none |
| Anchor ideas placed | All three 5.2 ideas appear in the month | The plan forgot its own best material |
| Risk met in advance | Likeliest failure named, countermeasure real | "I'll just stay motivated" |
Worksheet
THE SCHOOL OF NET MARKETING
Lesson 5.4 — The 30-day content plan
MY PILLARS (3–4, from positioning and moats)
1 _____________________ moat: ______________
2 _____________________ moat: ______________
3 _____________________ moat: ______________
4 _____________________ moat: ______________ (optional)
CADENCE MATHS
Committed cadence (from 5.3): ____ per __________
× 4.3 weeks = ______ items this month. No more.
THE MONTH (job: A attract · T trust · C convert)
Date Pillar Working title Fmt Job CTA
____ ______ _______________________ ___ ___ ____
____ ______ _______________________ ___ ___ ____
____ ______ _______________________ ___ ___ ____
____ ______ _______________________ ___ ___ ____
____ ______ _______________________ ___ ___ ____
____ ______ _______________________ ___ ___ ____
____ ______ _______________________ ___ ___ ____
____ ______ _______________________ ___ ___ ____
____ ______ _______________________ ___ ___ ____
CHECK THE MIX: ~40% differentiated / ~40% lighter,
on-pillar / ~20% pointing at the landing page.
All three 5.2 anchor ideas appear: ☐
≥ 2 items link the landing page: ☐
BATCH SESSIONS (when items get MADE, not published)
Week 1: ☐ Session A ____ ☐ Session B ____
Week 2: ☐ Session A ____ ☐ Session B ____
Week 3: ☐ Session A ____ ☐ Session B ____
Week 4: ☐ Session A ____ ☐ Session B ____
RISK NOTE
What will most likely stop me: ___________________
Countermeasure: __________________________________
SELF-CHECK
☐ Item count matches my committed cadence
☐ Every item has a pillar and a job
☐ The mix is roughly 40/40/20
☐ The hero asset appears whole and sliced
☐ My risk has a countermeasure
Next: Lesson 5.5 — Create, publish, distribute.
theschoolofnetmarketing.com/learn/create-publish-distribute