What is an Editorial Calendar?

An editorial calendar is a tool that helps you plan content for your business. It’s a great way to ensure that you’re publishing the right types of content at the right time, so you can reach your goals and drive traffic.

There are several different formats for an editorial calendar, so it’s important to choose the one that best fits your needs and team’s workflows. This can help you avoid creating a document that’s a time-suck rather than a time-saver.

What is an editorial calendar?

An editorial calendar is a tool that helps content marketers organize their work, plan for future content and track project progress. It can be a spreadsheet, a Word document or an online tool within your content marketing platform. It can be used to create a timeline for writing, editing, and publishing a piece of content.

It’s a great way to ensure that you and your team are prepared for any challenges that may arise in the content creation process. It also helps you schedule posts and other forms of content for a variety of platforms and times.

The best editorial calendars are easy to use and can be customized to fit your needs. They can include automated reminders, mobile accessibility, customizable category options, space for writing notes and other features.

Editorial calendars have been in use for centuries in traditional print publications, and they’ve grown to be a popular option among digital publishers as well. They can be used to manage the entire content production process from ideation to publication, which is essential for delivering quality content that meets your business goals.

While some content teams prefer to manage their own calendars, it’s common for marketing departments to use a dedicated software program with features that are tailored to their needs. These tools are more expensive than spreadsheets or other simple solutions, but they can be worth the investment for larger teams or complex content campaigns.

An editorial calendar can help you identify gaps in your content strategy and save time through planning ahead. It also allows you to determine if a piece of content is not resonating with your audience or if it needs more work.

When you’re creating an editorial calendar, consider your audience and the types of content they like to read. This will help you decide which topics are most important and should be featured in your next publication.

Moreover, an editorial calendar can make it easier for you to create content that is relevant to your audience’s interests and preferences. It’s also helpful to plan your content around events or holidays.

How do I create an editorial calendar?

An editorial calendar is a visual workflow that helps a team of content creators schedule their work on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis. This can include tracking content types, promotional channels, authors, and publishing dates.

Creating an editorial calendar is essential to keeping your team organized and focused on producing high-quality content. It’s also a great way to make sure you’re not wasting time on unproductive activities.

To begin, you should gather key information from your content marketing strategy to help determine what to track in your editorial calendar. This includes who your target audience is, their needs, and what topics they’re interested in. You can use these insights to create a content plan that’s specific to your business and helps you achieve your marketing goals.

You can also track important details on your editorial calendar, such as the title and meta description of each piece, and a call-to-action (CTA) for each post. This makes it easier for you to ensure each piece is optimized for SEO and aligns with your business’s overall marketing strategy.

Once you’ve gathered the relevant data, it’s time to start planning your calendar. You can either do this manually or using an online tool like Google Sheets or Excel.

Some companies prefer to use a dedicated software platform for their editorial calendars. For example, Digital Authority uses CoSchedule to plan out timelines for blogs and social media posts. The platform offers color categorization, calendar and task views, and a variety of tools that help keep the team collaborative and agile.

A strong editorial calendar can also help you see content gaps ahead of time and prepare the right content at the right time. You should also allow flexibility within the calendar, so that you can change your schedule as necessary.

Using a content calendar also allows your team to collaborate on projects without being in separate locations. This means you can stay up-to-date with what’s happening at any given time and avoid misunderstandings that could affect your business’s overall marketing performance.

Whether you’re a content marketer or a small business owner, creating an editorial calendar is critical for staying organized and on top of your tasks. This will help you achieve your marketing goals and stay on track for success.

What are the benefits of an editorial calendar?

An editorial calendar is an organizational tool that helps you plan out your content marketing efforts. It also allows you to schedule and prioritize projects and assign tasks to your team members.

An effective editorial calendar can help you create a backlog of well-written, researched articles that are relevant to your audience. It can also help you create a consistent inbound marketing strategy that will attract new followers and boost brand awareness.

While many people think of editorial calendars as tools used by print and digital publishers, they are equally useful for anyone who creates online content. This includes blog posts, social media posts, and videos.

Editorial calendars are most often created in a spreadsheet or other format that can be shared with a team and edited by individual users. These spreadsheets can have tabs that reflect the publishing process, for example, a tab for story ideas, a tab for stories currently being written and edited, and a tab for published stories.

There may be columns for each piece of published content that includes the name of the piece, the author assigned to it, the publication destination, the micro content (for example, sub headings and search optimized descriptions for HTML links), and other important information about the piece of content. Some editorial calendars track the performance of each piece of published content, for example, the number of tweets and Facebook likes received from the piece.

A good editorial calendar can make the entire process of creating and distributing content much easier. It can streamline the process of brainstorming ideas, scheduling and planning the content, and ensuring that all team members have access to the information they need at any given time.

For content teams working in different areas of the company, an editorial calendar can be the best way to stay organized and ensure that everyone on the team is working on the right projects at the right time. It can also help a team stay on track with the work they’ve been assigned and prevent members from feeling like they have to rush through their assignments or spend too much time reworking them.

What are the challenges of creating an editorial calendar?

A calendar is a useful document for planning and tracking content marketing activities. It allows you to organize your content and create a schedule for when it should be published, and it can also provide a template for creating an editorial strategy.

A good editorial calendar helps your team develop a consistent and reliable publishing cadence, which is essential for driving traffic and conversions. It also ensures that everyone on the team knows what they’re working towards and when it will be completed.

An editorial calendar is a useful tool for any digital marketer, regardless of their role or the platform they use. It outlines the type of content you’ll be creating and scheduling on a weekly, monthly or yearly basis.

It also includes the themes and subjects you’ll be covering, as well as the reader personas that you’ll be targeting. This helps your writers align their content with your audience’s needs and interests, and it makes it easier to create high-quality content that will appeal to them.

There are several challenges that come with creating an editorial calendar, however. First, it’s important to keep it simple and easy for everyone on the team to use.

Secondly, you’ll want to make sure that your calendar is flexible enough to allow for last-minute changes when something unexpected happens. This can be especially helpful if you have a lot of different content types or if you need to adapt your editorial schedule to accommodate for resourcing changes.

You can also add tasks to your editorial calendar that need to be completed by specific people. This can include everything from reviewing an article to promoting it on social media.

The best way to keep your editorial calendar organized is to label the tasks that need to be completed with three different labels: assigned, work in progress (WIP), and complete. By highlighting these labels with different colors, you’ll be able to see exactly where each piece of content is on its way to publication.

Lastly, you’ll want to update your editorial calendar frequently. This means incorporating feedback about your published content into the calendar, and also doing an audit of the performance of all the pieces of content you’ve created so far. This can help you decide what needs to be done differently in the future to increase visibility and engagement.