We’re often asked how we can keep coming up with new ideas for blogs and other articles. Well it doesn’t just happen, in fact it takes quite a lot of time and energy to put together a plan that corresponds with your overall marketing aspirations and campaign goals. One thing that really helps keep it all together though is a content editorial calendar.

So what is an editorial calendar?

Well put simply, it’s a tool that helps you firstly decide on the topics of content you are going to provide, in what format and then how you are going distribute them. Your calendar can be used for every piece of marketing that you create, and you can pre-populate it with important events that happen in the year that you might want to ‘hang’ some marketing around (for example a florist around valentine’s day – you get the picture!).

However, the primary purpose of keeping an editorial calendar is to control the publication of content to ensure you keep a regular appearance that interests your prospects and customers.

The key is to spend some time planning what you are going to publish. You can simply have a ‘theme’ of the month and then publish content that works for the theme, or perhaps you can use different personas each month to represent your different client types so that you can really focus on whats important to them. It’s then a bit easier to work out what you can publish and where it needs to be distributed.

There are multiple free editorial content calendars available on the web that you can download, some very simple and some really complex. So we have taken what we think is the absolute core of what you need and produced a really simple excel spreadsheet that you can use.

If you want to take a look you can download ourĀ content-calander

We have then just populated the first few days with a copy of our own content calendar so that you can see how to fill it in. Seriously, this is the most important activity you will do this year so why not download our spreadsheet and get filling it in!!