How To Make An Editorial Calendar For Your Blogging

In this article, I am going to discuss why you need to have an editorial calendar for your blogging and how to make an editorial calendar for yourself.

Why do you even need an editorial calendar?

Well, the main reason is that an editorial calendar will help you to create content with purpose and content that gets results.

An editorial calendar will help you not only increase your website traffic, as you will be posting consistently, but it will also help you to differentiate your brand from other blogs in the same niche.

The reason you need to plan and have an editorial calendar is to manage the process of planning your content from idea, right through to content creation and publication.

If you don’t have a plan, you end up creating content on the fly and at worst could end up with blogger burnout.

To get started, it is a good idea to look at your “Blog Content Framework”:

• Categories
• Subcategories
• Media types
• Post types
• Posting schedule
• Blog post ideas

With a well-established ”blog content framework” and editorial calendar you’ll see better results faster. You’ll get more social media followers, more visitors to your blog, and more awareness about your brand.

Categories:

These are the main points that you are going to cover in your blog.

Ask yourself what are the topics that are going to make up your blog’s primary focus. Here less is more. It is best to start with only a few categories so that your readers can navigate easily around your blog. Start out with two or three and add more as you need to. Too many categories can make your readers feel overwhelmed.

Remember giving people less choice increases your engagement.

Think of when you go to a restaurant. It is easier if the menu offers fewer choices than too many choices.

Keep the names of your categories short and simple, and suited to your blog. Make sure they are easily understood.

Subcategories:

These are smaller articles you need to cover underneath your main category. Start small and increase these slowly as your blog grows.

Sometimes it helps to start with main categories and only subdivide your posts into subcategories later on.

Media Types:

This refers to the way in which you choose to deliver your content. It could be in the form of videos, infographics, content, or both.

Keep it simple to start out with and start out with what you feel most comfortable with. There are many options, but do what you know best and you can branch out into other media types later on.

Post Types:

Here you will decide what types of posts you are going to deliver and how you are going to structure them. You could say have one review, then a how-to video, then a helpful article, etc. This helps you to add variety to your blog so that you don’t only add one type of blog post each time you publish something. List-type posts are also great for engagement.

Don’t post the same type of post every time to make your website more interesting. Maybe you could plan to do a video every second week, a list-type post on the first week of the month, and a review on the middle week of the month for example.

Having this on your editorial calendar will save you a lot of time as you will know exactly what you need to publish and you can get straight to it.

Posting Schedule:

Here you need to decide when and how often you will be publishing a post. Consistency is key here.

This could either be per week or per month, depending on what type of blog you have. A common mistake is to be too ambitious and try to post too often. This just leads to burnout and it places a lot of pressure on yourself. It is no point posting five times in one week and only once in the next week is not very consistent.

Remember that consistency is more important than posting too often. Remember less is more. It is also best to post better quality less than posting more but not such high quality.

If you have a personal blog, you don’t need to publish as frequently as say for example a magazine blog. But you need to spend more time writing here, as people want to see things from your perspective.

If you are stuck for time, you can post content that has been curated from other blogs with your own twist on them. Remember you will always need to credit the other blog by sending back a backlink to where you got your content from.

Blog Post Ideas:

This is a list of post ideas. (Ideas Bank) It is good to make a list as you think of ideas for future posts so that you always have a  variety of topics to fall back on. Don’t think you are going to remember each good idea you have, always write it down.  Find a good central place for all your ideas to be put together, like a spreadsheet.

If you want to start your own blog, this is the best way to get started.