A blog is an asset to your online business. A well-crafted content calendar can help you organize your content marketing strategy in the best possible way. Often inbound marketers ask, how to create a content calendar for their blog and how much does it cost them?
Read on the following article to find out how you can create the best content calendars that can help your Los Angeles SEO business grow with flow and ease.
Search for the free templates that are available online
To learn how much you should blog, it’s recommended to have a better editorial calendar in place. An editorial calendar can help you schedule your blog as per your requirement on a weekly, monthly, or yearly basis. The good news is an editorial calendar is for free. You can easily download your favorite template out of the hundreds of templates available online and can edit using Google Calendar.
Now let’s find out a little about how you can create an editorial or a blog calendar.
- Download any template using the link
- Import it to the google calendar
- Open Google calendar
- Use the left hand menu to create a new google calendar
- Fill out the details in the pop-up
- Import the xls. file you have downloaded before
- Select the file
- And click import
Congratulations, you are all set!
Brainstorm all your content ideas
If anyone would ask me what the most critical stage of creating an editorial calendar is, I would say brainstorming ideas. There are some evergreen topics, and there are few others that change along the way. Find some similar topics and guides that will drive traffic without regularly.
For example, the following are some of the evergreen content ideas, that never go out of style:
- Guide to your content curation
- Basics of blogging
- Best practices for growing your Twitter followers
- Ten tips for creating clickable tweets
- Ten tips for creating an amazing copy
Having such a list in place will never leave you short of ideas for content publishing for your Los Angeles SEO company blog. Also, it is a critical step that can help you save time at a later stage.
Determine your publishing schedule
Once you have your editorial calendar on Google Drive and the blog ideas in place, it’s time to fill in with all the details of articles that you want to publish.
While the calendar has a space for every day, it does not mean you will have to publish a blog post every day. Chances are you choose to publish it for two days or a week or a maximum of three weeks. Always prioritize quality over quantity. Never over-commit to a blogging schedule, create as much content as you can without compromising its quality.
Even if you wish to publish more than a single time a day, make sure you update your calendar accordingly. Feel free to add, delete, or adjust events according to your feasibility.
Set up the recurring events
Once you can specify your publishing dates and events, then you can make these recurring events on the Google calendar. Put all those things which you are going to do on a recurring slot.
Hit done and then save all events, and then you will have a complete editorial calendar to work with.
Share your editorial calendar with others
Once you are good to go with the final editorial calendar, share it with all the marketing team and advise them to follow it strictly. How you implement this calendar defines your content marketing success. Share it with the regular contributors of your blog, if there are any.
Use a Google calendar as an editorial calendar
Along the way, you might have tried various editorial calendar solutions, but the most recommended one is Google calendar. And, one of the significant reasons is often we use Gmail for corporate communication, and almost everyone has a Gmail account. Therefore it becomes easier to share it with everyone at your business. Secondly, it’s easier for everyone to make recommended changes in it.
Moreover, with a Google Calendar in place, it’s far easier to schedule and move around posts, well, because it’s already a calendar. It has all the functionalities that you are looking for. One of the major mistakes that we do as a business owner is we try to hack a calendaring function instead of just relying on the one which we have.
If you have hired a new team member at your Los Angeles SEO company, make sure you share the calendar with him or her so that she or he knows how the overall content strategy works.
An editorial calendar can help you accelerate content creation and content marketing of your business, use it in the most efficient manner to reap its benefits.