How to use an editorial calendar to keep from getting overwhelmed by your content strategy
When embarking on the journey of content marketing for your business, it’s easy to become overwhelmed with all of the ideas you have for blog and social media content. Suddenly, every bit of your day becomes blog inspiration, food for infographic thought and ideas for promo videos. This is great, great feeling. But with all of the ideas that need to be put in action, start by mapping out your ideas and getting organized with a stable, objective framework: the editorial calendar.
A well-organized editorial calendar will do wonders for your business. To start, it helps give business owners a place to channel all of those content ideas so you can map out weeks, even months, in advance. Knowing ahead of time what blog post should be written and when a social media post is going to be scheduled will help give you a full picture perspective of your brand’s communication strategy. Additionally, an editorial calendar provides  a space where your team can brainstorm collective ideas for future content and marketing initiatives.
Planning content ahead-of-time in your editorial calendar is a great way to make sure what you’re sharing is fresh and relevant for your audience. By mapping everything out on a quarterly basis, it allows enough time to plan out seasonal posts, such as holidays, but also leaves room for flexibility in the schedule if something arises that will be applicable to your target audience. Keeping areas of your editorial calendar flexible is important, as having the ability to make changes quickly is part what content marketing is all about.
Don’t be overwhelmed, however, when you see that your calendar is suddenly filled with ideas months ahead of time. Thinking in advance doesn’t necessarily mean that every blog post scheduled for June will be written in January. Trust us, we understand that writing content isn’t something that happens overnight. Allow yourself enough time to write and edit the posts and then take it from there—the editorial calendar will do wonders for keeping your business on track
Creating an editorial calendar will be a labor of love, but the payoff is most certainly worth the effort. Given a manageable editorial calendar, scheduling tweets, implementing SEO-friendly keywords and writing e-newsletter copy will suddenly become much less daunting. Taking those extra hours at the beginning of each quarter to get organized will make the months moving forward flow with ease.
