Creating a Content Calendar

What Is a Content Calendar?

A content calendar (also known as an “editorial calendar”) is a written schedule of when and where you plan to publish upcoming content. Content calendars typically include upcoming pieces, status updates, planned promotional activity, partnerships, and updates to existing content.

Why Are Content Calendars Important?

If your blog is a hobby where you publish posts occasionally, you probably don’t need a content calendar.

But if you’re using content marketing to grow your online business, then staying organized is key.

Here are three ways that content calendars help your content marketing strategy:

Reason #1: A Content Calendar Ensures All Your Content-Related Tasks Get Done

If you’re disorganized with your content production schedule, you’ll forget things.

Or publish less often.

Or neglect to update old articles.

Put another way: A calendar ensures nothing falls between the cracks.

Reason #2: A Calendar Makes It Easier to Collaborate With Your Team (and Outside Partners)

If you’re a single-person blog, you may not even need a content calendar in the first place.

But if employees and contractors contribute to your content, you need a system that keeps everyone on the same page.

Today, our content calendar is more of a project management system than an actual calendar (we use Monday.com).

It’s a streamlined system where our strategists, writers, editors, designers, and developers can collaborate on projects. And our project manager holds everything together.

Reason #3: A Content Calendar Gives You a Big-Picture Overview of Your Upcoming Stuff

For example, we use our calendar to ensure that we don’t publish a bunch of case studies all at once or two guides covering the same topic.

That way, we can see our entire marketing strategy for the next few months on a single screen.

Pretty cool.

6 Content Calendar Best Practices

1. Understand the Key Elements of a Content Calendar

Yes, there are content calendar tools out there. And I’ll cover them later in this guide.

But the fact is: Content calendars don’t have to be complicated.

After all, its job is to make things easier for you and your team.

This means you can start off with a simple content calendar using Google Sheets.

Here are the four items that every content calendar needs to have:

Editorial

The most important piece of your content calendar is Editorial. These are the pieces of content you’ll be publishing, whether on your own blog, on a podcast, or on social media.

The main goal of your content calendar is to get your editorial pieces scheduled well in advance. That way, you can stay organized and consistent with your publishing schedule.

Some companies plan their editorial content a full year in advance. Some independent bloggers might not know what they’re publishing next week.

There’s no perfect amount of time you need to plan your content in advance.

We try to plan things six months ahead. But we leave some room for flexibility since things can change quickly in the digital marketing world.

As long as you have a single place that shows you what’s coming up, you’re good.

Platform

The platform is where your content calendar is hosted.

Solo content creators have the most flexibility in choosing a tool, from pen and paper to Google Calendar to a simple spreadsheet.

The most important thing is that it works for you.

In fact, when I was a solo blogger, my editorial calendar was a simple Google Sheet with notes that only I could understand.

But it’s a different story for content marketing teams.

When you create content with a team, you can have five, 10, or even 20 people touch a piece of content before it goes live. So, it’s critical that everyone can see the status of each post.

Otherwise, you’re going to get overloaded with emails from people asking: “What’s that status on this video?” or “Are the visuals finished for this Facebook post yet?”

In fact, our last calendar in Google Sheets was designed specifically for collaboration.

And this kind of thing isn’t just helpful for content marketing and SEO departments. It’s also a way to send new content that you’re working on to other people in your organization.

And if you’re an agency or freelancer, you can link to your content calendar from Basecamp, Asana, and Trello so clients can keep tabs on what you’re working on.

Promotional

The next most important piece of your content calendar is Promotional.

Promotional items are what they sound like: how you plan to promote your content.

• When will you be sharing it on Facebook?
• Do you have an upcoming podcast interview or Reddit AMA?
• Are you going to send a newsletter to your email subscribers?

These would be promotional activities for your content calendar.

Promotional activities don’t necessarily need to be in a completely separate calendar from your editorial items.

But it’s a good idea to title them differently or color-code them so you can easily tell them apart.

Future Ideas

This is a list of future content ideas you’re not actively working on yet. For example, this could be a random topic you thought of on your drive to work. Or something that came up during a brainstorming session.

These ideas don’t usually show up in the calendar itself because they’re not scheduled yet.

But you do need to “brain dump” these ideas so you don’t lose them (or let them distract you from content that’s almost ready to go).

2. Use a Content Calendar Tool

Some tools exist specifically for creating, managing, and collaborating on your content calendar.

Depending on how much content you publish and your team’s size, you may want to invest in content calendar software.

Here are some great options to try.

• Notion:the all-in-one workspace for your notes, tasks, wikis, and databases.
• Google Sheets: probably the most popular option for most individuals and small teams. Free and good for collaboration, but takes work to setup.
• Microsoft Excel: Microsoft has made their spreadsheets more collaboration-friendly than before.
• Google Calendar: if you’re a one-person operation, Google Calendar alone might be enough for you.
• Coschedule: plans range from an editorial calendar with 1-person access to a fully featured marketing suite for large enterprises. Recommended.
• Loomly: includes interactive guides for creating blog posts, automated social media posts, and more.
• Editorial Calendar plugin for WordPress: simple, drag-and-drop, and free. However, relies on when you have posts actually scheduled in WordPress — which may not be right for everyone.
• Basecamp, Trello, Slack, and Asana: designed as project management and communication tools rather than for content calendars, any of these three can be used either for task-management purposes. And with a little creativity, you can also use them as content calendars.

3. Brainstorm Topic Ideas

Now comes the fun part: brainstorming content ideas.

You can find relevant ideas in a number of ways:

• Make a list of your audience’s wants, needs, goals, and challenges and turn them into engaging topics. For example, if a challenge is time management, you could create “5 Time-Hacking Techniques That Successful CEOs Swear By.”
• Mine the comments section of your blog (or a competitor’s) for questions and pain points to address. Look for common themes among comments—these make GREAT topics.
• Put a fresh spin on hot industry topics by brainstorming unconventional angles or contrarian views.
• Spy on competitor content. What topics are your rivals covering? You might want to cover them, too, with the goal of creating something 10x better.

Keyword research tools are also very helpful for coming up with content ideas.

All you need is a broad topic, like “green tea,” to start.

For example, type your topic into Semrush’s Keyword Magic Tool and click “Questions” on the upper-left menu.

Review the questions to see which ones would make great topics for your audience.

Another handy tool for coming up with excellent ideas is Topic Research.

Enter a topic, and the tool will return a bunch of topic cards with potential ideas.

Click on any card to see headlines, related questions, and keyword data like volume and difficulty.

Next, click “Mind Map” on the menu.

Now, you’ll get a visual representation of words, phrases, and questions related to your topic.

Keep scrolling to see a long list of questions related to your topic.

Jackpot!

Jot down any potential topic ideas you’re interested in—you’ll need them for the next step.

4. Add Items to Your Calendar

This is where the rubber meets the road.

Creating a content calendar may seem daunting if you’ve never done it before.

But once you have things organized for the first time, you’ll see just how helpful an editorial calendar can be.

Here’s how to create a content calendar on any platform:

Step #1: Make a List of Your Content Ideas

If you write about a variety of topics, it may help to categorize them as you go. But you can just list them out.

Step #2: Decide on a Publication Frequency

This frequency depends on your specific content strategy. If you’re creating more of a social media calendar, you might publish multiple posts per day.

But if it’s for a blog, you may only publish three to four posts per month.

(If you’re using a spreadsheet, you can have different levels of detail on different tabs for “monthly vs. weekly” or “blog vs. LinkedIn.”)

Step #3: Fill in Dates

Use your list of content ideas to fill in your dates according to the frequency you just established.

5. Schedule Every Part of the Creation Process

Most content calendars only include the title of the post and the date it’s going live.

Which is fine for simple content pieces (like a short social media post).

But if you publish larger or more complex projects, you might want to schedule out all of the steps of the content creation process in your calendar.

In other words, instead of a calendar that looks like this:

It will look more like this:

For example, we’ve published research-focused content on our blog.

And unlike a list post, research-based content requires a lot of work from many people.

And in some cases, the work needs to be done in “assembly-line style.”

In other words: One element can’t start until the previous one is 100% complete.

To give you an example, we design lots of visuals and charts for our research posts.

We obviously can’t make these charts until the data comes in. So “data collection and analysis” needs to be scheduled before design.

This is especially important if you’re working with a team. With a team, different people are responsible for different parts of a single piece of content. Scheduling the important dates for each step in advance can help you stay on track.

Here’s how to do it:

Step #1: List Every Type of Content You Publish

Most of the time, you might publish short opinion articles, but the workflow might be completely different when you publish larger case studies.

If you dabble in different formats (like video and podcasts), I recommend jotting that down too.

Step #2: Break Each Content Type into Steps

For example, our typical blog post creation process consists of four steps: keyword research, outlining, writing the content, and design.

While for my videos, the process is: find a topic, write a script, film the video, edit the content, and add graphics.

Step #3: Add Each Step to Your Calendar

If you have a team, include the name of the person responsible for completing it next to each step.

This could include any of the following roles (or all):

• Content strategist
• Writer
• Editor
• Content producer

You may also want to include the following on your content calendar:

• Working title
• Target keyword
• Due date
• Status
• CTA

6. Include More Than Just New Blog Posts

Content calendars can be used for much more than just scheduling different types of content.

Here are a few things you should include in your content calendar to make it more robust and useful:

Content Updates

It’s important to keep your content fresh. So, for pieces that are easy to edit (like blog posts), you should include future updates in your calendar.

For example, we added color-coded labels to our calendar for content upgrades, rewrites, and optimizations.

Site-Wide Content Audits

If you don’t prioritize content upgrades and refreshes in your content calendar, you’re leaving a ton of traffic on the table.

By focusing on updates and optimizations rather than constantly churning out new content, you’re not just working harder—you’re working smarter.

And getting more bang for your buck with quicker wins.

Schedule and Promote Your Off-Site Work

Whenever you do a guest post, podcast interview, live talk, or any other kind of off-site promo, include that in your content calendar too.

Fill Your Content Calendar with Great Ideas

By now, you’ve filled your content calendar with a goldmine of creative ideas.

But here’s the million-dollar question: How do you know which ones will truly resonate with your audience and supercharge your SEO efforts?

The answer is simple: keyword research.

Brainstorming helps you generate creative concepts, but keyword research ensures those concepts align with what your audience is actually searching for.

Learn how to choose the right keywords, which tools to use, and how to decode crucial keyword metrics with our comprehensive resource: Keyword Research for SEO: The Definitive Guide.