Do you have difficulty in producing content regularly? Do you lack motivation sometimes to write your articles, you exceed your due dates? If your answers are positive, then it may well be that you do not have an editorial calendar.
An editorial calendar is an essential tool to be able to keep his motivation to write new articles. I created one for my blog after I realized after a few months of activities that I lacked diligence and accuracy in writing my articles. As soon as I realized this lack of me, I did some research and I realized that what was missing was an editorial calendar!
During my research, I realized that this tool can be in various forms! I’ll introduce you to some in this article. By cons, I return above the bases and explains what an editorial calendar and usefulness.
What is an editorial calendar?
An editorial calendar is a planning tool that is often in the form of a calendar. It allows bloggers and other professionals to predict their future articles forthcoming. It is a tool to frame the entire writing process, from the idea to the publication and promotion.
Your editorial calendar can be as simple as just having the title of an article and how you will publish day. By cons, it can also be further like to include your promotional schedule on your social networks.
Benefits to owning an editorial calendar
- Huge dose of motivation
- Post articles on a regular basis
- Helps to always have ideas for articles to write for days when you lack inspiration
- Visually see upcoming articles
- Avoid unexpected problems with articles aside – take writing breaks!
- Plan seasonal articles
- Less stress
- More traffic
- Helps to finish the articles that are still in progress. (I can’t believe I’m the only one that has 30 drafts.)
- Helps to feed your social networks regularly
Key points of a good editorial calendar
- Good color code (time needed, subject, type of the task…)
- Flexibility to be able to easily move any publication
- Easy to view everything in a glance
- Simplicity, do not get lost in too many colors, too many categories, etc. The aim is to simplify the writing process for your articles – not making it complicated.
Once you have created your schedule, you will realize how creating content for your blog is easier.
Questions to ask yourself when creating your editorial calendar
- How many articles do you want to publish each week?
- Do you want to publish specific subjects on a certain day of the week?
Some bloggers like to have a central topic for all tickets that are published on Monday, for example. By cons, articles published on Friday will have a completely different subject. - Ask yourself about your writing process: what are the lists you are going to need to classify the status of your articles?
Does “Ideas”, “Draft”, “Review”, “Planned” and “Published” lists are good for you? - Do you have a seasonal niche ?
A blog about hockey or swimming will have fewer articles published once the season is over, it is to be considered!
To sum up, ask yourself about the steps of your writing process.
Now it’s time to create your OWN editorial calendar
My old calendar on Trello
I manage my editorial calendar with Trello. Before doing all these searches about what is an editorial calendar and how to create one, here is what it looked like:
As you can see, I wasn’t organized at all!
Get a new calendar like mine
As you can see, my schedule is much more organized! It makes all the difference.
Learn how to create your own here!
Calendars of other bloggers
- Start a Mom Blog has an editorial calendar in paper in front of her work space
- Megan Martin uses an Excel Sheet to schedule her articles
- Em for Marvelous has a blogging binder
- Emily Lee has a pretty interesting printable library
- and many more ideas on Pinterest!
In conclusion
Since I have an editorial calendar, my life as a blogger has completely changed! I publish more regularly my articles, I’m more active on social networks, I am more relaxed!
In the next article of this series, I’ll explain how I created mine with Trello!
Tell me in the comments: did I convince you to set up an editorial calendar? Do you already have one? Tell me about your experience!
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[…] I mentioned a few suggestions to plan your articles with other tools in my previous article. […]