Editorial calendar is as important to publishers as their writing app is. Editorial calendar is a tool for detailed planning content publishing, even if you are dealing with internal blogging and not with any kind of media publishing.
The main purpose of an editorial calendar is to help the editors and writers to organize the publishing schedule, effectively rendering it as more than just dates in a calendar. It is an official writing agenda, with delegated author(s), milestones, publishing dates, deadlines and many more elements.
It doesn’t matter if you have a team of just two authors, or there are entire team – the editorial calendar will help you all to stay focused on intra-corporate blogging.
Editorial calendar needs to provide answers to who will write what until when:
1. Who is writing an article?
2. What is the subject and what are the keywords of the respective article?
3. When the article is going to be published?
Deadlines and milestones are important because they help to maintain a healthy publishing rhythm. Authors should be able to easily check when they were assigned for a specific topic, when its due date is, and when it will be published.
Writers need to know which categories or segments they should focus on (weekly and/or monthly), so you should include that as well.
Start with selecting a period of time: a month or quarter should be just fine. Next step would be to add important milestones, first off publishing dates so that you can plan due dates and so on.
Define your audience
When brainstorming topics for your content calendar, make sure they are aligned with who your readers will be or who you are attempting to attract with your blog posts. Keeping in mind your target audience will help in determining what you will discuss in your post and can help you use the appropriate language in your content.
Make plans, but more importantly – stick to them. Editorial calendar should help you to work smart, not hard.