How-to setup an Editorial Calendar for effective Content Strategy?

Image Courtesy Stuart Miles

Writing is a wonderful art & over the time since I started to write - blog, articles, whitepapers or for that matter any content, I have found that the only way to better it, is to follow a certain content strategy. 

Your single most goal is to build content that will generate more traffic but the challenge is how-to translate that into action...

Regardless of your goals, one of the way to setup an effective content strategy that can improve over time, is to build a "Editorial Calendar". I have seen multiple templates available on the web, but having picked up few of them I have gone ahead & personalized it to suit the content that I produce.

An editorial calendar is a great way to do forward planning - research, et al for your content and also helps to keep track of your ideas, users.

Though, one of the goal that every content strategy should address is to show up on the search ranking, so have a post that has a blend of "search engine" specific keywords in title & post.

Here the glimpse my "editorial calendar" and you might want to personalize it to your requirements:

Editorial Calendar

I've divided my calendar under columns like:

Week

As I do my posts on weekly basis, the first column was to put a date/week for each content. It helps me channelize my research, thought process in the run-up to the week.

Key Goal

Its good to define your key goal at the start. It has been my experience that until you have a certain goal in mind, it would be difficult to setup your thoughts over the huge amount of noise generated on the web.

Heading

The first place where the viewer might get interested to go through your content is the "heading". This is the single most piece to attract viewers and gather a certain fan following. Also, the traffic from social channels will most probably be driven by it.

"Headings" need to be creative, suggestive or even controversial so that viewers will read further & comment too.

Have a tentative heading to start with as you might need to revisit after you have defined your keywords.

Keywords

Go through any SEO optimization techniques & the stress is to have maximum coverage of keywords. 

"Keywords" supposedly are instrumental in driving the traffic to your site from the search engines. Make sure your post, heading have a mix of them so that your page is search-engine friendly.

I make sure that my post has a good set of keywords for it to appear in the search engines & help drive first-time visitors.

Hits/Week

Once I am done with posting my content, I track the stats for a week. It helps me to analyze the content of my post - what worked & what didn't. 

A deeper analysis can reveal which channel has generated traffic - search engine, Twitter, Facebook. It is one detail that can helps you to decide which channel to emphasize for your content.

Comments

These is a very personal column that I use to deduce the judgmental errors.

It helps me in planning for my next post & I try to avoid the mistakes that could have occurred in previous posts...

And while you are here, do not forget to leave your comments. They are welcome & helpful too...

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