Creating a content calendar isn’t easy, especially when it comes to the first time. It can feel convoluted, boring, and extremely tedious but creating your own content calendar isn’t just worth it; it’s beneficial for you and your blog.
And once you succeed at creating one, all of your future posts will be much easier to write and publish, that being said, let us walk you through everything you need to know about creating your own content calendar before getting started.
What is a Content Calendar?
A content calendar is a tool that outlines the schedule for publishing your content on your blog, it also outlines when you’ll publish interviews or guest posts as well as your regular blog posts.
Creating a content calendar is, first and foremost, a strategic decision if you don’t have one, then you’re going to publish according to your own schedule, which isn’t going to serve your blog, readers, and business in the best way possible.
With a content calendar in place, you’ll know ahead of time how often you’ll publish new content, you’ll also know who you’ll be collaborating with and how often you’ll be doing so, that’s extremely helpful when you’re planning your editorial calendar, social media strategy, and marketing efforts.
The Benefits of having a Content Calendar
– Strategic planning – A content calendar helps you plan your content ahead of time, it’ll help you avoid publishing content on an irregular schedule, and it’ll help you determine the best time for publishing and guest posts that’s a huge strategic advantage.
– Editorial calendar – it will be in place, you gain a better idea of what you have coming up while you’re likely to have a few posts in the pipeline, you’ll have a better idea of what to post next, you’ll also have a better idea of when your guest posts are coming up, all of this will help you create an editorial calendar.
– Collaboration – it will help you determine the best times to collaborate with other bloggers and authors that’s a major advantage, as you want to collaborate with authors and bloggers who are able to publish content at the best times.
– Content promotion – it will help you determine when to leverage your various channels for content promotion. It’ll help you determine when to use social media, when to use email marketing, and when to use other content promotion tactics.
– Analytics -it will help you determine the best times to track your blog metrics, you’ll be able to do this by publishing posts that track, track, and track, that way, you can get a better idea of what your blog stats look like, you can also determine the best times to analyze the metrics further.
How to Create Your Own Content Calendar
First things first, you’ll need to understand the basics of your blog, and to do that, you need to understand your blog’s metrics.
To get a better idea of what your blog looks like, you’ll want to look at your blog’s analytics, you can find your blog’s analytics from the blog platform you’re using.
The first thing you’ll want to do is create a content calendar template this will speed up the process of creating your content calendar, and you can use it as a base, you can modify it as needed, or you can create your own.