Today’s post comes from Savannah Cordova. Savannah is a writer and content marketer with Reedsy, a platform that connects authors and publishers with the world’s best editors, designers, and marketers. In her spare time, Savannah enjoys reading contemporary fiction and writing short stories.
What Is a Content Calendar? The Beginner’s Guide
If you’re a writer looking to expand your audience, there are certain tips you’ll hear over and over again: Start a blog. Get on social media. Ask people to subscribe to your mailing list. They’re so oft-repeated because they work: when it comes to growing your audience, there’s simply no better tactic than building personal relationships.
But these tips are also useless if you don’t actually offer your readers any content. What’s the point of following a Twitter account that never tweets, or a blog that never updates? This might seem glaringly obvious, but you’d be surprised at how many people make a strong start on social media and other platforms, only to drop off the map within weeks.
Of course, continuously producing and posting high-quality content is harder than it looks (as any writer will know all too well). So how can you ensure that your platforms stay active and engaging across the board, while not burning yourself out?
The answer is a content calendar — which is exactly what this post is about! Let’s start with what a content calendar is, and the myriad benefits of having one.
What is a content calendar and why do you need one?
A content calendar is pretty much what it sounds like: a schedule of content to be posted on your preferred platforms at regular intervals. The goal is to provide a steady stream of material for your followers/fans to enjoy — which keeps both parties “content” in an emotional sense as well! You won’t undergo last-minute stress about what to post, and they’ll know that they can rely on you for consistent and interesting content.
Besides maintaining your readers’ happiness and your own sanity, other practical benefits of content calendars include:
- Better collaboration. In a team environment, it’s incredibly helpful to have an all-inclusive document with everyone’s assignments and due dates. Each person knows exactly what they’re working on and when it should be completed, which increases accountability and efficiency. And if you want to look at a colleague’s work for reference or to edit, it’ll be easy to find! Even if you’re a one-person team at the moment, you may as well get into the habit. This ensures that you’ll be ready if you ever do need to collaborate with someone else in the future — not to mention you’ll be more accountable to the cold hard deadlines you set.
- More strategic scheduling. Sans content calendar, you can still turn out posts that your readers will enjoy, but it’ll be much harder to strategize your long-term goals for them. For example, if you have a book coming out soon, you’ll want your content to gradually lead up to the release so readers will be excited to buy it! This entails putting promos and teasers on your platforms for weeks, maybe months, in advance of your launch — which will be a lot more taxing if you don’t have a calendar to plan it. You may also want to focus on a specific topic or theme during a certain time period (for example, NaNoWriMo-related posts during November). Without a calendar to outline those posts and space them appropriately, you’ll end up scrabbling for content when you need it the most.
- Tracking your progress. Once you’ve been using a content calendar for awhile, it becomes a great tool not just for planning, but also for tracking your progress. Soon you’ll be able to look back on your calendar and clearly see the trajectory of your content and how it’s (hopefully) improved over time! Patterns will start to emerge as to what sort of content does especially well for you, so you can work on maximizing what works… and minimizing what doesn’t.
In other words, the question isn’t so much why should you have a content calendar, but why shouldn’t you? Considering all the benefits (and how easy they are to create, as you’ll see soon) it’s a no-brainer. Now, let’s go over what kind of info your content calendar should include.
What kind of info goes on a content calendar?
There are endless ways to organize a content calendar. Depending on your preferred platforms, posting frequency, and what level of detail you want, your final product might look totally different from the following example.
That said, to give you a more concrete idea, here’s what a week of our Reedsy content calendar might look like:
This is fairly minimalist as calendars go, but we have all the essential info, which covers:
- Type of content. What sort of content do you want to focus on? You may want to incorporate blog posts (as we do), upcoming newsletters, webinars/presentations, and social media posts. That said, I wouldn’t recommend putting all of your tweets on your main content calendar, as this can overcrowd things a bit.
- Prospective titles and/or links. Include as much or as little detail as you want here. Just a title (or even working title) can suffice, or you might want a brief summary of what each piece of content should involve and achieve. The latter can be especially helpful if you’re delegating to others!
- The person assigned to create it. This is pretty self-explanatory, but absolutely necessary if you’re working in a team, so no one gets their wires crossed. Be sure to notify each person when you’ve assigned them something on the calendar.
- Due dates. We don’t have individual due dates, but everyone is expected to get their assignments finished (or almost finished) by the end of the week. You may want to be more specific, especially if you’re on a tight schedule, e.g. posting something new every day — in that case, create a separate section for deadlines.
- Notes/comments. Use this section to note all other important info (“Make sure to talk about X, Y, and Z in this post” and such). Also, when each assignment has been completed, the creator can mark it as “Done” with a link to the Google Doc or the published post.
You may also want to include the following extra elements in your calendar:
- Themes for “clusters” for posts. As I mentioned, you’ll probably have weeks where you want your content to stick to a particular topic or lead up to a special event. And while you know exactly how these pieces of content relate to each other, the rest of your team might not — plus you might forget about your original intentions! This is why it can be useful to mention the theme of each “cluster” you envision on your calendar. (We’ll talk more about these clusters in the second post of our series.)
- Keywords you’re targeting. Are you trying to improve your SEO? Use your content calendar to keep track of which keyword(s) should be in your blog posts. Again, this can be very helpful when looking back on your content down the line, to measure how successful you were.
- Brainstorming section. If you want to keep a record not just of logistical details, but of how the sausage gets made, you can also have a section of brainstorming and progress notes. Be warned, however, that — as with recording every single one of your tweets — this may cause your calendar to become unwieldy.
Again, the information that goes on your content calendar is entirely up to you. If you like to keep things simple and clean, you could just have titles and due dates. Or maybe you’re the Michelangelo of organization and your content calendar is an elaborate work of art! Whatever works for you, go for it. And speaking of working for you…
What tools can you use to create a content calendar?
You’re probably already thinking about how best to build your content calendar — and again, the tool you use is completely up to you. But here are my personal recommendations depending on your circumstances:
- If you work alone and can survive without relying on the Internet, use Microsoft Excel.
- If you don’t have Excel and don’t want to pay for it, use OpenOffice or a similar open-source program.
- If you work collaboratively and have easy access to the Internet, use Google Sheets. This is what we use at Reedsy — it’s pretty fast, intuitive, and great for teams.
- If you prefer a more visual component to your calendar (i.e. you want it to actually look like a calendar), use Google Calendar or a calendar maker like Calendar Labs. Of course, you can always add a little color or special formatting to a spreadsheet calendar if you want it to “pop” more.
Indeed, you may have to play around with your tools, the info you include, and even which platforms you favor before you find the right balance. But once you’ve finally cracked the content calendar code, you’ll wonder how you ever went without one.
Stay tuned for the next post in our series, “How to Create Your Perfect Content Calendar.”
Great blog on content calendar.
Yes, this is good stuff from Savannah. Next week’s is pretty good to. I’ll be working on creating one for myself.