Increase your efficiency with a content calendar
Bill Gates was the originator of the phrase “content is king” in 1996 in an essay published on the Microsoft website.
In his submission, Gates predicted that content would be the most effective way of making money on the internet. This statement may have seemed farfetched in 1996, but it is a reality today, and almost all businesses rely on content to generate leads.
But creating content in itself is not enough. You have to publish quality content regularly and consistently on all platforms where you are running a campaign.
Leveraging a content calendar is the best way to ensure you have a solid content strategy.
What is a content calendar?
As the name suggests, a content calendar is a tool designed to help create and post content in an organized way, which is a critical element of content creation.
It is more of a roadmap that helps you stay on track and ensure that your content meets specific requirements. Some areas of content marketing a content calendar will help you improve are creation, duration, publication, optimization, and promotion.
What to include in your content calendar to increase efficiency
Here’s what you need to include in your content calendar.
Monthly plan
For a start, you will need to create a basic content plan for the whole month. The plan should include everything you will need to create in the month, such as blog posts and social media posts and their publication dates.
In other words, you have to plan specific actions for every day of your calendar. These actions include publishing and reviewing past content, among other action items for your content marketing team.
Content information
While creating a schedule for content publication is great, it is not enough to guarantee the quality and consistency of the content you create and publish. So, you will need to include details of the content that needs to be created, such as content titles and a short description of what the content will be about.
You can also go a step further to include keywords for every title to help your content creators optimize the content for search engines. The most effective keyword research method is incorporating topic research tools like Google analytics. You could also try out this Google Analytics alternative to help you get around the limitations of Google Analytics.
Categorize content by type
Different campaigns call for different content strategies. Sometimes you will have different content for link building, lead generation, offsite posts, blogger outreach, and paid ads.
Managing many types of content for the same campaign makes it very easy to be overwhelmed. So it is important to place the different types of content in separate categories, which can help your marketing team easily know which content goes where.
Deadlines
The main goal of having a content calendar is to ensure that you are consistent in posting content. You could even incorporate a content management tool that automatically uploads content on a pre-planned schedule. This means you will need to have content ready on its publication date.
The best way of ensuring that there is never a situation where content is not ready is by setting deadlines in your calendar.
The best approach is to set deadlines at least a week before the due date, especially when working with freelance content creators. This ensures that you will have ample time to review the written articles to ensure they are error-free and align with your business ethos.
After posting your content, you will always need to go back and see how each post performs. So you may want to add a link to the post in your calendar for easier referencing. You could create your content calendar using spreadsheets, but the most straightforward option would be leveraging downloadable or online calendars that come with a preset template for ease of use.
Photo by Elena Kloppenburg
