Editorial Calendars: a Blogger`s Best Friend - Advanced Editorial Calendar Ideas
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In the previous section I gave you the bare bones instructions for how to construct a simple, relatively primitive editorial calendar. For many bloggers, it is probably enough. If you want to take your blogging to the next level and feel that you would really benefit from the extra structure, you might want to set up your editorial calendar to cover an entire year. That's not nearly as overwhelming as it sounds, or at least it doesn't have to be.
Angela Booth wrote a post on the topic in BloggingTips. She described it as a four-step process. You start by choosing seven to ten categories for blog posts. You should create these categories with the search engines in mind; they need to attract attention. Maybe you do a travel blog; one of the topics could be traveling on the cheap (entire blogs could be devoted to that topic alone, but I think you get my point). Other topics could be family-friendly destinations, educational vacations, and so forth.
The next step is to brainstorm five blog post ideas for each category. Let's take up the topic of educational vacations. Your list might look like this:
- Touring historic Williamsburg
- A trip to Huntsville, Alabama's Space Camp
- Planning a vacation around visiting museums
- North Carolina's John C. Campbell Folk School
- Vocation Vacation: The vacation that lets you test-drive a new career
If you do this for ten categories, Booth points out, you now have 50 ideas for blog posts, which should put you well on your way to filling your blog with tons of fresh content.
If you have a staff or regular group of writers, the third step is to inform your staff. You could have brought them in on the brainstorming process if you wanted to, of course. They can pick which of the articles they want to do. Make sure you have firm dates for when each article will be finished and when it will go live.
If you're writing your blog yourself, of course, this step is somewhat easier. Take your lists and put your topics in the appropriate places on your calendar. Fifty topics gives you one for each week of the year, with two weeks off for own vacation. You'll need to do more brainstorming if you're going to post more often than once a week, of course, but this is a start.
Finally, once you've solidified your editorial calendar to your own satisfaction, you should announce your calendar on your blog. This way your readers and potential advertisers will know what to expect. Congratulations! You're giving them - and you - something to look forward to.
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