Are you struggling to keep track of your content marketing efforts? Are you looking for a more effective way to structure your editorial calendar?

It’s easy to get bogged down by the day-to-day tasks of a content marketer, but with a solid plan in place, you can manage your content marketing schedule and individual tasks more effectively.

In this guide, I’ll explain the benefits of using a content calendar and share 10 content calendar tips to help you organize your publishing workflow.

1. Start with a content calendar template

The first step to creating a content calendar is to choose a template that works for you. This will help you to stay organized and make sure you’re covering all of your bases, like your blog, social media, and email marketing.

There are a lot of great free content calendar templates available online. You can also use Google Sheets or Excel to create your own.

When choosing a template, make sure it includes all of the following:

• The date and time you’ll be publishing your content

• The topic or title of your content

• The author or creator of your content

• The category or type of content

• The status of your content

• The publication channels you’ll be using

Here’s a simple example of what a content calendar might look like. This one is set up for a blog, so you can see a column for the author and the blog category:

2. Plan your content 90 days in advance

It’s a good idea to plan your content 90 days in advance. This will help you align your content with business goals and important dates in your industry.

It also gives you a buffer so that if you fall behind, you can still publish content on time. And, if you need to make changes to your content, you have plenty of time to do so.

3. Use color coding to categorize your content

Color-coding your content is a simple and effective way to keep your content calendar organized and visually appealing.

You can color-code by type of content, campaign, product line, or any other category that makes sense for your business.

In this example, you can see how the team at Trello uses color-coding to categorize their content by type.

4. Schedule content at the best times

Once you determine the best times to post on social media, you can then use your content calendar to schedule your posts.

You can also use your content calendar to schedule your blog posts, videos, and podcasts at the best times for your audience. Just be sure to take time zone differences into account if your audience is global.

5. Plan for seasonal content

One of the best ways to make sure you’re not missing any important dates is to plan for seasonal content ahead of time.

You can add in holidays and other seasonal events that are relevant to your business and audience. This will help you to create content around these dates and make sure you’re not missing any opportunities.

For example, if you’re a fitness brand, you’ll want to make sure you’re planning content around New Year’s resolutions and the summer months when people are getting ready for beach season.

6. Plan for evergreen content

Evergreen content is content that stays relevant to your audience over time. In other words, it’s not tied to a specific date or event that will eventually make it outdated.

For example, a blog post about how to write a resume is evergreen content, while a blog post about the best movies of 2021 is not.

It’s important to include evergreen content in your content calendar because it gives you a base of content to publish throughout the year, even when you don’t have any time-sensitive content ready. This can be especially helpful during slow periods, like the holidays, when you might not have as much time to dedicate to your content marketing.

7. Schedule content for holidays

The first step to organizing your content calendar is to schedule content for holidays throughout the year. This allows you to plan your content around the holidays that are most important to your business.

For example, if you’re a retail business, you’ll want to make sure you have content scheduled for Black Friday and Cyber Monday. If you’re a B2B business, you may want to plan your content around New Year’s Day and the Fourth of July.

By scheduling content for holidays in advance, you can make sure you’re not missing out on any important opportunities to reach your audience.

8. Add a column to track your content’s performance

Your content calendar can be more than just a publishing schedule. You can also use it to track the success of your content after it’s been published.

To do that, simply add a column to your calendar to track your content’s performance. For example, you could add columns to track page views, social shares, and comments.

This will help you see which types of content are performing well and which ones aren’t. That way, you can adjust your content strategy and publish more of the types of content that your audience loves.

9. Use a social media content calendar

Your blog and social media content calendars should be separate. But, they should work together to help you plan and track your campaigns and content.

A social media content calendar is a place where you can plan and organize your social media posts. You can use it to plan posts for the day, week, or month.

You can also use it to schedule your posts ahead of time. This can be a huge time-saver, and it can help you ensure that you’re posting consistently.

Just like with your blog content calendar, you’ll want to start by figuring out which social media platforms you want to use. Then, you can determine how often you want to post on each platform.

You can use a social media scheduling tool to plan and schedule your posts. Most social media scheduling tools will also let you create content calendars.

10. Use a content calendar tool

There are a lot of moving parts in a content calendar, and it can be tough to keep everything organized if you’re just using a spreadsheet.

That’s why a lot of marketers use content calendar tools to keep everything in one place. These tools allow you to plan, organize, and schedule your content in one central location, and they also come with a lot of other helpful features, like task management, social media analytics, and more.

Some popular content calendar tools include:

• HubSpot’s Marketing Calendar

• CoSchedule

• Trello

• Asana

• Airtable

Before you choose a content calendar tool, think about what features are most important to you, and make sure the tool you choose has them. You should also think about how much you’re willing to spend on a content calendar tool, as some of them can be expensive.

Conclusion

Content calendars are essential tools for content marketers. They help you keep your content strategy organized and keep your team on the same page. By using the tips in this blog post, you can create a content calendar that helps you create better content, publish more often, and get more traffic and leads.