“Oh [bleep], I forgot to put up a blog post this week. What am I going to write about?!”

“Shoot, I have to put something on social today but I don’t know what to say.”

“I should really send out another email newsletter but I have no idea what to include in it.”

Ah, the “What do I even write?” circle of content marketing. You know you need content — you know you need a content strategy. But you have no actual content ideas.

Don’t feel ashamed. We at Edify are in the content marketing business and even we have cycles of “But what do we write?” It’s just the nature of the beast.

There’s a great tool that can help you avoid the daily drudgery of determining what you’re going to write. This tool can even help you put strategy behind your blog posts, social media posts, and newsletters.

This tool goes by many names: content calendar, editorial calendar, social calendar. Doesn’t matter what you call it — a rose by any other name would smell as sweet — and you need one. We’re going to show you exactly how. First, let’s answer one question:

What are the benefits of having a content calendar?

The biggest boon of an editorial calendar is that it not only keeps you organized, it forces you to think about your strategy. Because a content calendar integrates every content aspect you have, you should be considering how it all fits together, like so:

What you are writing about on your blog this month -> What will you say about each blog post on each social channel -> What will someone do when they visit your blog — sign up for a newsletter? -> What will you say in your newsletter that month that makes sense in the context of your content and your marketing strategy?

A content calendar helps you tie everything together. Plus, planning all your content at the same time means you get to abolish the daily what-do-I-write grind; depending on your tools, your content will publish automatically, or you can just hit copy-paste-post and not worry about it again.

Another benefit? You’re not flying by the seat of your pants with just-in-time posts and no planning in advance. Content created for the sake of creation is neither intentional nor high quality, and haphazard content does not yield the effective results you surely want.

How do I make a content calendar?

The first step is to determine the time chunks you want to plan for. For some clients, we make a monthly editorial calendar; for others, we do it weekly. Personally, I prefer a monthly calendar — it puts every piece of content into a larger perspective and feels more intentional than going week by week, and feels easier to fit into a marketing plan.

Most businesses, unless they are big-time content sites like Forbes, do not need annual editorial calendars. That said, thinking ahead is beneficial, so if you have yearly or quarterly planning sessions, make a content overview a priority. Added benefit of discussing content in planning meetings? You ensure content drives business goals. And that’s hot.

So hot. See? Content can be sexy!

If your business is cyclical, it should make high-level content planning easier. If it’s not seasonal, you’ll want to think closely about how certain themes can tie together to create a progression that feels natural if someone is in it for months, but doesn’t make newly-joined potential customers feel like they missed a lot.

Determine how your content works together

First, let’s look at an example of a content strategy that is also a content calendar. This is an example of a content strategy, high-level calendar doc that we made for a client. It shows how to tie content together and promote it across a variety of channels. The channels include:

Email
Instagram
LinkedIn
Website/blog

*Anonymized and chicken-ized example of content strategy calendar we delivered to a client.*

Each thing has an action, or CTA, that the person would take. They could download an ebook, join a course, sign up for the newsletter, etc. These are all vastly simplified from what we provided to the client, but shows you the general idea.

Outlining key topics that feed into your marketing goals ahead of time will help you flesh out more granular calendars down the line.

Break it out into channels

A monthly or weekly content calendar should list all your content by channel. That means you want to plan out things like:

What blog posts will go up and when
Content of each social post on each social media channel for each day and when it goes live
Email nurture/newsletter topics and send dates
Ad content and live dates
Course topics and go-live dates
What imagery you will be using for each of the above

Get down and dirty with your keyboard

This is it — rubber meets road, fingers meet keyboard. Now you must write each and every post (or hire us to do it for you).

Determine your blog posts and write them ahead of time. Get your email newsletter ready. Write out your social content!

Now put it all together. You can fashion a spreadsheet to track it all, you can download some free calendar templates online, or you can pay for third-party calendar tools. But before you pay for another service, check to see if anything you're using already has calendaring capabilities; tools like WordPress and SEMRush allow you to schedule and/or post out content.

Do it over and over again

Do this every month (or week, whatever you prefer). Yes, every single month. You may not like doing it, but it will feel so good to know that your things are written, scheduled, and posting without you suffering every day.

Or let Edify do it

We specialize in devising content marketing strategies — and the content itself — that help you grow your business. And we do it for a variety of businesses, large and small, and industries.

How to Create a Content Calendar — and Why You Need One