The Advantages to Creating an Editorial Calendar
Creating an Editorial Calendar can help you stay focused and blog more effectively so you can meet your customers’ needs and win more business. I just developed an editorial calendar for this blog at the end of last year and I am sure it’s going to help keep my blogging on point. Here’s why: as you develop a content strategy, it’s important to start thinking of yourself as a publisher. Publishers have everything planned out in advance based on the yearly cycle as well as their product cycle. They know in advance exactly what type of content they need to create and produce for the month of February and why. If you think more like a publisher, you’re going to be much more successful in your content strategy implementation.
Ability to Create a Theme
By creating an editorial calendar, you can develop an overall theme for the year or the quarter based on the products and/or services that you’re promoting, as well as the time of year. Planning it all in advance makes it easier to be prepared and come up with the ideas, content, and images that you want to use to promote.
Makes It Simpler to Find Your Voice
By planning out your marketing year in advance, it means you’ll also be planning your product creation. If you provide services, you’ll already know in advance which services you’ll be focused on. This will make it so much easier to know what kind of content to create and in what tone you need it to be, because you’ll understand in advance when you need it, and what it’s for. When you have a plan, finding your voice comes a lot easier.
Makes It Easier to Diversify Content
If you know in advance what the topic of your content needs to be, it’ll be easier to create different forms of content for your needs. You can plan in advance to create blog posts, video blog posts, videos, reports, and more, based on a particular subject or theme designed to market a particular product or service. By not doing it “on the fly,” your content will be more cohesive and diversified.
Keeps the Content Ideas Flowing
By making an editorial calendar, you actually create a situation where you make it easier to keep content ideas flowing. Some people think planning makes content boring, but the truth is, planning makes content effective, appropriate and enjoyable for your target audience. It gives you time to create appropriate titles and outlines, to ensure that you get the message out that you want out.
Enables You to Create Quality Content
By planning your content in advance, you have more time to make the content true quality content that speaks to your audience. Whether you’ll be writing it and editing yourself, or hiring others to do it for you, it’s important to plan in advance what type of content will be needed in order to produce the highest quality content that you can.
Keeps Your Website on Topic
It’s easy to get off topic sometimes if you haven’t planned your content in advance. By writing down what content you’ll be creating before you create it, you’ll have time to nix ideas that go off topic, or move them to the right time and place. If you try to produce content at the last moment, you may end up with irrelevant content that has no purpose.
Acts as a Map to Help You Reach Your Goals
Your editorial calendar is just like GPS or a map. You can look at it in one glance and see where you’ll be in the future, and you can look more deeply into it and find out what you’re supposed to be doing right now. You won’t go into each day without a clue of where you’ve been or where you’re going.
Helps Increase Collaboration
Having a publication calendar that you share with others can also help increase collaboration. If you allow for guest writers and bloggers, they can look at your publication calendar and it will be easier for them to decide what to write about within your guidelines. In addition, it will help your outsourcers and people who work with you understand the direction you’re taking the business.
Attracts More Visitors
Having a set calendar will make your content appear more regularly, thus increasing the rate of visitors to your website. Your audience will learn to expect certain content from you at certain times and will appreciate knowing when, what and where to go to see it and view it.
Sets Expectations and Deadlines
Even if you are just setting deadlines for yourself, it’s important to do so. If you have no expectations of yourself or others it will be difficult to build a truly profitable business. For instance, if you are building a furniture business, but you cannot ever tell anyone when the furniture will be finished, you won’t ever be able to sell anything. Set expectations and deadlines for yourself and anyone you outsource to; this will help you meet your goals.
Finally, by having a publication calendar you’ll ultimately have a more organized and planned business that will make more money in the long run. Content that is distributed and marketed according to your editorial and/or publication calendar will see a lot more success than content that is haphazardly put out without any notion of a goal or a plan.
If you need specific ideas about how to create a editorial calendar, email me. I can point you to free resources on the web and talk you through the basics. And if you’re too busy to do it on your own, I can help you get it done.
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