It’s good to be organised. When you own or run a business, it is essential.
A content calendar is a sure-fire way to keep both organised and motivated when it comes to generating content and keeping your followers engaged.
What is a content calendar?
It is essentially an outline of all the content you plan to write and publish in an upcoming period of time – be it a week, a month, six months, or a year.
There are a number of elements involved in a calendar. And, while there is no formula for creating the perfect one, a basic template might involve a table with headers like this:
| PUBLICATION DATE | TOPIC | KEYWORDS | ANGLE | IMAGE ALT
TEXT |
CATEGORIES
& HASHTAGS |
WORKING HEADLINE | PLATFORM(s) |
Content Calendar Template Headers
How does a content calendar work?
1. Once you set up a template similar to the one suggested above, complete the first column (Publication Date) to determine the frequency of your content creation. For instance, if you decide to publish monthly, establish the specific date you wish each piece of writing to be published (remember, of course, that the piece needs to be finished before that date to allow for a bit of polishing and editing. For more on how to edit your work well, read our article on it here).
2. Begin to brainstorm topics for each post or article and add them to the table. Depending on the nature of your business, it is generally a good idea to look ahead at upcoming publications, launches, holidays, or other events and plan to write about a topic which you can link back to the event or day. This helps to keep your content relevant and topical.
For example, if you sell individually-crocheted, vintage-style doilies, and next month will be National Sew-It-Yourself Day, then it would be a great opportunity to write a post about the importance of sustainable sewing, the benefits of making your own items, and how your doilies help to perpetuate these ideas.
Although it is a great idea to plan months in advance, be prepared to change your schedule if needed – for instance, if a global pandemic breaks out, you may find your topics need to be altered to make them more relevant to your audience at the time!
3. Keywords. Do a bit of keyword planning to help your blog article get pushed up the rankings where possible.
Great tools for this include Google Ad’s Keyword Planner, as well as Ubersuggest .
Try to find keyword combinations with high numbers of searches, but low Difficulty scores (the lower the score, the less competitive the term).
Write two or three keyword phrases into the table. Use them also to write the Alt Text for any images you are planning on using or sourcing for your post.
4. The Angle column of the table is your opportunity to flesh out what the content will actually involve. Use dotpoints to list four or five points which will form the basic structure of your article or post. They might be questions your post will endeavour to answer (eg. ‘What is a content calendar?’) Or they might be statements (eg. ‘5 ways to write excellent headlines’).
Either way, these dotpoints will often become the subheaders for your post.
5. List a few Categories which you can use to tag the blog post and/or some Hashtags which you will add to the post when it gets pushed to your social media platforms.
6. Write a killer Headline.
The more specific the headline, the better. For example, a good headline might be ‘How to crochet vintage-style doilies’. But a better headline would be ‘5 steps to crocheting vintage-style doilies’. And an even better one would be ‘5 easy steps to crocheting vintage-style doilies for beginners’.
A few other useful headline formulas include the Intrigue headline and the Problem-Solving headline. For 10 other nifty headline formulas, try Copyblogger’s post about it here.
How can I measure my content’s success?
Feel free to add additional columns to your content calendar’s table to keep track of your content’s success rate.
This might include results like how many comments were made on your article, how many Facebook reactions it attracted, or how many Tweets it generated.
Keeping track of the results of your content is a useful avenue for you to analyse why the better performing posts did so well (eg. were they more relevant? Were they a little bit controversial and therefore generated more discussion? Did they provide some particularly topical information, tips or hints?)
Whatever the reasons, take them on board, and try to apply them to future content you write.