Organizing and Managing Your Blog Content – Quick Tip Monday

Good Monday morning!

Raise your hand if any of this has ever happened to you:

You’ve accidentally published multiple blog posts on one day.

You’ve thought a post was scheduled to publish and it never did.

You wrote a guest post for another site and forgot to send your readers there that day.

<<raising hand>>

If your hand is raised, too, then it’s time to look at taking a more organized approach to managing your blog content.

You need an editorial calendar. An editorial calendar lets you have a big-picture look at what’s going on with your blog. It helps you avoid posts that are too similar being published back-to-back. It prevents you from posting multiple times on the same day. It protects you from your own horrible memory!

There are plenty of ways to create an editorial calendar. Let’s take a look at a few.

1. Use an old school calendar. Some people like the constant visual of a daily calendar to remind them of important to-dos. If you’re using a paper calendar, add your scheduled blog posts to it. Look at it every day and make changes where needed.

2. Use a blog plug-in. If you’re self-hosting a WordPress blog, you should get the plug-in called Editorial Calendar. This plug-in is probably the single most useful one that I’ve deployed on my personal blog. It lets you see a monthly view of all of your scheduled posts, drag and drop posts to different days, and do a quick start or edit of posts directly from the calendar.

3. Try a pre-fabbed spreadsheet. As far as I know, Blogger doesn’t have a gadget that’s the equivalent of the Editorial Calendar plug-in. But BlogBuildingU.com has an open Google doc spreadsheet that is pre-formatted to work as your editorial calendar. And, unlike a paper calendar, you can access it anywhere.

4. Use Google calendar. Speaking of Google, consider trying out Google Calendars to manage your blog events. It’s easy to add events and it will sync up with your Gmail account and mobile phone as well.

There’s no right or wrong way to manage your blog content – different tools work for different people. The important thing is that you HAVE a tool, period. Give one of these a try and hopefully, you’ll never have a posting snafu again!

Have a great blogging week!