How To Get The Best Out Of Your Writing Schedule?

For many content writers, building a writing calendar seems to be an idealistic dream. If you are one of them, it’s time to change your mind and create your own writing schedule…

A content calendar is a template used by publishes, groups, businesses and bloggers to control publication of content across a variety of media like social media sites, news outlets, magazines, blogs, and newsletters.

Publishers extract useful information and attract new advertisers by making data publically available. On the other hand, public relations professionals use content calendars to present the right kinds of stories to their clients. The main purpose of a content calendar is to control how many articles you publish in a day or week.

How A Writing Calendar Can Benefit You?

There are so many benefits to creating your content calendar. These are mentioned below.

1. A writing calendar will allow you to schedule important events or milestones.
2. Images, texts, and other media assets are required for publishing. All these assets are made available to the writer, making the task easier and smoother.
3. The content calendar lets you organize and plan things in advance. Your consistency in posting will reflect your professionalism.
4. Every single writer can benefit from the writing calendar because it becomes easy to break down large concepts into manageable tasks.
5. Your content schedule will strengthen your reputation as a writer because you will be able to deliverable valuable information to the target audience.

Let’s Create A Writing Schedule/Content Calendar

If you are ready to capitalize on these advantages, let’s create a content calendar.

Step 1 — Brainstorm Unique Ideas

The very first step is to develop your content ideas. These will be the topics that fit your brand, address different concerns of your followers and make establish you as an expert in the writing industry.

Some ideas to get started with are mentioned below.

1. How-to guides, webinars or videos
2. Case studies
3. Success stories
4. Trends, news stories, travel articles
5. Reading lists
6. Business-related articles
7. Interviews with popular writers or public figures

If you have already published a few stories, go back and check if you can repurpose them. Ideally, you need to develop enough ideas to schedule stories for three to four weeks.

Step 2 — Know Your Frequency And Publication Channels

Once you’ve brainstormed enough ideas, you need to determine where your stories will be shared and how often. Remember that every channel serves a different purpose.

1. Blog Posts — You can publish ‘how-to’ content and insights regarding different industries and businesses. There are many topics to go with, but you need to focus on quality and promote such stories on online forums and Reddit.
2. Video-Based Content — These can be shared on social media and will help you build a reputation in a short time. Once created, this type of content will only need to be updated whenever an update is available on the Internet. Make sure the writing you do aligns with the story told in your video. Depending on the number of followers you have, you can publish 5 to 7 video-based stories in a week.
3. Articles On Celebrities, Technology, Science And Lifestyle — You will find many people looking for stories on Hollywood stars, international celebrities, lifestyle, science, and technology. Social media sites like Facebook, Tumblr and Twitter are good to promote such stuff. The frequency will change between channels. For example, you shouldn’t share stories on Facebook more than thrice a day. On Twitter, Tumblr and LinkedIn, stories can be shared twice daily. You may make listicles and forward them to your friends and followers through emails.

Step 3 — Use A Spreadsheet

You can try a spreadsheet along with a calendar to map things out. Google Doc or another spreadsheet can be used to organize and plan the schedule of your content. If you use Google Drive, you will be able to share some articles with your team of writers and editors for review.

It would be great to include a couple of things in the columns of your spreadsheet, such as date of publication, name of the author, the title of the task, description of the content, publication channels to be used, target keywords, marketing goals and status (complete, published, rejected, or draft).

Step 4 — Define The Workflow

If you have a team of writers or content creators, you need to provide them with proper guidance and define the workflow. You may include the followings in your calendar.

1. The goals of different articles you and your team write.
2. Outline the brand’s tone and give content format to everybody.
3. Inform them about the preferred language.
4. Tasks that every member is responsible for.

Step 5 — Schedule Things And Fill In Your Content Calendar

Once everything has been planned and scheduled, you need to fill in the content calendar as soon as possible. The real beauty of this calendar lies in its flexibility. The seasonal content is fixed in place, but we encourage you to change the writing and publishing schedules of other projects according to your requirements.

Final Thoughts — Keep Your Writing Strategies On Track

We’d like to request you to keep your writing strategies on track. Arrange meetings with your team members and discuss when to publish certain stories and how to format and share them with the world. You should also maintain a balance between quality and quantity.

Have you ever tried any of these ideas?