How to create a content calendar?

What is a content calendar?

A content calendar (also known as an "editorial calendar") is a written schedule of when and where you plan to publish upcoming content. Content calendars typically include upcoming articles, status updates, planned promotional activities, partnerships and updates to existing content.

Why are content calendars important?

If your blog is a hobby that you use to publish occasional posts, you probably don't need a content calendar.

However, if you're using content marketing to grow your online business, then organisation is key.

Here are three ways content calendars can help your content marketing strategy:

First, content calendars ensure that all the tasks related to your content are actually getting done.

If your content creation schedule is disorganized, you'll forget things.

Or you'll publish less often.

Or you'll fail to update old articles.

In other words, the calendar ensures that nothing gets left behind.

Secondly, the calendar makes it easier to collaborate with your team (and external partners).

If it's a one-person blog, you may not need a content calendar in the first place.

But if you have employees and contractors contributing to your content, you need something to keep everyone on the same page.

Today, a content calendar is more project management than an actual calendar.

Third, a content calendar gives you a comprehensive view of your next materials.

For example, use the calendar to ensure that you don't publish a bunch of case studies at once. Or two guides covering the same topic. So you can see your full marketing strategy for the coming months on one screen.

Best practices

Understanding the key elements of the content calendar

There are content calendar tools, but we will cover them later in this guide.

But the fact is that content calendars don't have to be complicated.

After all, their job is to make things easier for you and your team.

That means you can start with a simple content calendar using Google Sheets.

Here are the four elements that every content calendar should include.

Editorial

The most important element of a content calendar is editing. This is the content you'll publish, whether it's on your own blog, in a podcast, or on social media.

The main purpose of a content calendar is to schedule your editorial work well in advance. This way you can stay organised and consistent with your publishing schedule.

Some companies plan their editorial content a full year in advance. Some independent bloggers may not even know what they will publish next week.

You should try to plan ahead, but you may need to leave some room for flexibility as things can change quickly in the world of digital marketing.

As long as you have a place to show what's coming next, you're fine.

Platform

The platform is the place where you store your content calendar.

Solo content creators have the most flexibility in choosing the platform, from a pen and paper calendar to a Google Calendar to a simple spreadsheet. The key is to make it work for you.

In fact, when you're a solo blogger, your editorial calendar can be a simple Google Sheet with notes that only he or she understands.

But for content marketing teams, it's a different story.

If you're creating content with a team, 5, 10 or even 20 people can touch a piece of content before it goes live. So it's critical that everyone can see the status of each post.

Otherwise, you can get overwhelmed with emails asking, "What's the status of this video?" or "Is the visual part of the Facebook post ready yet?".

And it's not just for content marketing and SEO departments. It can also be used to send other people in your organisation the new content you're working on.

And if you're an agency or freelancer, you can connect to your content calendar from Basecamp, Asana and Trello, so clients can keep track of what you're working on.

Promotion

The next most important element of your content calendar is promotion.

Promotion elements are what they sound like: how you plan to promote your content. When will you share it on Facebook? Do you have an upcoming podcast interview or Reddit AMA? Will you send a newsletter to your email subscribers? These would be promotional activities for your content calendar.

Promotional activities don't necessarily need to be completely separate from the editorial elements of your calendar.

But it's a good idea to give them a different title or color code them so you can easily distinguish them from each other.

Vision for the future

This is a list of future content ideas that you are not yet actively working on. For example, it could be a random topic that came to mind on the way to work. Or something that came up during a brainstorming session.

These ideas usually don't appear in the calendar itself because they are not yet scheduled.

But you definitely need to collect these ideas in your "brain" so that you don't lose them (or get distracted from the content that is almost ready).

Use a content calendar tool

There are tools specifically designed to create, manage and collaborate on a content calendar.

Depending on how much content you publish and the size of your team, you may want to invest in a content calendar software.

Here are some great options to try.

• Notion: all-in-one workspace for notes, tasks, wikis and databases.
• Google Sheets: probably the most popular option for most individuals and small teams. It's free and good for collaboration, but it takes work to set up.
• Microsoft Excel: Microsoft has made its spreadsheets more collaborative than ever.
• Google Calendar.
• Coschedule: plans range from an editorial calendar with 1 personal access to a full marketing suite for large enterprises.
• Loomly: includes interactive tutorials for creating blog posts, automated social media posts and more.
• Editing Calendar plugin for WordPress: Simple, drag-and-drop and free. However, it relies on when you actually schedule your posts in WordPress - which may not be right for everyone.
• Basecamp, Trello, Slack and Asana: Designed more as a project management and communication tool than a content calendar, but any of these three can be used for task management purposes. With a little creativity, you can also use them as content calendars.

Adding items to the calendar

Creating a content calendar can seem daunting if you've never done it before.

But once you get organised, you'll see how useful an editorial calendar can be.

Here's how to create a content calendar on any platform:

Step 1: Make a list of your content ideas. If you write about a wide variety of topics, it can help to categorize them as you go, or you can simply list them.

Step 2: Decide on the frequency of publication. This frequency will depend on your specific content strategy. If you prefer to create a social media calendar, you might publish several posts a day. But if you are creating a blog, you might only publish 3-4 posts per month.

(If you're using a spreadsheet, you may have different levels of detail on different pages for "monthly vs. weekly" or "blog vs. LinkedIn").

Step 3: Using the list of content ideas, fill in the dates according to the frequency you just defined.

Schedule each part of the creation process

Most content calendars only include the title of the post and the date of publication.

Which is fine for simple content items (such as case studies).

However, if you are publishing larger or more complex projects, you may want to schedule each step of the content creation process into your calendar.

In other words, instead of having a calendar that looks like this:

It will look more like this:

And unlike list posts, research-based content requires a lot of work from a lot of people. And in some cases, the work needs to be done on an "assembly line" basis. In other words: one element cannot start until the previous one is 100% complete.

For example, we design a lot of visuals and graphics for our research posts.

Obviously, we cannot produce these graphs until the data is in. So "data collection and analysis" needs to be scheduled before planning.

This is especially important when working with a team. In a team, different people are responsible for different parts of a piece of content. Scheduling important dates for each step in advance can help you stay on track.

This is how you should do it:

Step 1: Write a list of each type of content you will publish. Most of the time you will be publishing short opinion pieces, but when you publish larger case studies, the workflow may be completely different. If you are working with different formats (such as videos and podcasts), we also recommend that you list these as well.

Step 2: Break down each content type into the steps required to create it. For example, a typical blog post creation process might consist of four steps: keyword research, outlining, writing the content itself, and planning.

While for video, the process is: researching the topic, writing the script, shooting the video, editing the content and adding graphics.

Step 3: Add each step to your calendar. If you have a team, write next to each step the name of the person who is responsible for carrying it out.

Don't just include new blog posts.

Content calendars can be used for much more than scheduling different types of content.

Here are a few things to include in your content calendar to make it more robust and useful:

Content updates. It's important to keep your content fresh. So for easily editable pieces (like blog posts), you should include future updates in your calendar.

Site-wide content audits. Sometimes older content can do more harm than good.

Schedule and promote your work outside your site. If you're doing a guest post, podcast interview, live lecture or any other off-site promotion, include that in your content calendar.