Editorial calendars. I love them. There are a hundred different ways to handle them, but I like to start with my goal in mind and build out from there.
I have multiple objectives for my blog, so I feature different types of posts on Mondays, Wednesday, and Fridays, each tailored to address different strategic needs.
Once you’ve decided what role you want your blog to play, you can reverse engineer a content strategy to meet those needs. To help get your wheels spinning, I’m sharing all the details of how I determined what types of articles to feature.
Mondays are for guest posts.
One of my top priorities was to establish The Irresistible Business as a hub of a wildly valuable original content–more than I could possibly create myself.
Guest posts help me reach that goal while I foster relationships with other entrepreneurs I admire. It can also be less intimidating to reach out to someone whose business is thriving when I’m offering them an opportunity to share their message with a new-but-compatible audience.
These posts boost traffic to my site because the guest authors send their established audience to my blog (and often invite me to guest blog in return–bonus!), but it also helps boost traffic to the guest’s site because my audience–you wonderful people–are often moved to go learn more about the author.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Guest articles are a major win for everyone involved.
Wednesdays are for original content.
Each week I publish original content that helps me establish myself as an authority on entrepreneurship. When someone is thinking about working with me, they want to get a sense of who I am, what I know, and how I approach the work that I do. The articles I write for The Irresistible Business are a perfect risk-free way for prospects to get to know a little bit more about me and see if we’d click.
One of the unexpected benefits of sitting down and writing a handful of value-based articles each month is that it forces me to reflect on how I operate my business, and why. I’m constantly on the lookout for article ideas, which makes me pause and think critically about things that I might otherwise have glossed over–whether it’s a book I’m reading, a phone call with a mastermind buddy, or a conversation I’m having on Twitter.
Every time I have a spark of inspiration, I add it to my Google Docs so it’s there the next time I’m feeling stuck. This acts as a safety net to stave off writer’s block and helps me make sure I stay on brand.
Fridays are for content curation.
At the end of each week I do my Friday Five roundup. Putting this together means combing through dozens of articles to find a handful that I deem worthy of your time. Filtering, selecting, and framing this collection each week takes far longer than I thought it would when I first launched my site, but it is worth every minute.
This strategy has helped me get on the radar of some really big names–and even led to repeat editing jobs with a best-selling author I’ve long admired. It also gives me the chance to promote budding entrepreneurs who are doing incredible things and should have legions of devoted fans.
Building community ties energizes me, and curating content is just one more way to make connections, help my peers, and improve my SEO while I’m at it. (Linking to relevant sites helps Google recognize that I actually talk about what I say I talk about.)
Putting it all into action.
Once I developed my general framework, I plugged it all into my Google calendar, set it to repeat each week, and flagged it bright orange so I would never miss a deadline.
As I flesh out the details of each week’s content, I add notes so I can see at a glance what’s happening when. For example, I know who’s writing each guest post from now through August, and that’s in my calendar so I don’t have to think about it. I also keep a running list of topics and article outlines in Google Docs to fuel my weekly Wednesday articles, and I constantly keep my eye out for pieces to feature in the Friday Five roundup.
Do you have an editorial calendar? What systems do you use to keep your business on track and ready to launch to the next level?