Blix Interactive - Established 2001

How to Make an Editorial Calendar for your Business Blog

An editorial calendar will act as a torch to guide you through the dark and dangerous world of blogging. It will show the plan for your blog, the schedule of the content you plan to produce, who will be writing it and when it is due for publication. This helps to keep everyone accountable and ensures the blog doesn't hit a dry spell.

There are many different types of editorial calendar and what is needed will vary from business to business. Today we are going to through some of the key elements that you will want to consider including in your editorial calendar.

1. Decide on a Tool

There are multiple tools out there that work well for editorial calendars. From a simple Excel spread sheet to custom WordPress plugins like this one.  However in my opinion the best tool for an editorial calendar is Google Docs, it provides easy access for multiple users and can be accessed from anywhere.

We have made up a Google Docs template for you all to use here, follow the link then click File> Make copy. This will allow you to use and edit the template.

There are a few key areas in this which are worth going over; the editorial roadmap allows you plot an overview of events that are taking place over the year that could have an effect on your blog and topics.

The calendar section is the most important, this is where you will put the titles, author and publish date for your planned blog posts. Other columns such as audience and keywords can be used if you are doing a more targeted blog campaign.

The ideas sheet allows you and members of your team to submit ideas for consideration; this is a great way to get all the members of your team involved with the blog. If you like an idea, simply move it from the ideas sheet to the calendar.

Tracking your successes and failures is an extremely important part of blogging, it allows you to analyse what works, what doesn't and how best to move forward. There are a number of metrics you can use to track the success of individual posts, number of comments, social shares and page views all work well.

2. Set Goals

How can your blog be successful if you don't know what you are trying to achieve? Goals can range from increasing your keyword coverage to increasing rankings for a specific keyword or better engaging your customers. Regardless of what your goals are, setting them from the start is from an important step.

When setting goals be sure to think about how many posts you can realistically publish per month and who on your team can write about what subjects.

3. Think About Keywords

Using your blog to expand your keyword coverage is a fantastic way to increase visitor numbers to your site. Targeting informational keywords that support your main transactional keywords is my favourite way to use a blog. 

For example if you are selling car insurance then your main keywords might look something like "car insurance in [location]" "buy car insurance" and so forth. For your blog, you would then think about what information these people might be looking for before they run these transactional based searches, this will give you titles such as "How to Get a Cheap Car Insurance Quote in Guernsey". This exercise should give you some great ideas for your blog and will expand your keyword coverage, attract customers higher up the conversion funnel and build customer trust.

4. Put your Calendar Together and Write!

Once you have decided on goals, brainstormed ideas and researched keywords it is time to put it all down in your editorial calendar and get started!

 Remember the content of your blog does not have to be limited to blog posts, check out last week's post for some more ideas.