How to Create an Editorial Calendar for Your Blog

Let’s face it, the blogging landscape is not getting any easier. WordPress alone accounts for over 70 million new blog posts per month, which works out to over 2.7 million posts daily. In addition, the number of blogs keep increasing, with approximately 504 million blog sites accounted for in 2018.

As you can imagine, the competition is only getting stiffer, so you need to find ways for your own blog to stand out if you want to achieve any of your goals. This can be difficult if you run out of ideas in terms of what to blog about or fail to keep up with posting content on a regular basis. One of the keys to avoiding such a dilemma — and getting good results from blogging — is to ensure your content output is organized in a strategic way. That’s where setting up an editorial calendar for your blog comes in.

What’s an editorial calendar and why do you need one?

An editorial calendar, also called a publishing schedule, helps in the planning and publication of different types of content. As it relates to blogging, an editorial calendar makes it possible to co-ordinate the entire content creation and publishing process over a period of time. It can be used for some or all of the following:

• Formulating blog post ideas
• Creating a posting schedule
• Ensuring consistency
• Organizing content creators
• Setting goals and objectives
• Planning your SEO strategy
• Reviewing results

Your next question is likely to be how do you create an editorial calendar for your blog? Below are some steps you can follow.

1. Determine your blogging goals

Before you can set about creating an editorial calendar for your blog, you first need to establish the end results you want to achieve. What overarching message do you want your readers to get from your blog posts over time? What specific demographic do you want to attract? What are the main issues faced by your target audience that your blog will address? How many monthly readers do you want your blog to have at the end of a particular period of time? Which platforms and tools will you use to promote your blog posts? About how many articles do you want to produce per month, and how many writers or contributors will you need in order to achieve those numbers?

These are some of the questions you will need to answer in order to determine solid and realistic goals for your blog. Bear in mind, however, that setting goals for your content calendar should be based on the needs of your audience, and not just about quantities and dates.

2. Decide on a calendar format

There are many calendar apps out there, including Google Calendar, which can help you organize your article publishing dates and other content-related events. However, a calendar app may not be comprehensive enough if you are also going to assign tasks, plan projects, make forecasts, or measure results/feedback. If you want to go full project management mode, an app such as Trello or Asana may be a better platform to create your blog editorial calendar.

There are also content creation and scheduling platforms such as Buffer and HubSpot, which offer pre-designed content calendars you can adapt to your specific needs. If you are obsessed with seeing things organized neatly in rows and columns, setting up a spreadsheet in Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets may be your best bet. Spreadsheets are also highly flexible in terms of laying out the information how you want it, and they can be easily used alongside other websites and apps. Finally, if you just need the absolute basic minimum, you can also go with a traditional paper desk calendar or planner, which is useful for simply marking dates.

3. Lay out the main topics you want to pursue

After setting your goals, the next step is to decide what you want to write about. The niche you choose for your blog will determine the main topics you want to tackle. But some subject areas are broad, so it may not be feasible to write about all of the possible areas. In addition, pursuing some topics may require resources that you don’t have as yet. You can always turn to your readers to find out what topics they want to hear about more often, by sending out surveys or doing simple polls on Twitter or Facebook. You can also brainstorm topics with your team or do some research to find out what topics are most popular in your niche.

4. Work out a suitable posting schedule

How often do you want to post content on your blog, and what types of content will you be posting? Audiences are increasingly drawn to audiovisual content, so you may want to look into including videos and podcasts as part of your content mix, if possible. Also, when deciding on how regularly you want to post content, you need to find out what your readers’ expectations are. As a general guide, small blogs often post 1–2 articles weekly. Medium to larger blogs can post 5–7 times weekly or even several times a day, depending on the level of traffic and popularity. Another factor is the size of the content, whether you will be doing 500-word or 1,000+-word articles, or longer-form posts.

However, when working out your posting schedule, be mindful that readers are more interested in quality content rather than quantity. You don’t want to focus on posting a set number of blog posts every week, for instance, if you can’t guarantee that all of them will be well written and relevant to your target audience’s needs. If you are the one writing the posts or you have only one writer, be realistic about how many high-quality pieces of content you can deliver in a specified time.

5. Test and tweak

You may not get your blog editorial calendar exactly right the first time you create one. That does not mean you should abandon the idea. Realistically, you want to plan your content over a period of about 6–12 months. But you want to try it out for at least 30 days to see how it’s working out and if you are getting the results (posting on time, generating ideas, managing to create high-quality content, etc.). You can then look at the results and consult with your team (if you have one) to determine what changes need to be made to get your editorial calendar more in line with your blogging goals (or whether you need to re-evaluate those goals).

Finding success from blogging is not only about writing high-quality, SEO-friendly posts. It also means being consistent and deliberate. Creating an editorial calendar for your blog will go a long way in helping you to plan your content in a strategic manner and improve your chances of achieving your goals.

— Casey Botticello

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Casey Botticello is an internet entrepreneur and the founder of Blogging Guide, an online community of writers with an award-winning newsletter. He is also the creator of the popular Medium Writing Course and the Substack Newsletter Course.

Casey previously worked at several tech startups, a lobbying & strategic communications firm, and has created several businesses of his own. He is a graduate of The University of Pennsylvania, where he received his B.A. in Urban Studies.

You can connect with him on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, follow his Medium publications, Digital Marketing Lab and Medium Blogging Guide, or reach out to him directly on his personal website.