Pros and Cons of Using an Editorial Calendar for Blog Management
Online publishing and blog management can be extremely time consuming, particularly as your blog starts to grow or you bring on additional bloggers to join your contributor team. What are you going to write about today? This week? Next week? Who is going to write what content? These are questions that bloggers ask themselves every day.
When you first start a blog, it can be easy to manage writing, publishing, communicating with your audience, and so on. As your responsibilities grow with your blog, it can get harder and harder to manage all of these activities and keep churning out great content consistently. That's when an editorial calendar can become critical to your ongoing success as a blogger. However, even bloggers who are just starting out can find value in maintaining an editorial calendar.
What Is an Editorial Calendar?
An editorial calendar is a calendar used by newspapers, magazines, and other offline and online publishers that outlines the content planned for the coming days, weeks, and months. Large publishers use editorial calendars for organization but also to attract advertisers. For bloggers, the biggest advantage is content management.
Your editorial calendar can be as detailed or as simple as you want. There are even plugins that can help you like the Editorial Calendar WordPress plugin which enables bloggers to create simple editorial calendars within their WordPress dashboards! As long as your editorial calendar helps you consistently publish fresh and interesting content, it's working.
The Benefits of an Editorial Calendar
An editorial calendar helps you consistently publish content on your blog. Instead of sitting at your computer each day and trying to decide what to write about, you can sit down once a month and plan out what you're going to write each day. If you'd prefer to work week-by-week, that's fine, too. An editorial calendar enables you to follow not just a consistent publishing schedule but also to create a contextually consistent flow of information.
Furthermore, an editorial calendar lets you work around your schedule. For example, if you're typically free on Fridays, schedule time to write long feature articles on Fridays and through the weekend, so you can publish them on Mondays. If you're always very busy on Wednesdays, make sure your editorial calendar includes an easy-to-write post each Wednesday. This might even be a perfect day to schedule guest blog posts.
One of the biggest challenges that bloggers face is consistently publishing new content when so much time ends up going to other tasks such as moderating and answering blog comments, responding to emails, promoting content across the social web, and so on. An editorial calendar can help you organize your writing so those other tasks don't get in the way of publishing great content each day. It's easy to get overwhelmed with writing, coming up with new ideas, and managing all of the other tasks that go along with blogging. An editorial calendar helps to declutter the process of coming up with post ideas and writing great content.
An editorial calendar is most helpful for blogs that have a lot of contributors and publish a lot of content every day. It's hard to make sure every blogger on a team is publishing different content when they should so the blog has a consistent flow of new posts that continually add value to readers' experiences. For these team blogs, editorial calendars make it easy to split up the workflow and ensure everyone meets their deadlines.
The Negatives of an Editorial Calendar
An editorial calendar is meant to make blog publishing less overwhelming, but for some people, it can do exactly the opposite. Feeling the pressure of sticking to an editorial calendar isn't helpful to some bloggers. If an editorial calendar causes you extra stress, then using one probably isn't a good idea. Also, if you spend more time creating and agonizing over your editorial calendar than you spend writing content and managing your other blogging activities, then an editorial calendar probably isn't right for you.
Similarly, an editorial calendar can become too restrictive. Just because you create an editorial calendar doesn't mean that you shouldn't have some flexibility built into it. For example, you never know what kind of news could break about your blog topic. If you stick too closely to your editorial calendar, you'll never be able to talk about timely news.
Remember, maintaining an editorial calendar for your blog is completely optional. You might not use an editorial calendar today or next week, but you might decide to start using one next year. You might never use an editorial calendar. It's your blog, so use the tools that help you reach your goals in a way that's comfortable for you.
