Keeping Your Posts On Right Track

Posted on 23. Oct, 2008 by Mike J in Content

A great way to keep on the right track with your posts is an editorial calendar. An editorial calendar is a schedule made ahead of time on what you’re going to publish. Many magazines and newspapers have used editorial calendars for many years, and with good reason they work very well. You can also benefit from creating and following one. Here is some of what you’ll improve on from having one.

Post quality:

When you know what you’ll be writing in advance, you’ll have a longer period of time to edit your post drafts until all uneccessary words have been cut and your posts will super posts. For posts that involve research, you will have more lead time for gathering your research.

Blogging consistency:

Without creating an editorial calendar or post calendar, your post topics can move all over to differnent topics. You may find yourself writing a post that would be too long and should be divided. Or create a post that required follow-through in a later post, but would not follow through. If your readers think a particular post is coming, but it never appears, you may loose them. With an editorial calendar, you can plan a series of posts in advance so that they build momentum and nobody is disappointed because your posts are publishing at regular times.

Inceased RSS subscribers:

When you know what’s coming, you can build anticipation in your readers for what’s to come at the end of your existing posts or comments. You can also use this as a way to entice blog subscribers. A small amount of extra effort at the end of some posts is worth the payoff in the extra readers.

Any calendaring program can be used to create an editorial calendar for you blog. It doesn’t matter which one you use, so long as you are using something. Sitting down and having a brainstorming session and getting ideas for those posts for an entire month or even two beforehand sometimes can be quite a inspiring exercise! The more in advance you can create post topics, the less likely it is you will ever suffer from a bout of what some call bloggers block.