Blogging Calendar

If you are going to make content marketing a regular part of what you do, you need to set a blogging schedule (and stick to it).

A blogging calendar can be a digital calendar, an excel spreadsheet,  a physical paper calendar, or a series of post-it notes on your dry erase board.

Whatever medium you use, you need to write out and schedule the delivery of your content to your audience.

By establishing a set calendar to blog, you give yourself two enormous advantages:

1. You establish an expectation in your reader to receive new content
2. You allow yourself the ability to do all of your content creation at once.

New posts have an undeniable bias in the mind of the website reader. When something is new, and more current, people will read it much more often than an old post from three years ago.

Also, think of the RSS readers. People who decide they like your site, and want to receive future content from it; they are not going to really be interacting with your content at the point they come to your website. It is when you continue posting that they will read your stuff.

But having a scheduled time to put up a post, send out a newsletter, or release a tweet, does not mean that this is your new work schedule. You can schedule your posts in advance.

The batching of your blogging is a huge timesaver. When you are in a writing mood, you can knock out three posts at a time, once a week. When you’re spending forty-five minutes on Twitter anyway, dont make it just aimless surfing time. Open up Tweet Deck or Hoot Suite, and anytime you find a link worth reposting, schedule it to happen sometime later this week. Turn your vacuous time into productive time, by being productive all week in one multiplied hour.

Key questions to ask yourself:

• How often do your readers want to receive new content?
• What is a comfortable level of output for you to sustain?
• What is your competition doing?
• How advantageous will this be to your long term goals?

Make a plan that works for you, for your blog, and for your readers.