Today’s digital marketing landscape is more dynamic than ever before, websites and apps change every day, new competitors crop up every week, and new trends can come and go in a matter of days, in order to keep pace with this ever-changing environment and remain ahead of your competition, you need a content calendar.
What is a Content Calendar?
A content calendar is a simple visual representation of related content that you want to publish on your blog, Iit’s a way to organize and plan your blog content so that you can create a reliable stream of content.
The calendar doesn’t just help with seasonal or holiday-specific content; you can use it throughout the year to publish a set of articles that cover a variety of topics, keeping your blog fresh and engaging your audience.
At its core, your content calendar should look something like this: every day, on every weekday, you publish a new blog post, this publishing pattern can be used to create a weekly and a monthly calendar, but the most effective content calendar is a weekly one.
How to Create a Content Calendar
There are many tools that make creating a content calendar a breeze but they often end up being more trouble than they’re worth, if you want to customize your content calendar, you need to do it manually.
To create a content calendar, you need to identify the topics, dates, and times of day that you want to publish blog posts, from there, you can use Excel or another spreadsheet program to create a template for your calendar when you have your template, you can copy and paste the data into your word press dashboard to make it happen.
Why You Need a Content Calendar
A content calendar is essential for an online business because it increases the amount of content you publish on a regular basis this allows your blog to remain fresh and relevant to readers, avoiding the trap of becoming a source of rehashed information.
You might be thinking that with so many different blog posts being published every day, your content calendar won’t be full but think about the types of posts that are most effective to publish on a regular basis.
Your calendar should include the content of this kind, filling your calendar with valuable, original content that provides your audience with new information and content, every week.
The 3-Step Process for Building Your Own Content Calendar
Let’s walk through how you can build your own content calendar from scratch:
- Identify the topics you want to publish on this step is the most important. You need to identify the topics you want to publish on in order to create a content calendar and the best way to do this is to ask yourself these kinds of questions:
- Which topics are your most passionate about?
- Which topics would you like to read more about?
- Which topics would your ideal readers love to read about?
- Identify the dates you want to publish, the next step is to identify the dates you want to publish on, in order to build your content calendar.
The same principle applies here as when you were selecting topics; choose dates that best fit the type of content you want to publish.
- Add the times of day you want to publish, the final step is to add the times of day you want to publish, which allows you to create your content calendar.