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An editorial calendar is your content planning bible. It shows a detailed listing of your blog posts/content pieces and where they stand in the production process. There are several ways to lay out your calendar, but most people use dates on one axis and all specifics about the item on the other axis. You can use a physical calendar or planner and write everything down, or you can create a spreadsheet online using programs like Microsoft Excel or the spreadsheet tool on Google Docs.

Schedule Your Blogs

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All great editorial calendars are merely tools. Before you even think about filling one in, you have to create a strategy. You need to determine how often you want to post your blog, what genre you’ll write about and create some marketing personas to determine who will be reading your blog. Once that’s done, we can get into the nitty gritty about the Editorial Calendar itself.

For each article, what do you need to define before you write? Those will be your section headers. Some common headers for content marketing agency editorial templates: Keywords, topics covered, title, post type and status

Compile A List Of Blog Categories

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After you have decided how often you will post your blogs, it is important to decide what type of content you will write about. You probably already know some keywords and search phrases that are important to your business. We find that the best way to generate ideas for our clients is to look at these metrics:

• Keyword reports

• Monthly Search Volume

• Ranking Difficulty

Now, it’s very important for our clients to generate sales or increase usage. If that’s not important to you, you may want to look at other metrics (time on site, referrers, etc). We take this data and refine the keyword list to see which keywords we can probably ‘win’ fairly quickly and focus our content efforts there. We use this low-hanging fruit to come up with broader topics that we’ll write about on their blog.

Next, we spend time generating ideas within those topic areas and placing them in the Editorial Calendar.

Acknowledge Time-Sensitive Items, Holidays, Anniversaries And Other Special Events

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Business anniversaries, holidays and special events will occur, and these are often great fodder for your blog. Plug any upcoming dates that seem promising into your Editorial Calendar.

Who Will Be Writing The Blog?

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Writing blog posts isn’t terribly difficult but it’s a time sink! If you have the time to do it, that’s awesome. We know that every blog post we write generates at least a certain number of leads (which also generates a certain number of sales/revenue), so we make the time to post. If you know you need to blog, but you don’t have the time or skills to do it, take a look at our content marketing pricing plans here.

Update Your Editorial Calendar Regularly

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Many an Editorial Calendar has been started and abandoned. Schedule tasks and time to update and use the calendar, and you’ll be amazed and how much you’ll start to enjoy the process (and your customers will enjoy all your great content too).

Because we know that many businesses are already time stretched, we’ve created an Editorial Calendar Template for you and your staff to use. Tweak it to fit your processes and share it via Google Docs or save it in a shareable folder on Dropbox or Box.

This is a scaled-down version of the actual Editorial Calendar that we use at Mariposa for our content marketing clients, so we hope it’s helpful.