Editorial Calender | SEO Marathon Free Training

Web Editorial Calender

An editorial calendar is perhaps one of the most important parts of your content strategy and without proper planning you'll find it difficult to establish consistency or structure in the content you’re posting to your site. An editorial calendar simply maps out your content development process assigning writers and dates to the topics of pages posts or other content that will be going up on your pages.
Below is an example of an editorial calendar and why you can certainly use this format to get started keep in mind that there is no single editorial calendar that will fit every business. You want to update this to a format and structure that you're comfortable working with and that fits the unique needs of your content strategy.


First let's take a look over to the right-hand side of the spreadsheet where we define the different content types that we want to build content around things like; product showcases, new stories, how to articles, and things of that nature. Yours will certainly be different listing them out here along with the approximate frequency with which you like to publish this kind of content will be helpful. Columns H and I List out the different writers that we can pull from along with the types of content that their willing and able to write. You might be lucky enough to have a team of copywriters that you can call upon but if not keep in mind that these folks can be anyone working with you.  You may require your sales team to write one piece of content per month, or maybe your management agrees to put together one blog post every two months. Whatever resources you have to help with content listing them out here will help you see who is available to write what and when.


The left-hand side of the spreadsheet includes a row for every day of the month listing what day’s specific content due to. Who's responsible for it and where on the site it will be published. In this case, we can see that there is new content going up on this site five days a week, spread out over a company blog, news pages, product pages, and a customer testimonial section. You can see the column is reserved for the headline of the content that's going to be written in many editorial calendars will go so far as to list the target keyword title and descriptions as well.

Again feel free to use this format is a template for creating your own editorial calendar, but make sure to add in whatever you feel is necessary for your own organization. And although this one has been done in Excel it's awfully good practice to do this in Google spreadsheets so that the document can be shared across your team and everyone can collaborate on the same document without having to pass around different versions of the same file. You also need to define how often your planning will happen and how far out you be making assignments. Some organizations work week by week well others will plan out months in advance. Whatever you choose, you'll need to make sure that writers are given sufficient time to produce high-quality output. We’re not writing just for the sake of putting more pages on your website remember that quality wins over quantity.

In the end and editorial calendar will only be as useful as the person taking charge of it and the people taking action from it. Building out a plan assigning authors and topics and holding people accountable for delivering will ensure that your consistently putting up good content, and don't forget to promote that content as well.

Many organizations include their social media and promotion plans right inside the editorial calendar indicating who will be sharing what on each channel what hashtags will be used and who is responsible for keeping conversations going. Using an editorial calendar to keep track of your content strategy can be a great way to put the structure around this