Half of me didn’t think this post was really important enough to write, because who doesn’t know the benefits of having a calendar (for anything), right? But I started doing a little more research into how businesses were handling their content, which turned out to be not very well in many cases, and figured okay so maybe this kind of stuff isn’t as obvious to some people than I thought it was. So here goes!

Why you need an Editorial Calendar for your Blog…

For regularity

Most people have a good grasp on this point so I’ll only cover it briefly, but one of the most important and obvious reasons you should have an editorial calendar is to keep some regularity to your posts.

To start with, find out which day(s) your audience is most responsive (this might take a little research, trial and error etc.) and set that day as your ‘blog day’. Let’s say that’s a Wednesday.

No matter what kind of calendar you have, whether it be a basic spreadsheet, a Google Docs calendar, or a plugin/widget of some sort (we use WordPress so we have a cool plugin, linked at the bottom), just add a note like ‘blog today’ on every Wednesday for the next few weeks and there you have the foundation of your calendar.

Providing you stick to it, it’s literally as easy as that. Defining a regular date for your posts can help you fit your blog into your workload a little more seamlessly and can help search engines decide on how often it will crawl your pages (it’s way more technical than that but that’s enough for now). It’s also good to maintain regularity for your audience but I’ll cover that a little further down.

Here’s a snippet of what ours looks like:

For keeping track of ideas

Personally, a big use for my editorial calendar is to keep track of ideas. I think from the headline downwards most of the time so it’s really handy for me to jot down some titles that I want to research and write about.

Having a calendar also allows me to add a rough title to days when I know I’ll want to cover that particular topic. Which brings me to…

For marketing assistance

If you know that one week your company is doing a push of a certain product it could also be handy to have an accompanying blog post.

Example: So if I know that my company want to push the Lawnmower 3000 on Wednesday in 3 weeks time, I’ll jot down an idea for a blog post to go up that week, maybe something like ‘How the Lawnmower 3000 can benefit small businesses’.

That way you’re keeping up with the regularity of your posts, aiding in the current marketing push, as well as giving visitors a link between your product and your blog.

For motivation

Your editorial calendar can also help you with motivation. It links back to the point above about fitting your blog into your workload – By choosing a blog day you’re setting yourself a deadline, and what better motivation to complete a task than having a deadline?

For your audience

I’ve covered it briefly earlier on but having an editorial calendar for your blog is vital for maintaining regularity for your audience, not just for yourself.

Yes, it’s helpful to have it there as a reminder/motivation, and yes it can be a good notepad for your ideas but all of that ultimately means nothing if you can’t convince your audience to come back, or better yet, give them the need to come back.

Being able to provide your audience with regular blog posts gives them a reason to keep coming back to your site, Follow you on Twitter, add your blog to their RSS feed, Subscribe on Facebook etc. If they know they’re going to get regular content that’s beneficial to their business or interests, they’ll actually need to come back.

So, in brief, that’s why I think you need an editorial calendar for your blog!

We use the WordPress Editorial Calendar which is free. You can find it here: http://stresslimitdesign.com/editorial-calendar-plugin

Content might not be king any more but that doesn’t mean it’s been booted out of the kingdom altogether. Businesses shouldn’t be fooled into thinking that content marketing is a waste of time and the Venn diagram, courtesy of SEOmoz, shows that even though content marketing is now sharing the limelight with Technical SEO and Social Media, it’s still very much a part of any optimisation strategy.

To really maximise your content marketing, whether it be via blog posts, news items, press releases, or email marketing, there are a few steps you can take to make sure you get off to a good start.

1. What do you want to achieve?

Before you start a content marketing campaign it’s important to firmly establish the point of it. What are you trying to achieve? Promotion of a product? Customer interaction? Brand awareness?

Content marketing isn’t likely to be the sole form of marketing you use so think about how content can aid your current campaign. Also set yourself a deadline, by what date do you want to achieve your goals?

2. Know your audience

Blog posts, news posts or email marketing campaigns are likely to fail unless you can display a coherent theme that relates to your audience. In order to find out which themes will be effective, you first need to know your audience.

Do all the research you can to determine exactly who your audience is. If you have the resources it’s helpful to perhaps send out a survey or a poll so you can get a general idea of the age, sex, demographic, interests etc. of your audience.

There are of course, a few assumptions that can be made when determining your audience. For example, if you’re a web hosting company you can assume that your audience will display more of an interest in blog posts relating to web hosting than they would graphic design.

3. Themes & developing content

Once you’ve established what you want to achieve and the exact audience to which you want to target, you can actually start planning your content.

Start thinking about what themes you want your content to revolve around, what kind of voice (are you writing from a personal perspective?), the kind of tone you want (informative/stern or conversational), and whether you want to aim more towards guides or casual news items. Personally, I find making a list of rough titles I want to write to helps me with developing content so I have a kind of check list of posts I want to write, this also helps me with the planning of my content, which brings me on to my next point.

4. Scheduling

Think about how often to want to publish content. If you’re sending emails, how often are they going out? Perhaps you’re writing an monthly newsletter or a weekly product update. If you’re blogging are you aiming for a daily post? Do you have the time and staff to do this? Always try to be realistic with your schedule or you could become overwhelmed and start producing poor quality content, or missing deadlines altogether.

The tips from now on can be seen as a continual loop. When you first start your content marketing you’ll take an educated guess at what times and dates are best for publishing content. However, once you go through the testing, measuring results, and plan review stages below you’ll probably find that you need to come back round to the scheduling stage and re-evaluate your strategy.

This isn’t a bad thing though so don’t worry if you find yourself back here 3 or 4 times before you start seeing some positive feedback.

5. Testing

As with any kind of online marketing and advertising campaigns it’s important to test different methods of promoting your campaign in order to determine the most effective delivery method.

Testing may seem easy but there are tonnes of variable combinations that you’ll need to explore if you want to really cover all your bases. Don’t just test whether a short blog post works better than a long one, test whether a short blog post works better than a long one at 10am, whether it gets more retweets on Twitter than a long one, or whether it gets you more comments.

Testing and measuring your results (below) go hand in hand so remember that for every variable you test and change, you also need to be recording its effect.

6. Measuring your results

As a company that takes pride in our email marketing campaigns we put a great deal of effort into measuring the success of each campaign. We take into account factors like the number of people in the campaign, the title of the email, the time of day, the length of the email, interaction rates, the relevance of the email to the recipient, and much more.

We can look at all of these things to determine why certain emails failed and what proved to be effective; do 10am emails have a higher interaction rate than 5pm emails? What about Monday compared to Friday? Long emails or Short? These are all factors that can be turned into useful information; market research if you like.

The same principles can be applied to blog posts and news items too; timings, content, audience, relevancy; they’re universal variables that come into play with all kinds of content marketing, and are therefore all variables that can be harnessed and studied.

7. Don’t be afraid to change the plan

Obviously, the point of testing and measuring your results is so you can optimise your content marketing strategy. If you find that your original plan isn’t working, don’t be afraid to change it.

If your content either isn’t working, or starts to drop (in visits, CTR’s, comments etc.) then loop back round to the testing stage and start again. It’s safe to assume that once your figures start dropping, you start to lose the attention of your audience and therefore you start to lose the reason for your content marketing.

See also: A Guide to Successful Email Marketing