Choosing the Right WordPress Editorial Calendar Plugin

What is an Editorial Calendar?

An editorial calendar is the foundation of strategic blogging. It enables you to plan ahead, and if implemented properly should go a surprisingly long way in terms of engaging your audience and growing your subscriber base.

Do You Really Need One?

Really, at the end of the day, an editorial calendar is nothing more than a schedule. Think of it like a plan, or a timetable, or a program for your blog posts. You can use it to plot out what your next month’s worth of blog posts might look like. It can helps you determine what you need to write about, how much you need to write, and where the holes or gaps in your editorial schedule might be.

Using an editorial calendar allows you to:

• Hone your forward planning: you can see, at a glance, what you should be writing about, and where your gaps might be. This allows you to easily schedule writing time into your diary.
• Stave off writers’ block: I don’t know about you, but for me, the hardest part of writing is often coming up with a relevant, meaningful, engaging topic. If you have already sat down, and done this, populating your editorial calendar in advance, then when it comes time to write, you can do just that: write.
• Go in deep: creating an editorial calendar makes you take a step back, and approach your blog from a more holistic perspective. It makes you think about your content as a whole, rather than self-contained, compartmentalised, individual posts. It allows you to approach a topic in stages, building out a series of posts to cover a specific topic more deeply; ultimately, it allows you to provide more value to your readers.
• Capitalise on SEO benefit: rather than pluck a topic at random and dash off a quick post to keep tempo with your weekly/daily/monthly posting schedule, creating an editorial calendar makes you slow down, and select more considered topics on which to write. Keyword research should part a major role in any editorial planning process. Use the keywords for which people are searching in your blog titles, headings, copy, and meta-descriptions.

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by Sally Wood via SitePoint