Your Blog’s Editorial Calendar - Get Organized, Then Relax
Your blog is a publication, and because it is, it needs an editorial calendar.
The term “editorial calendar” comes from publishing. The calendar shows the major editorial features planned for upcoming issues of a newspaper or magazine.
Magazines and newspapers set up editorial calendars so they can assign stories to writers, and also they can sell advertising. If a magazine has an issue with the theme “your first baby” in its calendar, the advertising staff will be selling space in that issue months ahead.
An editorial calender makes blogging easy, because it assigns posts in advance, and lets you sell advertising in advance too.
With an editorial calendar, you can plan your blog content 12 months in advance.
Here’s how to create an editorial calendar for a new blog.
1. Choose seven to 10 categories for blog posts
When you’re brainstorming ideas for your new blog, choose from seven to ten categories. This is your “table of contents”. Also, keep the search engines in mind when you create categories. You want your categories to attract attention.
2. Brainstorm five blog post ideas for each category
Let’s say you have ten categories created for your blog. Now brainstorm five posts for each category. This gives you 50 ideas for blog posts, and your new blog looks much less intimidating, because you’ve planned a lot of the content.
3. Announce your editorial calendar to your staff
If you have staff, circulate the blog posts you’ve brainstormed. Let staff choose which blog posts they want to accept. You can also hire guest bloggers to write some of the posts.
If you’re a solo blogger, add the posts you’ve brainstormed to your own calendar, so you know what you’re writing, and when.
4. Announce the editorial calendar on the blog
As soon as your blog goes live, announce your editorial calendar.
This means that you can get advertisers specifically for each category, or for a specific blog post. If you’re not accepting advertising, you can do in-house advertising for each post.
Create an editorial calendar for your own blog. An editorial calendar is a great tool which will not only get you organized and make you more productive - it will help you to make money too.
Mike | April 13th, 2008 at 9:18 am #
Setting up an editorial calendar was extraordinarly helpful for my blog. I went from panicking about getting additional articles up on any sort of schedule (and falling behind further and further behind even getting posts up regularly), but after spending an afternoon working on filling the scheduled post queue, I’ve finally got
a) several weeks of content ready-to-go
b) some decent articles, now that I’m not scrambling
c) peace of mind.
Ken Stewart | September 16th, 2008 at 7:51 am #
I’m playing with the notion of having an “editorial calendar”. However, for now I would like to keep the calendar generic to the category and post 4-5 times a week. So perhaps Tuesday would be a business related post, Thursday might be technology related, etc.
Thoughts?