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An All-Inclusive Guide To Creating A Content Calendar

Guide to creating a content calendar

Guide to creating a content calendar.

Bill Gates, Diane Hendricks, Warren Buffet, and Oprah Winfrey.

Apart from being billionaires, what is a common thread among these highly successful individuals?

The power of ‘organization’ is an enviable characteristic.

All content creators have felt the need to be a little more organized and disciplined about their schedule at some point or the other.

A content calendar does just that!

Have a schedule to prepare and plan your content posting.

Hope you’re on onboard because we’re going to find just how to do so:

Meaning & Definition

Think of it as an editorial calendar.

Like your mom plans grocery shopping, cooking, arranging, taking care of your (unnecessary) needs, and working!

You too can plan when to post your next piece on great white sharks, status updates about your upcoming music, announcing a partnership with your favorite content creator (you’ve been waiting for this but it needs some build-up!)

Other updates regarding your content and promotional activity!

Where Can I Do It

While the medium is only a means to an end, it is necessary to pick one that you’re comfortable and quick in.

Your options are Microsoft Excel, Google calendar, Google sheets, Looming, Co-schedule, editorial calendar plugin for WordPress, to name a few.

The selection of a content calendar tool depends on your team, your content, and familiarity.

Don’t be afraid to try a few to pick the one that’s best suited to your line of work.

How To Do It?

Step One – repurpose & start with what you have

Remember that old pitch you made to a brand you wanted to work with?

You can break it down into articles, personal blog posts, or videos for your website / social media handle.

Step Two – the best content will come from your friends, family, and coworkers

Setting up a workstation and traveling to look for interesting interviewees can take up too much time.

The best intimate, personal, and spontaneous moments are discovered with the people who know you the best!

Especially for vloggers and influencers, this allows you to be more productive when it comes to scheduling, marketing, and blogging, all at the same time.

While your followers get a peek into your life, you also save time chasing other people for interviews!

Step Three – creating your kind of content – find your usp

Depending on what your forte is, you should create more effective and impactful videos on your preferred medium.

Improve your social media presence by creating relevant content that strikes a chord with your audience.

You can do this in the following ways:

This involves two types of content –

  1. Regular Content –

All types of podcasts, webinars, reports, a series of videos, etc that fall under the same theme and structure.

Your content could be entertaining, informative, or both.

Know who your audience is and keep reaching out to them by updating your content.

Regular posting – Posting every once in a week is a good lesson on how to properly update your content for SEO.

Plus, this means you can reach out to newer subscribers or followers on Instagram or YouTube.

  1. Special Content –

Campaigns, research papers, and contests are less regular and don’t need as much posting but require more attention to detail.

Since your audience knows your stance and voice, these types of posts need more research and must be carefully planned out for release.

An example of this would be a collaboration with an NGO or an informative show.

Step Four – editorial meetings

While planning and creating content, you are likely to miss out on sitting down with your team and discussing your evolving strategies.

It is also a great opportunity to discuss pending timelines, newer product collaborations, ideas, social media activity, and feedback.

This is a good place to change and tweak your content for last-minute changes to increase customer satisfaction and improve response time before publishing.

Statistics regarding your revenue model and engagement can be discussed and brainstormed.

Step Five – have a content repository

Does your content calendar seem full of things to do and ideas to execute? That’s okay.

You will always want to take inspiration from previous experiences and moments.

A content repository is a storage, like your journal – with your ideas, thoughts, and your work – complete and incomplete.

It’s like a safe space for your work that you can come back to whenever you want to.

Step Six – make it shareable

You can edit your content calendar from time to time but let it be accessed and viewed by your team as much as possible.

Since content is never created alone, it is ideal to have the people working with you to be aware of your expectations, timelines, and deadlines.

This way, everyone works together in making sure that the best work is completed.

You can even share it with your mentors and peers, people whose feedback is important to you.

Step Seven – change is the only constant

Lastly, make sure that you update your content calendar as much as you can.

Regular updates will allow you to evolve and change your process according to the situation to target your potential customers granularly.

This way, you can also allow time for creative discussions and set aside time for ideation whenever required.

Conclusion

If there was one thing I had to leave you with, it would be this – there’s no right or wrong way to create a content calendar.

Start with a template and then commit to the realistic deadlines you set yourself for better productivity and an overall better work ethic.

Why it is important to publish fresh content regularly on your website

Why it is important to publish fresh content regularly

SEO experts and content marketers are constantly advising you to publish new, fresh content regularly on your website and blog.

Whenever this is suggested people think that a content marketer or an SEO expert is making such suggestions so that a client needs to spend more money on getting new content.

Of course, repeatedly publishing fresh content brings more money for the content writing and the content marketing company, but this is just one side of the story.

Recently a prospective client had submitted a query from my contact form and she said she found my website by first searching for the term “creating content clusters” and then further filtering the results for the last 30 days.

“Creating content clusters” is a competitive phrase and in normal search results my website doesn’t appear  even among the top 40 results on the search engine results page.

But since I have just recently published a blog post on the topic, it appears when someone filters the search results for the past 30 days, at number 2.

screenshot-of-topic-cluster-search-result-page

This made me think that having fresh content isn’t just good for your normal SEO, it also increases your chances of getting found on search engine results for the narrowed searches based on time frames. Especially when you aren’t ranking otherwise.

What if someone wants to search for web pages and blog posts published within the past 4 months? If you have published something during this period it will definitely show up.

I’m not saying you should publish regularly just because some people might be searching for information within certain date ranges, since there is an option to narrow down searches based on time frame it means there might be many people using this feature. It means there are many people looking for fresh content.

What are the benefits of publishing fresh content on your website or blog?

Even if you are not much bothered about being found by people who are looking for you within a particular date range, publishing fresh content regularly increases your chances of getting ranked higher by Google.

This is because Google prefers fresh content to stale content.

Given a choice between ranking a website that rarely publishes and ranking a website that regularly publishes and given that the quality of content being somewhat similar, Google ranks the website that publishes regularly higher.

This is because Google wants to present fresh content to its users. It looks for similar content, and if in terms of quality it finds fresh content, it chooses that content for better rankings.

Most of the search engine crawlers are designed in such a manner that they are continuously scouring the web for fresh content. They mark the websites that publish content regularly, taking note of the frequency with which the new content appears.

Then they automatically visit these websites at set intervals and if they publish new content, it is quickly crawled, indexed and ranked. This way, their content becomes visible on search engine results pages, sometimes within seconds.

This is something I have experienced personally: since I publish fresh content regularly on my blog, many of my blog posts and web pages start appearing in Google search within seconds. I’m not saying it metaphorically, my posts and pages actually start appearing within seconds.

In fact, this is one of the biggest reasons why I advise my clients to publish content regularly – to help the search engine algorithms draw up pattern of publication on their website or blog so that whenever they post something, it is quickly, almost immediately, indexed and ranked.

Another, a serious reason for publishing fresh content regularly on your website is that it gives a reason to people to visit your website repeatedly.

Normally, when someone visits your website and goes through all the present information, there is no reason for the person to come back again.

Unless you are amazon.com people are not going to buy from you on their first visit. They buy from you on their third or fourth or fifth visit. But since, you don’t give them a reason to visit your website, very soon, after having visited it once, they forget about it because there are hundreds of other such websites to attract them.

There are just two options for you: send them ineffective marketing messages by email that they very soon start redirecting to the spam folder, or you publish high-quality valuable content that informs them, educates them, or at least engages them.

Something that they appreciate.

A good thing about publishing fresh content regularly on your website is that you can then use the same content for your email campaigns and even for social media and social networking updates.

Publishing fresh content regularly should never be seen as a hassle. When you are constantly interacting, when you are constantly publishing fresh content, it shows to the people that you are active and you are eager to engage.