Do you have a blogging calendar or a blogging schedule?
You cannot have a content strategy without publishing a blog. Of course, you can publish content on social media platforms, but if you want your website to remain the focus of the buzz that is created around your content, instead of generating content on third party websites, your time and money are better spent publishing content on your own blog.
Recently I published a blog post Why do most blogs fail and what you can do to avoid that?
One of the reasons why most blogs fail is that the blog publishers don’t have a schedule. They don’t have a calendar.
Why do you need a blogging schedule or a blogging calendar?
To give you a direction and also to help you prepare and write quality blog posts.
Without a blogging schedule you are last. Think of a blog like any other enterprise. To run your business or to run your office, you need a schedule. There is a time for all the employees to come to office. You know that by Wednesday you need to submit a report to the higher-ups. You know that your computers need to be upgraded by the 15th of the next month.
When you have a calendar, you plan accordingly.
The same goes for your blog. If you don’t have a schedule, if you don’t have a publishing calendar, things go haywire.
A publishing calendar also helps your content writer. He or she can prepare content writing or blog writing according to the priority of your topics. By checking your calendar, you can immediately know that certain blog posts have been published or not.
A content calendar also gives you consistency. Every blog post has a unique purpose to solve. You want to target certain customers with certain blog posts. At the same time, you don’t just want to focus on a single niche.
There are some customers who need to be convinced. There are some customers who need to be educated. There are some customers who need to be informed.
You need different blog posts for these purposes. In your calendar you can assign days that on Mondays, your blog posts will cater to a certain audience, then on Wednesdays, they will target another set of audience, and so on.
The benefits of creating a blogging schedule or a blogging calendar
- You can assign different topics to different days of the week.
- You can collate all the related information at a single place such as the title, the target audience, the KPIs, the keywords, the images to be used and the people responsible for successful publication.
- You can track the topics that have already been published to prevent duplication.
- You can track the performance of individual topics in terms of engagement, KPIs and search engine traffic.
How can you prepare a blogging schedule or a blogging calendar?
Creating a blogging schedule or a blogging calendar can be easy or complex depending on what all you want to include in the schedule.
I use Google Calendar. Since I don’t run a multi-author blog, my schedule is quite simple. Sometimes I don’t even schedule – I simply publish whatever comes to my mind.
I use a combination of Google Calendar and Todoist. In the calendar I make entries such as the topic and some research links that I may have come across. This entry automatically appears in my Todoist schedule.
Some blog posts are short, and some blog posts are quite long. Shorter blog post can be completed in an hour and longer ones can take a couple of days. Hence, I schedule drafting and publishing over the stretch of two days, if need be.
I don’t want to mislead you or anything. I don’t have a complex blogging schedule or calendar for myself because, as mentioned above, I go with the flow simply because I write my blog posts by myself. Sometimes I suddenly pick up my phone, write a short blog post on it, and publish it from the phone itself.
But if you’re managing multiple content writers and you are an organization with an elaborate content marketing strategy, then you cannot hope to succeed without having a documented blogging schedule.