An editorial calendar helps you plan your content and stay ahead of deadlines. It’s a useful tool for any entrepreneur or online creator because you always know what’s coming next and you can plan around big events, launches, and holidays.
One of the worst places to be as a content creator is in the “what should I do next?” state of mind. Your energy should go towards your content, not towards all the decisions you have to make before you can even start creating. Your editorial calendar lets you make those decisions ahead of time so you can focus on your content.
In this post, you’ll learn how to make an editorial calendar using the following steps:
- Start and maintain a backlog of content ideas to fill your editorial calendar
- Set attainable deadlines for your content
- Work with events, launches, and holidays (not just around them)
- Schedule your ideas
- Set a process that helps you stick to your goals
Create a Backlog
You probably have tons of ideas for new content. You may even have a note or document where you capture those ideas. If you do, you’ve probably seen the benefit of having that one-stop place for all your upcoming content.
Creating a backlog is about writing down the ideas you have right now, organizing them, and maintaining the list over time so it’s always full and easy to navigate.
It starts with writing everything down. Brain dump everything you can think of about your topic, even if some of your ideas “aren’t good” or if you don’t yet feel ready to tackle some of them yet. The more you can start with, the better.
Then, organize your ideas by category, product or event they relate to, if they require more research, or whatever system is meaningful to you. For Empower writing, I organize my ideas in a product management app with tags for each of the categories you see on this website. I also like to have a sub-list of priority ideas, or the ones that I’m excited about or know that I need to cover soon.
You’ll find the right system for you as you get going, but the most important part of your backlog is maintaining it. This isn’t something you make once and use forever. Keep your ideas organized and top up your list when it starts to look small. Add new categories and content types as you continue to grow.
Your backlog will become the first place you look when you need inspiration, so make it a place you’re excited to visit.
Set Attainable Deadlines
The Rules of the Internet will try to tell you how often you’re “supposed” to publish new content to boost search results or to make sure you leverage all the relevant algorithms to get seen. Most often you’ll hear “weekly” as blanket advice. But do what suits your lifestyle.
I’ve made the mistake of getting caught up in comparing myself to others and over-committing to a schedule that doesn’t work for me. Someone who creates content full-time can publish multiple times a week or even daily. Someone who works part-time might still hit multiple times a week. Someone working around a 9-5 job might only feel confident with weekly or biweekly deadlines. Or maybe you’re so busy that monthly is all you can commit to right now.
The specific frequency you choose doesn’t matter—what matters is that whatever you choose, you stick to it. Consistency is more important than frequency.
Find what you can comfortably commit to long-term. Sometimes you’ll be able to do more than you promise and sometimes you won’t hit your goals, so sticking to a long-term plan can help level everything out so you can stay on track. I used to mess this up all the time. I’d commit to a reasonable goal of biweekly content, then I’d get excited and make a bunch of content right away. I’d post it weekly and be thrilled that I went above and beyond my expectations. Then, I’d soon get burned out and not post again for a month.
What I should have done, and what I recommend you do, is to stick to the plan even during bursts of creativity. The worst-case scenario is you end up with lots of content scheduled out and you’re antsy for the world to see it. That’s a lot better than burning yourself out and panicking when you can’t deliver on your initial commitment anymore.
Choose your deadlines and stick to them. (And don’t worry, I’m also going to talk about how to stick to the plan!)
Work with the Big Stuff
Before you start scheduling your content, consider some of big items that are already on your calendar. When you have busy times like events, launches, and holidays, you might be thinking about how to work around them. But that mindset adds to stress and overwhelm. Try to think about the big stuff as opportunities for your content: work with them, not around them.
For example:
- You have a vacation coming up. Give your audience a behind-the-scenes peek at what you’re packing, tell them how you work remotely, or show them how you finish and schedule your work before you go.
- You’re attending a weeklong event for your industry. Take a camera and vlog it, blog the sessions you attend, or interview someone in your network. Or, do it all and get ahead on your content for a while.
- You’ve got a product launch coming up. Spend a few weeks before your launch posting content relevant to what you’re launching, even if you haven’t announced it yet, so you can start to grow excitement and get some initial feedback about your ideas.
- You’re celebrating a holiday. Show your audience something new like decorating or baking, how you work smarter so you have more free time with loved ones, or make seasonal content relevant to your niche.
You can’t avoid the life stuff from popping up, so when it does, take the opportunity to dive into these occasions. When you don’t, you’re adding more stress by writing a bunch of content on top of an already busy time.
There are countless ways to let your life guide your content so your content doesn’t guide your life. You’re a full person with a rich life, and your content doesn’t live in a vacuum.
Schedule Your Ideas
Scheduling your ideas onto your calendar is fun because you get the eagle-eyed view of your content. I love this step because it’s when my ideas start to feel tangible.
The first step to scheduling is to design your audience’s experience with you over the next few pieces of content. Grab some ideas from your backlog that stand out to you and figure out a good order for them.
What makes “a good order” of content? Vary your content across the different categories you used to organize your ideas. For example, on this blog, I try to avoid posting into the same category back-to-back so you get a nice variety of how-tos, quick writing tips, and planning guidance. I also try to switch up long and short posts and cover different content types you might be working on like blogging, videos, and general writing advice. Look ahead to the life stuff you want to work with, too, and pair them up with good content ideas.
At this point, you should have a sub-group of ideas from your backlog that are in the order you want to publish them in.
Now’s the easy part: get a blank calendar, app, or scrap of paper and put a date to each idea based on the frequency you decided on. If you want to be super-duper consistent, you can set the time of day ahead of time, too.
Scheduling involves taking a big step back and designing your plan from above, then putting it in your calendar to make it real.
Stick to Your Goals with the Right Process
It’s not enough to make the calendar, put it up on your wall, and move on. The content needs to actually get created, published, and promoted. Find a way to get it all done in time for the deadlines you set.
There are many ways you can make it happen, but I’m happy to share how I get my work done for this blog for inspiration.
Backlog and frequency
My backlog for all my blogs and YouTube content is in a project management tool, where I collect and tag my ideas for each content “outlet” I publish to.
For Empower Writing, I’m able to publish weekly around my full-time job. For other content, I’ve set monthly, biweekly, and weekly deadlines.
Creating content
To create content, lots of busy creators love batching, myself included. Batching is when you work out the process of creating one piece of content like a blog post, video, or podcast episode, then go through that process with multiple pieces of content at once.
For this blog, I create a month’s worth of content at a time. Here’s how I do it:
- I take a look at my backlog and choose my next 4 posts.
- I make copies of the relevant blog post templates that I’ve created and write up my notes and ideas for each post.
- I write the posts. I also like to draft the emails I’ll send out to my email list to announce each post, too.
- I put the post drafts into WordPress, edit them, and schedule them.
- I edit and schedule the emails to my email list
When I finish these steps, I’m done with blog content for the month. I spread this work out across 2-5 days around my job. This is quite a chunk of time, but it’s much faster handling 4 posts at each step than only 1. I also have developed a great system for creating templates and filling in notes for my posts that makes writing them really straightforward.
A quick detour: I used to sink hours into each blog post draft, so I developed a system that lets me never start with a blank page. I use personalized templates combined with what I call the plug-and-publish system to set myself up before I write.
Now, I can write up my 4 posts for the month in about 2 hours total, which gives me so much more time back to invest in other areas of my business. If you want to learn how to do it too, check out my Your Blogging Blueprint course.
Batching has helped me avoid burnout because I’m not always in the cycle of content creation. When I use to do all these steps one-at-a-time, I felt like I was never able to take a break. I enjoy each step much more with batching because I can really sink into the experience. And with four posts moving through at once, I see much more progress as I go. When I’m done, my content gets shipped on autopilot so I can focus on other tasks and be available on social media when my new content is ready to share.
I’m not going to tell you how to manage your content because only you know how you like to work. I’ve figured out my routine from trial and error, and it will probably keep changing, so the best you can do is to get going so you can find what works for you. You might prefer creating one or two pieces of content at a time, or tackling more at once and so you can take lots of time off in between. Give yourself space to experiment with different processes, keeping your deadlines super reasonable as you go.
Stay on Track with an Editorial Calendar
Your editorial calendar helps you zoom out, work with all the life stuff that’s coming up, and stay consistent with your deadlines.
To get started, create your ideas backlog, set attainable deadlines, assign your ideas to your next few deadlines, and find your process to get it all done.