How to Create and Use an Editorial Calendar

Let's face it, it doesn’t matter how good we are at what we do or how long we’ve been doing it, we all look for faster and better ways to get everyday tasks done. We look for new tools to use, new techniques, and new information to use.

Creating content can be frustrating and take a lot of time out of your day, not to mention keeping up with what you have and have not posted yet. But, an editorial calendar can help you stay organized and reclaim those hours.


The editorial calendar has evolved over the years. What began as a simple spreadsheet used for tracking your published content has become an important part of managing the complete life cycle of your content marketing system.

If you want to keep in step with the progress your industry has made with editorial calendars, you will definitely need a plan. Without a plan, you will probably find yourself wasting time creating useless content. With this in mind, I have included a set of tools, and tips to help put you on the right path to creating great content that performs every time.

1. Start with the basics

A good place to start is by gathering information about your content marketing strategy upon which you will focus the efforts of creating your content. Answering these questions will help guide your actions and help you decide what you will need to track in your calendar.

4 things you will need to consider are:

• Who is your audience? By keeping your audience in mind while you create your calendar, you can plan how you will use your content to deliver what your audience needs

• What is your purpose for creating content? Do you want to generate leads to your website? Are you looking to increase your online presence? Maybe increase your thought leadership? Your content marketing mission will help you decide what, how often and where you publish, as well as how your content is organized and categorized.
• What are your resources? Are you a one person team or do you have a team of writers? Do you have a handful of experienced people willing to share their insights? The overall workflow you will track in your calendar will depend on the size of your team and their assigned tasks.
• How can you stand out in a crowd? Can you use your content to meet industry needs that haven’t been addressed? Are there gaps in your content creation efforts-or in those of your competition? Are there any industry events you can use to increase your exposure potential? Knowing where you can increase your role in getting your audience’s attention will help you fill your editorial calendar with useful content that will meet your goals.

2.How to set up your calendar

There are several tools on the market to help you set up your editorial calendar. Additionally, a lot of content collaboration solutions have included tools to help you manage the editorial process. For example, Trello users can access calendar view as a “power up” feature.

But, if you want to keep things simple, you can start out with a Google sheet or an Excel spreadsheet to keep track of your content’s progress through the editorial process.

How you design your editorial calendar will depend on your resources and your marketing goals. Even so, it is recommended that your calendar include the following:

• The publication date of your content
• The headline or topic of your content piece
• The author of the content (who created the content, you or a team member)
• The status of the content. (this will be updated as it moves through the publishing process)

Depending on your goals, how much content you will be creating, and the platforms you will publish on, you may need to track the following elements to help keep you on track:

• The format of your content: Is your content a podcast, a video, an infographic, a blog post? You may even want to consider re-purposing your content into other formats.

• Where you will publish your content. This can include your website, blog, emails, Facebook page, or your YouTube page. You can modify and expand your tracking as needed
• The visuals you use: Visuals can lend appeal to your content when it comes to brand recognition and sharing potential. Keeping track of the visuals you use in your content will help you make sure your content has a cohesive brand identity and a signature look.
• Keywords and meta-data: This include SEO titles and meta-descriptions that will help keep you content in line with your SEO efforts.
• The categories of your topics: This will help make your calendar more searchable when it comes to seeing which topics you have create more content about and which one you need to cover more.
• Your calls to action: This will help make sure your content is in line with your marketing goals.
• URLs: These can be used to link to older pieces of content as well as to keep your audits up to date.

Check out this sample editorial calendar:

3. Filling Your Calendar

One of the hardest parts of maintaining your editorial calendar is having enough relevant content to fill it up. Keeping a list of ideas in your calendar spreadsheet will make things easier when it comes to finding inspiration for content ideas.

You can modify the fields you use in your spreadsheet, but these fields are recommended for tracking:

• The topic idea
• The owner of the idea
• The target categories/keywords
• A time frame for publication

Editorial calendars can be also be used for other content marketing tasks. When it comes to organizing your  efforts and your content marketing, the ways to use editorial calendars are endless.  What tips, tools and ideas do you use? Feel free to share them in the comment box below.

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