This week’s to-dos for powering up your website are all focused around organisation and planning. It’s a good idea to revisit this post (or your lists and calendar) on a monthly basis to make sure you’re keeping on top of everything and doing all the long-term planning you need to be successful.

1. Make a master to-do list

If your website is more than a few months old, chances are you’ve spotted some things that aren’t quite right or need updating. Make a complete list of snags and updates, then organise them accordingly into quick and long tasks. If there are any that will take under two minutes to fix (e.g. typos), do them straight away and check them off.

2. Sketch out the year

It’s still early in 2014, but creating a skeleton of the upcoming year is a great way to ensure you stay on track with your goals. Look at the bigger picture and don’t forget to include significant life/business events and commitments as well so you know your busiest times.

It’s up to you whether you do this on a per-website or per-business basis, but a few of the things you might want to include in your skeleton outline are:

• Redesigns
• Product/service launches
• Milestones (e.g. business anniversaries)
• Events (e.g. awards, sponsorship, conferences)
• Aims (e.g. gross/net profit, number of clients, number of Twitter followers)

Keep the plan on your desk or always open in a tab and continue to add to it and alter it as time goes on, using it as a basis to make next year even better.

3. Design a content plan

Having fresh content is a win for both your visitors and search engines, and a regular schedule will keep your visitors coming back for more. Use your analytics data and look at the social shares on similar websites in your niche to identify the most popular content, and use that to generate more ideas. Keeping a list of topics and titles as a draft post/page within your site makes it easy to come back to, quick to update, and prevents it from getting lost or mixed up with other projects.

Make sure that your content strategy finds a good balance between pleasing your visitors and not becoming a chore that takes too much of your time.

4. Brainstorm promotion ideas

Once you’ve created your content plan, it’s important to spend at least as much time working out where and how you can seed your content. Social media, upvoting sites specific to your niche (like Design Bump), guest posts, emails and similar go a long way.

If you don’t produce a lot of content, it’s better to focus on brainstorming how you can promote your business, services and products directly throughout the year. Take into consideration your busiest and quietest periods to make the most of promotions, and don’t forget specific seasonal opportunities and events.

5. Subscribe to essential updates

If you use a content management system or any third party software likely to be updated, subscribe to important announcements via mailing lists and official forums. Whilst widely-used software such as WordPress will notify you when upgrades are available, this doesn’t apply to all, and you need to log in anyway to even be aware of new releases. If you run a lot of websites or use a variety of platforms, email subscriptions are the best way to keep up to date and even stay ahead of the game because you’ll be more aware of upcoming releases and new features.