Blogging

How an Editorial Calendar Can Improve Your Blog Posts

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Last Updated on February 12, 2022

Editorial calendars can help you plan what you’ll post on your blog when. But it can also help improve what you post, too.

If you’ve followed me over various blogging-related Twitter chats like #Blogchat, #Bloggab or #Blogtrends, you’ve likely seen me mention the editorial calendar. It’s essentially a schedule for your blog so that you can lay out, a week or a month at a time — or longer if you prefer — the posts (or topics) you want to write about going forward.

I’d heard of editorial calendars for quite a while, but had never really used one. But early in 2013, I decided to bite the bullet and install a plugin called WP-Editorial Calendar. It creates a calendar view and plots everything on it according to the dates you have posts published or scheduled.

At a glance, you can see what you have planned. Or, if you have a hard time coming up with ideas, how many days there on which you have nothing planned.

Here’s a look at a portion of my editorial calendar for a three-week span of last month, just so you can get an idea of what you’d see on your administrative side of your blog, otherwise known as your blog’s “backend.”

http://i4.photobucket.com/albums/y118/Pattboy92/editorial-calendar-sample_zps8ae726b3.jpg

As you can see, for each day of the week, there’s the title of the post. They’re dimmed in this view because they’re already published. If any were in “draft” mode, the word draft would appear in brackets right after the title to remind me that I hadn’t actually scheduled the post to appear, yet.

Regardless, I can see, three weeks at a time, whether I have posts already scheduled or whether I still have work to do. Which brings me to this: in addition to the editorial calendar, I switched to daily posting. Yes, it was ambitious. Yes, at times, it’s maddening.

But thanks to the editorial calendar, it’s possible, because I can easily see which topics I’m ahead on, which ones I’m behind on, and which posts need my immediate attention.

This past weekend, during #Blogchat, we touched on the topic of finding ways to avoid giving up on blogging when the going gets tough. I suggested that when you’re experiencing Writer’s Block, and sooner or later, we all do, an editorial calendar can help you focus.

Chris Yates then responded with this:

I have to disagree with that, at least to a point.

An editorial calendar can inspire a great post.

It can help you find a great topic to write about based on “connecting the dots” between posts you’ve recently written about or scheduled. It can inspire a great post about topics you haven’t written about because you can spot them easier, too.

But most importantly, an editorial calendar can inspire a great post indirectly by taking some of the pressure of scheduling other posts off your shoulders.

Let’s say you write a food blog. And let’s say that you post on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Mondays are your kitchen tutorial days, in which you explain some process of cooking or a gadget that has to do with food preparation. Wednesdays are your review days, on which you visit an eatery of some kind and discuss what you had, how wonderful (or lousy) it was, and why. And Fridays are your recipe days, on which you simply unveil some secret formulation for the next culinary delight.

Let’s say it’s Tuesday, but there has been a kitchen tutorial you’ve really been thinking about writing since Sunday, when a friend of yours asked you about some kitchen trick. You already had a different post scheduled for Monday, so you thought you’d use her idea for the following Monday. But it’s Tuesday, and you have a review post due on the next morning.

Don’t you?

You check your editorial calendar: you have two review posts “in the can” so to speak, scheduled one and three weeks in advance. You’d even managed to forget, while stressing out over how to write next Monday’s post, that you’d even completed a couple of review posts and had them on standby.

Your editorial calendar shows you that at a glance.

And because of that, you have two immediate options: you can spend your Tuesday (and Wednesday, for that matter), writing that tutorial without the deadline pressure, or you can go ahead and spend your Tuesday knocking out the Friday recipe post, and then free up Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday, if you need it, to perfect that tutorial.

Your editorial calendar helps you manage your time more efficiently. That helps you focus on your content, not your deadline.

And that’s almost automatically going to guarantee that your content will be better, because you’ve had more time to spend crafting it rather than just spitting it out fast to run on time.

Can an editorial calendar inspire a great post? It can certainly help you find the extra time you need to produce one. So I’d have to answer that question with at least a qualified yes.

Your Turn:

Do you use an editorial calendar on your blog? If so, do you feel that it has helped free you from some of the deadline pressure? Do you think your blog is better or worse because of it?

the authorPatrick
Patrick is a Christian with more than 30 years experience in professional writing, producing and marketing. His professional background also includes social media, reporting for broadcast television and the web, directing, videography and photography. He enjoys getting to know people over coffee and spending time with his dog.

6 Comments

  • I have always used a diary to track my blog posts.  Mine is a Filofax paper agenda.  I post three times a week.  At the start of the year, I write in all the blog posts on their dates by type of post.  Then as I go, I write in the title of the post and a checkbox to show that it is completed and scheduled into the blog.  I also write in checkboxs for all the different types of marketing I do for each post, such as twitter, facebook and google+.  That way I can track if I’ve completed the marketing per each post.  I feel more comfortable using paper than any sort of electronic or web-based calendar because I am more confident that it will not be lost via a wipe or hacking.  I try and get my posts into the blog as far ahead as I can.  My author interviews are often three or four months ahead since I seem to have plenty of authors interested in appearing on my writing blog.  I am a little slower with the book reviews and the articles that I write, but I muddle through as best I can. 

    I enjoyed reading your article.  Your suggestions seem spot on to me and your description of your method is easy to follow.

  • @James at TraVerseBlog If you can manage what you have and you’re happy with it, don’t feel like you MUST have an editorial calendar. You should certainly do what works best for you, James! 🙂

  • I totally agree with you. One of my blogging goals was to plan posts in advance and I started an editorial calendar (sort of) in excel. It’s been such an improvement because I now have posts listed for over 8 weeks. 

    Tosin AK
    http://www.mystylepad.com

  • Interesting perspective.

    I don’t use an editorial calendar per se. However in an effort to create buzz and awareness about my blog I always publish on Thursdays and I always include the #TraVerseThursday whenever I share on social media.

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