Do you know what the secret behind the success of a blogger is?
It’s consistency.
There are many bloggers who want to achieve great success in their blogging careers. But after publishing their content consistently for some time, they give up.
They start procrastinating, fall short of ideas, get busy with other work, and start ignoring their blog. And as such their traffic starts declining.
Many of them don’t even realize that this decline is a result of their inconsistency. But those who do, aren’t sure how to make things right.
If you’re one of them, here’s the answer for you. Create an editorial calendar and stick to it.
Don’t know how to do that? Don’t worry. In the following section, you’ll learn what exactly is an editorial calendar and how to create one.
So let’s get started.
What is an Editorial Calendar?
An editorial calendar is a planning document that lets you schedule your blog posts regularly.
This can be on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis, depending on how you prefer to keep your publishing schedule.
Since it’s a visual document, you’ll be able to identify details like which post needs to be drafted and published on which date, etc., with just a glance.
You can also keep track of other related information like the author of the post, the edit requests, drafting or publishing date, etc.
Why Use an Editorial Calendar?
Now, if you think that consistency is the only reason why you should use a visual document to plan out your publishing schedule, you’re completely wrong.
There are several other benefits of using an editorial calendar. Let’s look at some of them.
1. Organize and Track your Content Status
The best thing about editorial calendars is that it helps you keep your content organized and track its status.
It helps you understand what stage your content is in when it’s supposed to be published and other similar important information.
2. Achieve your Goals Faster
By properly following a well-planned editorial calendar, you can easily meet your deadlines and manage your blog more efficiently.
This, in turn, helps you grow your audience, meet your goals faster and build your business more quickly.
3. Boost Productivity
When you have your editorial calendar ready, you can straight away get started drafting your content without having to waste time thinking about the topic or deciding when to publish it.
Your calendar keeps you accountable by helping you focus better and write faster.
Now let’s check out how to create an editorial calendar.
1. Pick the Right Tool
Having the right tool for your editorial calendar is extremely important. There are different tools that can help you create an editorial calendar for your blog.
But not every tool may be right for you. To identify the perfect tool, you need to understand your goals well. That way, you’ll know what you want to achieve by using the tool.
You can try answering a few questions to make the process easier. For example,
- What features do you want in the tool?
- What is your budget?
- Do you manage a team of writers?
Knowing these answers helps you choose the perfect tool your business deserves. We use Asana to create our editorial calendar. It’s a great tool that helps businesses track, organize and manage their content easily.
2. Have a Schedule
Once you have your tool, you need to create a publishing schedule. You need to know how often you want to publish your content. If you’re a beginner, don’t overwhelm yourself by overpromising.
Stick to publishing one post a week first. Once you get comfortable publishing one post, you can slowly start increasing your frequency. It is also important to have your content ideas ready at least a month ahead.
This makes things easier to follow, and you can also make necessary changes if something comes up. It helps you stick to your schedule without having to miss your publishing dates.
3. Organize and Schedule Your Content
Having your schedule ready isn’t enough to maintain consistency. You need to organize and schedule your content too. So once you have your topics ready, add them to your calendar.
Now add more details to it like your due date, publishing date, authors, keywords, offers, quick notes for writers, social channels for promotion, etc.
If you have a team of writers, you might want to add more details like article status, word count, format, instruction for writers, etc.
Doing this gives you a quick glance at your overall marketing strategy and helps you be more consistent with your blogging process.
So that’s how easy it is to create an editorial calendar for your blog. So what are you waiting for? Get started now.
