Why you Need Editorial Calendar Tools

Many freelancers who are running their marketing online always ask how they can better their businesses. They have been writing blogs but they seem not to generate good traffic and sales. Well, all content marketers who know their onions know how important editorial calendar planning is in strategizing, engaging and getting more clients to their blogs.

Editorial calendars are content tools that define what one needs to publish, when to publish and where to publish it. Editorial calendars help content marketers in the following ways:

1. Improves content strategy

Content marketing is all about understanding what your customers want, when they want it most before packaging it into a digestible form. This requires a strategic tool like an editorial calendar so that you can always have an overview of where your content marketing is headed.

2. Editorial calendars increase your traffic.

With carefully planned content posting, clients will soon note a pattern that addresses their needs and they will, therefore, visit you more as well as share your content with their friends.

3. Editorial calendars bring a sense of discipline.

Creating an editorial calendar brings a sense of discipline in how regularly you post your content. It makes your writers and content creators more accountable and hardworking to meet the demands as put on the calendar.

That being said, here is how to manage your editorial calendar planning:

1. Content Structure.

Before you plan your editorial calendar, you need to carefully state how your content will be like. Who is your audience? How do they affect how you write? What are their immediate needs that you need to meet in your blogging?

2. Participants.

As you plan your calendar, take an inventory of the team of content writers that you have. This way, you will be in a position to weigh their abilities and writing styles such that whatever duties they will take are in line with their different abilities.

3. Consistency

Understand how often you will need to post content on your blog so that you can know what needs to be posted when and by who.

4. Content Assets

If you regularly post graphics or videos in your work, you need to know who will be posting the same and where they will be getting them from.

5. Editorial Review

For peer-reviewed content, you need to first arrange with the peer reviewers so that content written will quickly be reviewed before being made available to your readers.

Here are some editorial calendar tools you need to note:

There are so many free and commercial apps and tools on the Internet that help content marketers in creating editorial calendars, for example, Kapost, Trello, Basecamp and WordPress Editorial Calendar. Before choosing your appropriate tool, you need to consider the following:

1. What are the features most important to you? For example, do you want a calendar that can easily be shared virtually and whose progress can be tracked?

2. Does the chosen calendar tool fit into your content plan? Does it support social media updates? How appealing is it? Some of the popular editorial calendar tools used by most content marketers include the WordPress editorial calendar plugin.  You can also use Google spreadsheets which are also free with your Gmail account. In case, you are not sharing your calendar, you can create a local Excel calendar.