Five Reasons Why You Need a Blog Editorial Calendar

How a Blog Editorial Calendar Can Help You Take Control of Your Content Marketing Strategy

What’s the biggest enemy of your content marketing strategy? If we had to guess, we’d say it was procrastination. Instead of getting your blog posts sorted as early as possible, you wait until the day before you intend to publish them before you even getting started. This leads to rushed work that doesn’t send the message you want it to.

You need to give your content marketing campaign a little more respect than that. Ideally, you should have content ready to go days in advance. This gives you the time to make edits or even pull the campaign if the situation demands it.

Of course, you then have to remember to post your blogs. After all, finishing early doesn’t mean anything if you don’t get the blog online when you intended to. That’s where a blog editorial calendar can help. Here are five reasons why you should download one today.

Reason #1 – Getting Organized

Let’s jump right back into the point we made in the intro. An editorial calendar allows you to plan your content marketing strategy out weeks, or even months, in advance.

This can help a lot when you have tons of content to write. A quick glance at your calendar will tell you exactly when you need to get a piece finished up and published. This enables you to manage your workflow, so you have what you need written down before your deadline.

It goes further than that. You can use your editorial calendar to note down supporting tasks too. For example, you may need to conduct an interview with somebody before you can create a piece of content. Your calendar will help you to organize your time so you can get the interview sorted, and still have enough time to write the piece.

Reason #2 – Less Pressure

Picture the scene. You need to get a blog post tomorrow, but you haven’t started yet. “No problem”, you think to yourself. It doesn’t take you long to get something written when you have a good idea.

Then you sit down and find that no ideas are coming to you. You rack your brain, thinking about what your readers want to find out. All the while, the clock is ticking, and you have less and less time to turn an idea into a fully-formed article.

An editorial calendar takes all that pressure away. You can plan several weeks’ worth of ideas in advance, which means you always know what you’re going to be working on when you sit down to write.

Reason #3 – Creating a Long-Term Strategy

The best content marketing strategies know where they’re going, and what the company’s audience wants to read about. If you don’t have a plan in place, you end up taking a scattershot approach to your writing.

More often than not, you’ll find that your writing doesn’t hit the mark. The topic you write about today may not match up to the one you wrote about yesterday. Your blog becomes a random mix of topics that don’t relate as well as they could to one another.

With an editorial calendar, you can plan your writing activities to ensure consistency among your topics. For example, you could use your calendar to create a theme that you’ll follow for an entire month. This long-term thinking ensures more consistency in your blog.

Reason #4 – It Makes Blogging Feel Like Work

Let’s say you operate your own blog. You have grand designs on building a huge readership, but your blog isn’t earning money for you at the moment.

You may find that you start with a full head of steam, but writing content for a small audience starts to wear thin. Soon, you start delaying your articles. After all, what will it hurt at this early stage of your writing career?

It’ll hurt a lot. Your current readers will tune out, and you won’t offer enough fresh content to attract a larger audience. An editorial calendar helps because it makes your blogging feel like work. You’ll give yourself deadlines, just like you would have in any other job. This compels you to keep writing, which is what’s going to help you build your audience.

Reason #5 – It Reminds You of Key Events

As we mentioned, your editorial calendar does much more than make you keep track of your writing. It can also offer reminders for all sorts of things.

A good calendar will mark out all of the important holidays and events that your readers care about. This is ideal for retailers, who need to prepare for holiday seasons well in advance.

Your calendar provides a constant reminder of upcoming events. This can inform your content marketing strategy, so you don’t miss out on an opportunity to take advantage of what’s going to happen in the future.

Conclusion

So, there you have it, five great reasons why you should get an editorial calendar. It will ensure you stay organized, and allow you to create a long-term plan for your content strategy.

We can help you. Get in touch with us today to find out more about our free editorial calendar template.