By this point you’ve now got goals, motivation and inspiration. The next step is to ensure that you establish momentum. Regardless of your goals, if you’re taking this course it’s because you’re committed to investing your precious time and effort into creating something distinctive, worthwhile, and lasting. The way forward to avoid wasting that time and effort is to create a schedule.
Think of your blogging schedule simply as a framework. An infrastructure to put in place that will ensure that your blog is kept fresh and current based on a consistent frequency that is realistically sustainable long-term, for you – that you can then enhance and embellish upon whenever the mood strikes.
For this lesson, let’s set up some tried-and-true tools to help you maintain your energy and inspiration as you develop and grow your blog.
An editorial calendar is nothing more than this:
“The most ambitious, yet achievable, commitment you can make to your blog.”
For many of us, blogging is a way to express ourselves and interact with others during our free time. The idea of setting deadlines and making plans can be off-putting for those of us who do it for the sheer fun of it, on our own loose schedule (i.e., whenever the kids/boss/pets/baseball playoffs allow it). And that’s absolutely fine.
The great thing about editorial calendars is that they can be as detailed or vague, as rigorous or elastic, as you see fit.
For some, publishing twice a week (or once a month, or every day, or… you get the point) is already a calendar of sorts. Many bloggers build a foundation for a calendar when they introduce a regularly scheduled feature mixed in with off-the-cuff material. Making any pact with yourself about the regular rhythm of your posts is a huge step beyond the “whatever, whenever” plan — which in reality is no plan whatsoever.
An editorial calendar allows you to plan in advance and allocate your limited time wisely. Let’s say you plan your blog monthly: you might already know that on the second weekend of the month you’ll be offline for a wedding and that an important deadline is coming up at the end of the month.
A calendar allows you, first, to start writing in advance. Since you can pre-schedule the publication of your posts, you’re done once you’re pleased with your draft. Your blog will take care of the rest while you’re dancing (or working) the night away.
Second, a calendar lets you make smart decisions about the mix and the timing of the posts you want to publish. A busy week? Why not schedule posts that are shorter or easier to write. More free time? You can finally dive into that long essay on the history of Korean BBQ you’ve been meaning to start.
In other words, you can (and should!) play around with the types of posts you publish, giving your audience time to digest your meatier content by punctuating long, serious posts with shorter and lighter fare.
Once you’ve been blogging for a while and have a bit of a track record, designing a calendar becomes even more important (and can yield even bigger dividends). You should consider examining and analyzing your stats, then take your content planning to the next level. When you know a) what your most popular posts are, and b) what your strongest traffic days are, you can start maximizing the patterns you detect.
For example, try combining a popular topic with a high-traffic day to expose as many readers as possible to your strongest content.
On softer days, you could experiment with a new type of post you’ve been thinking about, or go with an interactive feature (like a post with a poll) to focus on higher engagement among your visitors.
“The idea is to identify your blog’s core audience and serve it the content it came looking for, but to also test out new features that might expand and deepen your blog’s appeal.”
We’ll cover more information about working with and understanding stats in the lesson Metrics and analytics.
Regardless of the kind of blog you keep, here are some editorial calendar-building pointers you’ll want to keep in mind:
- Go visual: If it’s only in your head, it’s not really a calendar. Use your smartphone’s calendar app or a note-making tool like Simplenote. Get any of the many templates available online. Or go old school with pen and paper. Having an actual document will help you to keep track of your progress (and to make changes when you need to).
- Be realistic: It’s better to schedule two posts a week that you know you’ll publish on time, than a daily post you’ll miss three days out of seven.
- Budget time for interaction: Consider the time you’ll want to spend responding to your audience. Don’t schedule a post that’s likely to generate a lot of discussions if you know you won’t be able to moderate and respond to comments.
- A calendar’s not just a plan — it’s an archive: Once you’ve crossed off the week’s/month’s/year’s scheduled posts (great job!), don’t toss away your plan. Go over it and try to detect long-term trends: what posts did you most enjoy publishing? What kind of content elicited the strongest reactions from your visitors? Planning will be easier if you rely on actual data rather than gut feeling alone.
- A calendar isn’t only for publication dates: Create a space in your calendar for thoughts that haven’t yet matured into fully formed post ideas. Keeping an inventory of these can pay off whenever you’re having a moment of writer’s block, or need to change plans quickly. It’ll also make it easier to create future calendars, as you’ll never be starting from scratch.
While having a schedule in place is often useful, having one that’s too rigid can backfire. A predetermined calendar with no leeway can fast become a fun-killing distraction — and bloggers who don’t enjoy maintaining their blogs don’t maintain their blogs.
Practically, too, having some wiggle room is important. Keeping a day open gives you the space to write spontaneously and publish time-sensitive content your readers might be eager to read.
Did your team just win a big game? Did your partner just propose? Did you just accidentally bake the best chocolate chip cookie in recorded human history? Time for an impromptu post! In other words, plan for the unexpected by not over-planning.
If you were guessing that today’s assignment is to create an editorial calendar, you’d be correct! Here are some tips to get started:
- Don’t worry about creating a calendar that stretches out over the next 12 months. Aim to make a plan for the next 3 months, with a publishing cadence that you’re confident you can sustain. If one blog post a week is realistic for you, then create a calendar with that schedule in mind. That translates to 4 blog posts a month for 3 months = 12 blog posts.
- If you’re using an actual calendar (whether it’s digital, like Google Calendar or project-planning software, or a paper planner), write the blog post topics and/or titles on the date you plan to publish them. Remember that you can change it anytime, so don’t get too hung up on crafting the perfect title now, or coming up with a detailed outline. Sometimes all you need is a title to inspire you. (But if you’re so moved, add a sentence or two to help flesh out the idea a little more.)
For extra credit, write 2-3 blog posts in advance and schedule them to be published on the dates you’ve chosen for them on the calendar. You can always change the scheduled date later, but preparing some posts in advance when you have more free time is helpful for those times when you’re overwhelmed with other commitments — or when you’re suffering from a temporary case of writer’s block!
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