The most important thing on any blog is it’s content. Without valuable content your blog will never accomplish its goals. One of the ways to make sure that you’re creating high value content is by developing and following an editorial calendar.

An editorial calendar achieves it purpose for planning, as well as keeping your content on topic. It also gives you an overview of the direction you want to take your blog over a week, month and year. An editorial calendar is your guide to publishing online content.

Here’s how to start.

Decide how many posts a week you will post.
The first place to start is determining how many posts you’ll publish a week. In the beginning it always seems like an eager goal to plan on posting daily, but if your company is new to blogging you may want to start slower and than work your way up. Commit to at least 2-3 times a week and than work on developing killer content.

Decide what type of posts you’ll publish.
There are a variety of blog post types to reference, but here are just a few for you to consider.

• How-To’s
• Video
• Audio
• Interviews
• Product reviews
• Trends
• Opinion
• Employee showcase

If you take a little time and use a little imagination you’ll have no problem adding to this list.

Start brainstorming post ideas.
Personally, I also start with a title and then work my way to an outline, draft, edit and then publish. That’s why I keep a file of titles and a brief description of what the future post will be. I would recommend that after you decide the types of posts and categories that you want to write about, to begin coming up with ideas that fit with each category.

Once you’ve established the type of posts you want to publish and a list of future blog post ideas, now its time to start adding them into your calendar.

Input ideas into your calendar
Now it’s time to begin mapping and adding the future posts into your calendar. If you choose to use video and audio make sure you plan enough time for editing. If you work in an industry where you content has to pass through a legal or compliance department make sure you plan time in to your schedule for that as well.

The success of any blog begins with great content and frequent posting. I hope this helps you in reaching all your goals.

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