Using a Blogging Editorial Calendar

Through the years that I’ve blogged I’ve used quite a few different editorial calendars. I thought I’d share of few of the things I’ve used in the past, and explain why I use what I do now.

No editorial calendar

Let’s just say that this didn’t work out very well. I was always trying to come up with something interesting to write about the day of, and putting that kind of pressure on myself never helped me come up with anything good. My posts were all over the place and to be honest it didn’t really feel like my blog had a theme. I also posted sporadically. I didn’t really have a schedule so I wasn’t consistent.

Notebooks

For quite awhile I used notebooks to write down post ideas. I didn’t always have a date associated with each post, but it kept all my ideas in one spot. It was easy to use even if I wasn’t at the computer when inspiration struck. In the end I moved on to something else though because it got hard flipping through pages and not having all my unwritten post ideas in one section.

Google Calendar

I used Google Calendar for quite awhile. The biggest thing that I liked about it was that it was in a calendar form. I’m a very visual person so that made sense to me. Being able to move posts from one day to another was also very easy. I could schedule recurring posts without having to do each one individually, which saved me a lot of time.

Epic Blog Planner from By Regina 

Over the holidays I ordered the Epic Blog Planner (affiliate link). Regina is one of my favorite people to learn all things blogging related from. She has so much to share and does it with an awesome sense of humor. I’d used some of her workbooks before, so I though the planner would be awesome as well. Unfortunately I ran into similar problems that I did with using notebooks. Since I move posts around so much I ended up crossing 2 or 3 posts out before finally putting it in the spot it would stay. It ended up getting messy.

But there’s a lot more in this blog planner that I do use. There’s a summary section for each month with space to put in all kinds of stats, as well as expenses and income. I never would have thought to do that on my own. In addition there’s a section at the beginning of the planner that helps you to plan the big picture of your blog. It asks you things about your ideal demographic to how you’ll expect to make money. I still use these parts of the planner even though I’m not actually planning the content in it anymore.

CoSchedule

The best thing for me in terms of editorial calendars has been CoSchedule (affiliate link). You can check out my review here, so I won’t say much about the specifics of how it works. I do want to point out why I like it so much though. It’s super easy to get it installed on your wordpress blog because it’s a plugin. I’m definitely not a technologically inclined person but I was able to sign up and get it started on my blog in a matter of minutes. I can schedule social media posts for each post right in wordpress when I write a post. I’m all about making things as simple as I can, and this really helps to save me time. I can also move posts around as much as I like. If I move a post it also automatically moves all the social media messages that I have scheduled for each post.

Tell me what sort of editorial calendar you use in the comments. 

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