When building a content strategy and managing a blog, one of the greatest challenges is being able to maintain consistency. No matter how long you’ve been in the game, being consistent with your writing and posting strategy is the key to maintaining your readers engaged and your audience constantly growing.
October 29, 2024
Paula Kehr
Blog Calendar: Definition and Importance
When someone subscribes to your blog, they’re relying on you for new material. Your audience will be expecting new information from you, your service, or your product. This is why being able to supply them with fresh posts and maintaining a steady flow of new content posted on a daily or weekly basis is so crucial for the success of your content strategy. And this is where having a blog calendar becomes very useful. A blog calendar can be defined as an organized roadmap for publishing new content -on a specified timeline- on your blog. Also, by scheduling and planning your posts, you can work on strategizing your topics so the content stays engaging and relevant. By establishing a schedule, you’re helping your content strategy because you’re ensuring a path to consistency and creating a plan that will enable you to publish on a steady basis. And why is it so important to publish new and engaging content? Because this is what will help you grow and attract traffic to your blog or website.
Steps to Creating a Blog Content Calendar
Creating a calendar for your blog content just requires a little planning. Let’s dive into the basic steps that you need to follow in order to create your own blog posting process.
First, you need to know the most common elements that will be present in your planning strategy: Blog topics, publication date, who is responsible for writing it, who is responsible for editing it, image, status, and final URL to post.
Schedule brainstorming sessions. It’s always a great idea to plan regular brainstorming ideas. It doesn’t matter how many people are involved in your team, or even if you’re running a solo project management. By scheduling regular brainstorming session you can make sure you’re always thinking about new ideas and new ways to create content for your blog.
Keyword research. By conducting a keyword research you will be gaining insight into the terms your audiences are looking for or reading, and this will enable you to create new content aligned to the topics your readers are looking for. By doing this, you will be driving organic search traffic to your blog, and also engaging your audiences.
Schedule your content. Once you have a clear idea as to what you’ll be writing about, you can now work on the schedule for your different posts. So, go ahead and give a publication date for each of your blog posts, and make sure you assign it to one of your writers.
Generate your content. It’s time to write! Sit down and generate your content, or conduct as much research as you need to in order to be able to produce a great piece of writing. Also, keep in mind you might need to accompany your content with an image, so take the time to search for the right graphic content as well.
Edit your content. Usually, there will be an editor in staff to review and edit your post, so it’s important to set time for this and schedule regular editing sessions before being able to post your new material on your blog.
Publish. Once your content has been submitted and approved, it’s time to publish. Once it’s up and lives, be sure to promote your new content across your different marketing channels, which includes social media.
Build Your Blog Content Calendar With Instagantt
There are numerous tools, spreadsheets, and PDFs out there that are free to use, but none of them are able to actually keep your blog strategy on track. Why? Because creating and most importantly staying on track of your schedule requires being able to visualize deadlines and progress.
By using Instagantt(gantt chart maker)you’ll be able to organize your entire content strategy in a gantt chart, from beginning to end. Moreover, the gantt chart software enables you to keep track of all the different key aspects of creating and managing a blog content strategy, and at the same time keeping everyone informed on the status of each step. By choosing Instagantt to create and schedule your blog calendar, you’re contributing to the success of your content strategy and ensuring your own content posting consistency.
