Creating an editorial calendar can be the tool that takes your business blog from a side hobby to a real and productive part of normal operations. Though managing a small blog is possible without a calendar, good implementation can still benefit even the smallest of operations.
A well-planned, strategic editorial calendar can transform a static, sporadically updated blog into aninteractive and reliable source of information and discussion.
Where editorial calendars really shine, however, is in the organization of geographically diverse and busy workers. If your workers are working different schedules, or even from different areas, an editorial calendar can be the difference between constant second-guessing and smoothly-flowing organization. It allows collaboration to take place across schedules and time zones, and clarifies important questions of responsibility and ownership.
The calendar can also be extremely useful when deciding which topics to cover. A calendar helps you get a quick overview of which topics have been covered lately and which are due for an update. From an SEO perspective, they can make it easy to ensure consistent coverage of keywords, even ones that aren’t necessarily the most interesting to write about. It’s important to ensure a constant keyword spread in order to rank in all of your important categories.
We’re going to examine the best tools that can help you create and maintain an editorial calendar for your blog.
Tool Suites
There are a range of suites of tools available for business blogs with the express purpose of creating and maintaining an editorial calendar. Most content management systems such as Wordpress and Moveable Type are perfect tools for business blogs, and it turns out that they have a selection of great plugins and expansions for editorial calendars.
If you don’t feel like messing with plugins, a simple Google Spreadsheet can be enough to organize a blog. With group editing and some creative formatting, a spreadsheet hosted on Google Docs is more than enough to impart many of an editorial calendar’s organizational benefits.
Allocate responsibility
With projects like blogs, it’s easy to get responsibilities confused and have disputes about who was expected to do which article. These disagreements can make it harder for colleagues to cooperate and collaborate. A calendar is often the best way of dispelling any confusion about responsibility and get everyone on the same page.
Making sure that everyone has a clear understanding of their own responsibilities, whether it is as a writer, editor, or social media representative is key to the smooth organization and running of a blog. If responsibility for a task hasn’t been clearly and transparently assigned, it’s naive to think that it will be completed.
Consistent keyword spread
In this age of content marketing, keywords are vitally important. A consistent keyword spread helps you rank on all of your important topic areas, ensuring relevance on Google and social media. Google Adwords has a great keyword tool to help make sure that you’re covering all of your keywords across the topics that are important to your blog.
Use the calendar to schedule topics so that each gets regular content treatment. Color coding different topics in the calendar can help make content gaps easily visible at a glance.
An organizational secret weapon
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Creating an editorial calendar streamlines the process and lets your writers get down to what they really want to do: write. Taking the hassle out of management ensures a smooth operational flow and gives your team an always online, always available reference point. This can be a godsend, especially if you’re not available to answer questions they might have. With a calendar, the editor is afforded the time to plan in advance and organize additional content for articles like images and video.
Bonus Tip Using an image resizer helps when you find that perfect image, but it won't correctly input in the article
An editorial calendar provides a complete picture of all editorial activity associated with the blog, making operations and responsibility more efficient, understandable, and scalable. Ultimately, a calendar is indispensable to the management of any publication, something blogs are just starting to catch on to.
