As a digital agency that strives to provide valuable content for our clients through our blog, we encourage our clients to do the same for theirs. We emphasize the fact that you need an editorial calendar to keep track of all the valuable information you’re publishing on a daily, weekly or monthly basis.
What is an Editorial Calendar?
An editorial calendar is a weekly or monthly perspective of when content is scheduled to be published. You can be as specific or general as you wish. For example, an editorial calendar broken down by month will list the relevant topics for each month and not specify the exact day, much like magazines do. Or it can be scheduled down to the day and include the time each post will be published, this is often used when a website publishes multiple pieces of content each day. With an editorial calendar, you’re able to have a vista like an overview of the content, thus enabling you to make sure that it’s consistent and focused over time. It also helps editors keep their sanity.
Of course before planning and scheduling out your topics or selecting posts titles, a content strategy should be developed. Without a content strategy, your blog will most likely lose focus, be inconsistent and eventually stop altogether.
Two points have been made so far;
1. You need to have a focused editorial calendar for your content
2. Before creating an editorial calendar, a content strategy should be developed
Getting Started
Creating your editorial calendar doesn’t have to be hard. There are many ways you can go about developing your calendar for yourself, team or company.
Here are a few tools that you can use to manage your editorial calendar.
1. Google Calendar
2. Excel
3. Hubspot or Basecamp
4. Editorial Calendar plugin for WordPress
5. Pen and Pencil (I don’t recommend it)
You can use just one, two or all of the tools above. You should try each one to discover which option works best for you.
Here at Uhuru we use HubSpot for our content marketing – this tools are the best fit for our team, your needs might be different.
Do you currently have an editorial calendar for your content? Let us know what you’re doing in the comments below.
