Maybe you’re like me and you post things to your personal or company blog when inspiration hits 1.
Or hopefully you’ve got more of a plan when it comes to the content on your blog – particularly if it’s a company or business blog. Having some sort of editorial calendar to plan out your posts is essential to making sure you always have fresh content on your blog.
Some of the benefits of putting in the extra work to manage an editorial calendar are:
- Content doesn’t bunch up all at once. You can properly space out new posts throughout the week or month for fresh content, year round.
- Planning a series of posts on a specific topic is much easier to promote if you think about it ahead of time. Starting off with “This will be a 4 part series on how to grow eggier eggplants” is more incentive for people to subscribe or come back to read the rest of the series.
- Planning ahead also allows you to bring in guest authors who bring expertise on a specific area that you may not have. This has the added benefit of bringing their audience to your blog.
- Having a rough sketch of the month ahead will force you to write better posts. Rather than showing up Monday morning and needing a post for your site because it’s been 3 weeks since your last post, you’ll be able to put your feet up and sip a cup of coffee as WordPress auto-publishes a previously written masterpiece on “Eggplants: Humanity’s Last Great Hope”.
A plugin for WordPress that helps manage an editorial calendar is creatively called Editorial Calendar:
Did you remember to write a post for next Tuesday? What about the Tuesday after that? WordPress doesn’t make it easy to see when your posts are scheduled. The editorial calendar gives you an overview of your blog and when each post will be published. You can drag and drop to move posts, edit posts right in the calendar, and manage your entire blog.
Download the Editorial Calendar Plugin here and leave a comment below with when your next post is scheduled to come out.
Update: For more on the benefits of an editorial calendar, read The First Step to Predictable Blog Publishing Success:
But businesses and writers who want to share their subject matter expertise or thought leadership need to plan in advance, think deeply about what they?re offering over time, and make sure that they have balance and depth.
- As is the case with this post. Inspired by this post from Patrick Rhone mentioning the plugin. ↩
I love the Editorial Calendar plugin for my food blog. It not only helps me schedule product reviews/giveaways in among the recipe posts I write, but also it helps prevent me from getting over-excited and dumping all my recipe posts into one week and having little to no content posted for the next couple weeks. I need a calendar to force me to have patience. 😉
Great post Chris. I?ve use the Editorial Calendar plugin myself, but have since moved on to CoSchedule, an editorial calendar that also incorporates social media. You can check it out here http://coschedule.com/ Disclaimer: I work for the company. Thanks for the post!
Interesting. At first glance that looks good. Thanks for stopping by.