Blog Organization: tips and free printables to keep your blog organized {part 4: editorial calendar}

Keeping track of a busy schedule is challenging. Adding the production of regular consistent content on your blog or website and you step into a whole new level of difficult. With out an easy way to see entire months at a time and up to a full year in advance, choosing a topic to write about each morning is time consuming. Not only is it time consuming, not having a plan might actually be wasting your time more than you realize. Managing a small business means you should be keeping track of your month in review and social media growth and income, expenses, and sales. You also should also have a plan for your schedule and time management. These tools can help you but with out an editorial calendar, you might not be sharing your best content at the best times.

An editorial calendar is simply a calendar to control publication of content across different platforms. They are used for blogs, magazines, newspapers, and to schedule social media content. Why is it important? While we might not be thinking about a certain holiday or event months in advance, publishers already have the content they are using for the entire year on their editorial calendars. Just because you’re not a big magazine, you can benefit from using an editorial calendar of your own. The content on your blog should be posted with enough time for your audience to use it before the intended date. For example, if I’m baking red, white, and blue cupcakes for the Fourth of July and post them to my blog with a shared recipe the day I bake (usually just a day before the holiday), only my immediate audience will ever see the recipe before the holiday. But if I share photos and a recipe of the holiday themed cupcakes one to two months in advance, there’s an opportunity for the post to go viral before we ever make it to Fourth of July. You want to give your audience the courtesy of having time to be prepared to recreate your recipes or projects. One day’s notice is not going to cut it.  

Using an editorial calendar can be as simple as filling in post ideas you have already accumulated for the month. Using the holidays, sponsors, and events section on the bottom of the calendar enables you to add reminders for posts you should be including for the month. I also use the calendar to help control my sponsored content. With a few different sponsored posts each week, it’s easy to forget to include non sponsored content in the week too. Just because you have content on your blog, it doesn’t mean you’re using it as the most optimal time.

Print your free printable editorial calendar to help you produce the best content at the right time.

When pitching ideas for publication, you should reference the publisher’s editorial calendar online and try to align your pitch with their upcoming themes. Sometimes these calendars are published online and can be accessed in their writer submission pages. You can also look for the calendars in the advertisers section on websites too.

Do you have any tips to share when determining how content will fit into your editorial calendar?

Use my tips for bloggers to print and create an organization binder that works for you.