How do I create a blog editorial calendar that works?

By Justine Boucher
Best practices

This article and expertise was originally published on Business2Community.

If you’re a marketer, you’ve heard about the benefits of B2B blogging programs — blogging increases traffic to your website, helps prospects find you in search engines, educates your audience — but it’s a constant battle. Newbies and successful shepherds of ongoing blog programs alike face similar struggles: What do you write? Who will author the content? When do you post the blogs? How do you keep things fresh, and organized? Coming up with what you need to blog next doesn’t need to be a case of anxiety-inducing writer’s block or stream-of-thought consciousness. Make the process simple with a blog calendar or editorial calendar.

Whether you use project management software like Basecamp or a simple spreadsheet, a blog calendar can keep your site content on track with a few basic details. Your calendar should include:

  1. Topics: Determine what the post will focus on. Include a few headline ideas, source material, relevant links, customer questions or other raw material that will lay the foundation for a post that’s helpful to your audience.

  2. Authors: Even if you’re running the blog solo, each post can support your team’s expertise. If you can attribute spokespeople for specialized areas, the content will give them a springboard from which to write, speak or participate in other circles.

  3. Timing: If the post coincides with an upcoming product launch or the CEO’s panel at a trade show, make sure it’s planned far enough ahead to go live with the news or draw attendees to the session.

  4. Status: Use a descriptor or color coding to indicate which blogs are drafts in progress, awaiting approval, scheduled to publish, or live and ready to distribute via other channels, like social media or your e-newsletter.

Depending on other information you need to track or plan in your editorial calendar, you can add categories such as the recommended calls to action or the customer stage of the B2B marketing funnel the post will target. By centralizing all the information in one project or shared document, you’ll know the pipeline status at a glance to keep the writers on deadline at a steady cadence.

A healthy blog program feeds all of content marketing

This careful planning doesn’t stop at the blog. It’s the center of many other content marketing assets at your fingertips, like:

  • Newsletters: After a few months, you will likely have posts on your latest releases, recent events the team attended, new hires and other company news. Batch these links for a quarterly newsletter to analysts or investors.

  • E-books: If you’ve posted several related posts or inform a specific vertical, combine them for a handy how-to guide or e-book your prospects can download and share.

  • Whitepapers and premium content: Noticing a blog series that received high site traffic or analyses that generated interesting comments? These could be fodder for webinars, podcasts, whitepapers, infographics, or other content assets that draw attention.

This article was written by Justine Boucher from Business2Community and was legally licensed through the NewsCred publisher network. Please direct all licensing questions to legal@newscred.com.

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