How To Create a Blog Content Calendar

If your content strategy is the vehicle that drives your marketing, a content calendar is the road map that’ll get you where you want to go.

If you follow it, you and your team will stay on track and be ahead of your publishing schedules. Without it, your content marketing process becomes an inefficient guessing game that results in inaction.

Keep reading to learn why you need a content calendar — and to get our free template that will help you create your own.

A Blog Content Calendar...

Charts the Route Ahead

An editorial calendar lets you focus on the future instead of fixating on your next step. If you’ve ever created a system or process in your business, you know what I’m talking about.

A content calendar is nothing more than a process that removes the guesswork from creating and publishing content. A structured calendar achieves this by helping your team to:

• Meet workflow deadlines
• Publish consistently (vital for SEO)
• See greater ROI from content
• Free up creative thinking time
• Instill peace of mind

By investing a little content planning time up front, you’ll save yourself untold hours this year.

Aligns Your Team

Effective team communication isn’t easy, especially amongst remote teams.

Since your entire crew will need to use your content calendar religiously, make sure you choose a tool that facilitates great communication and reduces friction. Consider:

• Do you need compatibility with Mac, PC, or both?
• Do you need simultaneous multi-editor support?
• Do you need a login, and who will manage that?
• Which features are must-haves and which are nice-to-haves?
• Do you also want a place for team members to add content ideas?

Expands Your Reach

A content calendar organizes your assets into an efficient lead-generation machine, instead of one-off posts that fade into oblivion.

When each piece is mapped out in an orderly manner, it’s much easier to repurpose and promote content. You’ll get twice as much out of every post as you capture new audiences tuned into different channels.

Syncs Content and Promotions

Planning content around existing promotions maximizes your calendar’s potential. A lack of congruence between content and promotions murders your ability to generate leads and sales.

An editorial calendar aligns both for the best results.

How to Construct Your Content Calendar

Maybe you already know how to get the most from a content calendar and just need a solid template. If so, download our free custom Google Sheet template here.

If you’d like some pointers on customizing your calendar for optimal use, see the steps below.

Step 1: Set Your Destination

Define your content marketing goals first. You need to know WHY you’re sacrificing your blood, sweat, and sanity for content creation.

What do you want out of your content efforts? What does a win look like? How will you define success?

Be sure to set measurable targets, like:

• 100 new leads from blog CTAs each month
• 20 phone calls daily from your site
• 10% email list growth (with qualified leads) monthly

NOTE: “100 new website visitors” and “increased social media engagement” are NOT goals. They’re strategies. Increasing traffic is one way to reach your goal, but it shouldn’t be the target if you’re a business that sells products or services.

Step 2: Map Your Route

Categorize current content into four to six buckets. If you’re a service-based business, your categories will probably concern the services you offer. For example, my primary topics are content marketing, lead generation, blogging, and productivity.

If you sell products, your main blog topics will probably focus on your buyer personas and the problems your products solve.

Clearly define post types too, like:

• List posts
• Aggregated content
• Instructional
• Promotional
• Product updates
• Multimedia

Variety keeps your publishing channels fresh and interesting for your target audience, while spreading the production workload.

Pro tip: List posts typically perform well across all distribution channels and offer your content team a break between more time-consuming assets.

Step 3: Choose Your Cruising Speed

How often should you publish? My answer: How often can you publish consistently?

Publishing is a consistency game, and not a quantity game. Choose a publishing cadence based on how often your team can realistically produce high-quality output.

Consistent publishing (and sharing that content on social media) helps build trust with both Google and your audience. One HubSpot study demonstrated that consistent bloggers generate 3.5x more traffic and 4.5x more leads than inconsistent ones. Consistency also trains your audience to anticipate new content.

Once you know how often you’ll publish, enter the publishing dates into your content calendar for the next 6–12 months.

Step 4: Plot Your Side Trips

For each piece, include a clear call to action that makes it easy for readers to take the next logical step, like:

• Downloading a content upgrade or lead magnet
• Scheduling a call or consultation
• Requesting product information
• Making a purchase

Each CTA should align with its post topic rather than offering something unrelated.

RELATED: How to Sell on Your Blog Without Being Salesy

Step 5: Appoint a Navigator

With multiple contributors comes the potential for oversight, so appoint an owner for your calendar to ensure nothing falls between the cracks.

Owners handle vital tasks like:

• Confirming no content conflicts with time off
• Assigning publishing tasks
• Following up on publishing workflow
• Monitoring engagement
• Updating statuses

Step 6: Fuel Up Regularly

Don’t let your calendar run dry — that negates its purpose. Start by brainstorming as many ideas as possible. Just two hours can provide you a deep well of topics that lasts an entire year.

Great sources of inspiration include:

• Client questions (pro tip: search your email client for anything with a ? in it)
• Sales call objections
• The problems your product or service solves for your audience
• Questions your team wishes clients or prospects would ask
• What customers need to know at each stage of your sales and onboarding processes

Then, you can flesh out your ideas during monthly or quarterly planning sessions.

Need Help?

No single template fits all. Customize yours in ways that accelerate results for your business. An optimized editorial calendar removes friction from an otherwise bumpy content marketing road.

Don’t have the time to plan years’ worth of content in advance? We don’t blame you. And you’re not alone.

Every day, businesses just like yours make progress toward their growth goals with our detailed, goal-focused content calendars. If you’d like to take content marketing off your plate, reach out. We’re happy to help.