Creating a content calendar is a crucial organizational tool for most creators. Having this tool in place can help you, tremendously. I haven’t quite gotten the hang of this method, but I have been working on creating a content schedule that will best suit my needs. Having a functioning content calendar will give you a better shot at managing your content creations. It allows you to plan your posts in advance, manage your organic and sponsored content, and helps you to stick to a rigid and structured schedule.

Set Content Calendar Goals

Before starting your content calendar be sure to choose the type of layout you want to have. This would entail evaluating what you would like to accomplish as a creator. Write down 3 short-term goals. 3 long-term goals and 3 goals that can be completed within any time frame. Keep them in mind while you are creating your content.

Start with what you know

Do you have a bunch of great ideas you want to begin blogging about? Write them all down as often as possible so that you can see them. Go through your list and pick out everything you know a lot about. When creating content, you can start blogging about these first since they do not require much research. This is something that will give you a head start on your content creation when you first get started. If you have a bad week in your content creation, you can easily pick one of these topics to create content around in no time. 

Determine your goals

Determine what goals you want to complete by the end of a certain time frame. Let’s say you want to have your website active for 3 years. This would mean that you would need to have a plan to make sure that you have those things in place. Perhaps you have 100 blog posts now, and you want to have 500 posts by next year. You’d need to schedule a time to determine how many posts you’ll need to write each month.

Outline your weekly posts

Set a weekly post goal of possibly creating seven posts each week. This would be one post a day, every day. These posts can all be created at once and scheduled throughout the week, or you can create one post every day. You can also take a break from posting and just do your research to get a jumpstart on your content creation for a few weeks to a couple of months in advance. 

Create your post outlines by deciding what topic you want to create content for. Think of your title names and write down specific highlights and bullets for a better-focused post. You can add or omit items once you begging to create. 

Determine what you want to create and when

You can pick what day, week, or month you want to blog about specific topics. For example, you may want to create a month dedicated to finance. You would create finance posts for that whole month. You can choose to do a week about finance, a week about travel, one week about business management and another week discussing company policies. 

You can further break this down into days. Perhaps you want to discuss finance on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Travel on Wednesday and Friday. Management on Sundays and company policies on Mondays. This will allow you to stay focused and create content routinely, It will also give your viewers insight on when to expect these types of posts on your site. They can set alarms for their favorite posts and make sure to be active around the time these items should be suspected to arrive on your site.

Schedule your posts.

You can write the title name on your content calendar for the month, week, or specific day you want to have the articles posted. This will help you remember what needs to be researched, created, posted, or promoted. You can check these off your list when they are done and you can save them for a later date if you get stuck during the creation process. This will also allow you to take notes and decide what still needs to be completed that day such as scheduling, advertising, social media shares, or SEO updates.