How To Create an Editorial Calendar?

In the past two posts about Better Blogging, we've been talking about how to come up with good ideas for blog posts. Now, I would like to write about Creating An Editorial Calendar.

There are a lot of things to cover but don’t worry if you’re brand new to the concept of creating an Editorial Calendar. There will be videos and an assignment at the end of each video. If you follow along, you will have an Editorial Calendar and a system for publishing new content. You can do it in one sitting or watch the 7 videos in the next 7 days.

Video 1: The Basics

This video lesson is all about the basics. You may be surprised at what the first step of creating your Editorial Calendar is. Watch video 1 below: 

Assignment: Do this first before you watch the next video.

Write in your notebook Who is your Target Market.

• Describe your visitor. Is he male or female? How old is he/she?
• What are your visitors interested in? What are their problems?
• What are they reading or watching (if you're creating videos) or listening to (if you are creating podcasts) when they come to your site?

Video 2:  How Much Content to Create

The second video focuses on figuring out how much new content you need to create. After all, you do have to know that in order to create your Editorial Calendar!

Find out more by watching today’s video.

Assignment: Do this first before you watch the next video.

Decide how often you are going to publish new content.

• Think about how much time you have.
• It's better to create 1 new piece of content consistently every week than to decide you want to create 3 pieces of content but you cannot keep up.

Video 3: How to Organize Your Content

This video is about organizing your content so that your readers (or listeners or viewers) can easily find your content.

It has something to do about categories and tags! A lot of people aren’t using these two things correctly. Are you making a mistake with them?

Watch the video below:

Assignment: Do this first before you watch the next video.

Write in your notebook the 5 categories that you want to create content on.

• Look in your blog what categories you use the most and choose 5 you want to keep.
• Work on moving the other categories into these 5 categories and delete the others you're not using anymore.

Video 4: Coming up With Content Topic Ideas

When you created your blog or site, you should know that you need to create content on a regular basis. So, you need a lot of new topic ideas to keep creating new content. 

The video below will show you how to come up with new content ideas.

Read also the previous posts about How to Come up With Good Topic Ideas part 1 and part 2, to get lots of ideas on generating content topic ideas.

Assignment: Do this first before you watch the next video.

Create your idea bank. You can use Word, Google Docs, Excel, or Google Sheets.

• Write at least 10 content ideas to start with. Then keep adding to your idea bank.

Video 5:  Launch Dates, Holidays, & Special Events

This video will talk about an important part of the content creation process that many people forget! 

Many people, including me, forget to add these things into their Editorial Calendar – and when they realize it, they scramble to create content and add these things in.

What I’m referring to are Launch Dates, Holidays, & Special Events!

Watch the next video to know why you need to think ahead and add these in ahead of time.

Assignment: Do this first before you watch the next video.

Write out a list of launch dates and other important dates like holidays and special events, so you can think about what content to create in relation to these events.

Video 6: Time to Actually Write Your Editorial Calendar

Finally, it's time to do the actual writing of your editorial calendar. We will talk about some tips on putting your Editorial Calendar on paper or in digital format depending on how you want to keep track of it.

Assignment: Do this first before you watch the next video.

Write your editorial calendar for next month

• Don't worry if it's not perfect. You can still add to it or make changes.
• What's important is you get organized.

Video 7: A Publishing System for Your Content

Now that you know what content you’ll be creating, it’s time to create a system for creating & publishing your content.

This will help make sure you get everything done. It will also be good to have if you decide to outsource some tasks in your business later on.

Watch the video below;

Assignment: Here's a sample of a Blog Post System. Try doing something similar or create your own system.

• Outline your blog post
• Write the draft
• Do a spell check and grammar check. (I use Grammarly, you can add the Chrome extension for free)

• Find photos you can use in your blog post and for social media posts.
• Get the links to your free or paid products that you wish to promote in your blog post.
• Get your affiliate links and use them in your post, if relevant.

I hope this post has helped you create an editorial calendar for your blog, website, YouTube channel or podcast.

This is the eighth post in our Better Blogging Challenge. If you missed the other blog posts in this series, just click the link above to find the other posts at the bottom of the page.

Thank you for reading.