A 3-month content calendar for a small Nepali business

A generic 'October content plan' pulled from a Western template will have you writing about Halloween sales while your actual customers are shopping for Dashain. The search spikes that matter to a Nepali business follow the Bikram Sambat calendar and the tax cycle, not the January-to-December year most content tools default to.

Two things repeat every year and are worth building into any calendar from day one: the festival season from Ashwin through Kartik, when search volume for gifts, clothing, sweets, travel and home goods rises sharply and then falls off fast, and the recurring monthly obligations under the VAT Act, where registered businesses file a return by the 25th of the following month regardless of season. A retailer and an accounting firm need almost opposite calendars, and a template that ignores that split is useless to both.

Ashwin is when search interest starts climbing well before the festival itself, so content published in the first two weeks of the month is what actually gets found and shared before people finalise their plans. Publishing your Dashain content during Dashain week is too late; the page needs three to four weeks to be indexed and to start ranking.

For a retail or gift business, week one is the right time for a 'what to buy for Dashain' style post built around your actual catalogue, not a stock listicle. Week two is for a sizing, delivery or booking-deadline post, since 'last date to order before Dashain' is a real, high-intent query every year. Week three and four are for restocking updates and a short piece answering the two or three questions your staff keep getting asked by phone.

For a service business with no festival product to sell, don't force festival content that doesn't fit. Use Ashwin instead to publish one solid evergreen page, something that answers a question your customers ask year-round, since your competitors are distracted by festival marketing and won't be publishing anything this month.

Tihar falls in Kartik and brings its own distinct search pattern: rangoli and decoration searches, sel roti and sweet recipes if you're in food, and a strong secondary spike around Bhai Tika gifting. Treat it as a separate event from Dashain rather than an extension of it, the products people search for are different and the content should be too.

The first week of Kartik is also when post-Dashain clearance searches appear, people who didn't buy before the festival, or businesses restocking. A short 'Dashain leftover stock' or 'Tihar specials' post published in the first few days of the month catches both.

This is also the month the 25th-of-the-month VAT filing rhythm becomes worth writing about publicly if you're an accounting, bookkeeping or business-services firm. A short reminder post two weeks before the deadline, not on the day, is what actually gets read, since by the deadline day people are filing, not researching.

Mangsir is comparatively quiet, wedding season is the main seasonal spike, and this is exactly when most small businesses stop publishing entirely because the urgency has gone. That is the mistake. Search interest for evergreen, non-seasonal questions doesn't drop, only your competitors' output does, so this is the cheapest month all year to publish something that will still be ranking next Dashain.

Use this month to write the two or three pages you keep meaning to get to: a proper 'how our pricing works' page, a comparison of your options against the obvious alternative, a genuinely useful how-to tied to your product. None of it needs a hook or a season. It needs to be accurate and complete.

If wedding-adjacent products or services apply to you, add one piece here, but keep the rest of the month evergreen. This is also a sensible point to review what you published in Ashwin and Kartik: which posts actually got search traffic, which fell flat, and what that tells you about next year's plan before you forget the details.

The realistic failure mode isn't a bad plan, it's a good plan abandoned in week two of Dashain because the shop is full. Write the Ashwin and Kartik posts in Bhadra, before the rush starts, so publishing during festival season is just clicking a button on something already finished.

Keep the calendar itself simple: a spreadsheet with month, week, topic, target keyword, and status is enough. Anything more elaborate becomes its own chore. Mark the two or three posts each month that are genuinely date-sensitive, order cutoffs, filing deadlines, and protect those above everything else, since a late seasonal post is close to worthless while a late evergreen post loses almost nothing.