How to Create Your Blog Editorial Calendar

We’ve said it before, and we’ll say it again: if you want to be a business savvy blogger, you need to have an editorial calendar.  As with all things in life, having an organized set of content and keywords that you’ll be using to help promote your business throughout the next week, two weeks, or month will go a long way in helping you keep your content strategy in line.

As we talk about in our free ebook "How an Inbound Marketing Agency Does Blogging”, an editorial calendar is essential in not only mapping out your content, but to also track and measure the keywords and topics you've been covering.

Why A Blog Editorial Calendar Is Worth Your Time

Putting together an editorial calendar can be a bit time consuming, but trust us – the benefits of having a calendar all put together definitely make that time worthwhile.

• You Make Yourself (Or Employees) Accountable:  By having a calendar out where everyone can see it, you make yourself or your employees who are responsible for blog or website content accountable.  Having set deadlines for work is the best way of ensuring that work gets done.
• You Make A Commitment To Your Online Community:  When you start an editorial calendar, you aren’t only making a commitment to your business.  You’re also making a commitment to your online readers to ensuring them that fresh content will be produced on a regular schedule.  This will increase your readership and further expand your number of devoted readers, leads, and customers.
• You’ll Increase Your Content Creativity: We know just how hard it can be to continually come up with fresh content ideas.  Heck, we talk about it on our eBook “How To Be The King Of Content Marketing” and talk about ways to ensure that your content never goes stale.  One of the best ways of doing that is to have an editorial calendar that outlines exactly what you’ll be talking about on each day that you’re producing (which hopefully is every day).
• Your Calendar Can Help Advertisers:  If you’re fortunate enough to have advertisers help fund your site, then having an editorial calendar can help increase interest in your site by allowing advertisers to see where they can fit into the fold and when they should be marketing “x” product or service based on the content that you’re producing.

How To Create Your Dream Editorial Calendar

It’s important to remember that despite slotting things in on certain days that no calendar is set in stone. There is room for revision.

But what’s perhaps even more important to remember is that your editorial content should ultimately help you accomplish everything that you want to accomplish that month with the content that you’re producing.  Before creating your editorial calendar, really look at your stats and decide what your business needs to be successful, and then write down those goals prior to coming up with content ideas. For example, some of your goals may be:

• Create content that will help bring in more qualified leads
• Create content that helps promote you as an industry leader and increases your credibility in your niche
• Create content that will help you really hone in and target that new market that you think you should be marketing to

Once you have your goal or goals set, then it’s time to tart coming up with fantastic content ideas to help you achieve them.  You may need to dig into your data to see just what does help “x” type of lead convert or what sort of content has proven to successfully draw top funnel leads further along the sales process.

Take the general ideas from what has worked in the past and then expand upon that, but make it relevant to today and their position in the lead nurturing process.

And before we forget, your editorial calendar should be fairly flexible.  You never know when someone may offer to guest blog on your site or when a fantastic news story may come its way and prove to be more time sensitive in terms of need of being posted.

Just make sure that your calendar allows you to be stringent enough to accomplish your goals, but flexible enough to allow for any unexpected – but good - surprises along the way.  That way, you’ll always know that you’re producing great read-worthy and shareworthy content.