Editorial Calendar Why You Need One
The importance of proper planning is heard everywhere. So why is it so many people don’t plan out their blogging efforts, social media strategy, or email marketing. A lot of that has to do with having the proper tools to plan and track your progress. This is the importance of have a great editorial calendar.
A lot of posts have been done that talks about a blog editorial calendar however, blogging is only one aspect of your overall inbound marketing strategy. What you need is an editorial calendar that helps you plan and track all your inbound marketing efforts.
Reading some of the other posts and looking at our own efforts we have come up with tips for tracking things in your editorial calendar:
Blog Posts
This is the common one; you should plan out in advance what you want to write about. Then you can do so initial research as to the keywords, title ideas, call to action, and follow-up posts. Having a well-planned blog content strategy will provide much greater success in your inbound marketing efforts. This section of content is a must have in your editorial calendar.
Email Marketing
Yes, this should be in your editorial calendar. Email marketing is a way to reach your loyal community with some unique content that they can use. This content should also relate back to your blogging efforts and have a good integrated strategy so your readers can visit your blog for further reading. Having your email marketing plans in your editorial calendar will make sure you are staying on track.
White Papers and Reports
If you are using whitepapers/reports in your inbound marketing for business then this should also be scheduled in your editorial calendar. If are not using whitepapers then you should read our post about best practices for inbound marketing for business. Anyway, have whitepaper planned you can start to build a series of blog posts, and emails to prepare for the launch of the whitepaper. This will help with the success of your whitepapers for your community.
Interviews/Video Posts
Doing interviews is a great way to provide content for your readers and also learn from industry leaders. A good interview post is very valuable to building relationships and a great way to get to know some of the people in your industry. Planning and schedule are very important for interviews because they do take some leg work to get put together.
Social Media
Social media is becoming very important in your overall inbound marketing and SEO efforts.Good social media planning will help your SEO and improve traffic. However, the social media team or person needs to know what is planned so they can make sure the right message is getting out on those channels.
What do you use to track it?
We have tried a number of tools to help with planning all the different content and after all the testing like the blogging editorial calendar the best solution we found is a spreadsheet. This way you can track it and update things as you go. We have built a Google Doc template that you can access here and use for yourself. Just make a copy and customize to your liking. The first sheet is your content at a glance, this sheet is updated automatically from all the other sheets so it gives you a good view of what is upcoming and the status. Use this additional sheets to plan your content that will fit for your readers.
We have also created a Social Media Calendar as well. This tool is great for planning your social media strategy and preparing topics, content, keywords etc.
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Links for the Post:
Google Docs Editorial Calendar Template
Social Media Calendar Template
Some other Tools:
Editorial Calendar for WordPress Plugin
Google Calendar
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