What Is An Editorial Calendar?

So you’ve got all these ideas of what to blog, or you have things that you have to blog on certain days, but you need a way to keep track of what’s going to be posted when, right? We find that using an editorial calendar is a really useful way to make sure you don’t end up with three posts in a row that are about the same thing!

Having an editorial calendar also means that you might be more influenced to blog on a more regular basis – if you’ve blogged on a few days in a row, then you are more likely to keep on going. It’s a theory Jerry Seinfeld apparently came up with when starting out in comedy  – he would do a certain task each day, and cross it off. When you’ve got a chain going, it’s annoying to break that chain, right? Keep going!

You may have seen in our desk post that we use a week calendar to keep track of what posts are going up when (because Bonjour, Blogger! is updated daily) but you could use any old calendar – maybe a spreadsheet that you keep in Google Docs (so it’s accessible anywhere!) or a printable one – we love the ones in this post by A Thrifty Mrs!

If you write a few posts at the weekend (or whenever you have the time), you can then schedule the posts to publish at the most effective times. If you’ve got a giveaway happening (which you’re totally using Rafflecopter for, right?), then you could schedule the post to publish at a certain time, schedule some tweets to promote it at the same time and sit back and relax!

Do you plan out your posts? Let us know what works for you!