The producers of Good Morning America don’t awake every morning in a panic that they have to put on yet another show! Everything is planned well in advance, with topics and segments mapped out on a calendar. It’s not a surprise that day in and day out a new show has to be created.
So why are you treating it like a big surprise every time you need to write a blog post? So many of us have big blogging ambitions but then start writing on the morning of our deadline, or keep pushing it off for “when we have more time”. This makes blogging a constant stress, and a marketing activity that often ends up falling through the cracks.
There is a better way! You can create an editorial calendar for your blog, and it’s very easy to do.
Step 1: Brainstorm Your Topics
One of the biggest barriers to consistent blogging is WHAT to blog about.
Answers to your most frequently asked questions make great blog fodder, and are quick and easy to write. So step one is to brain dump, or write out, of all your most frequently asked questions. Try to generate as many as you can (go for 25 at the minimum). Don’t make this too complicated – these should be the basic questions that you’re asked over and over again. Go through old emails or listen to voicemails to jog your memory.
Step 2: Edit And Calendar
Once you have your big list of questions, go through and edit out any whose answers wouldn’t make great posts for your blog. (Remember, too basic isn’t a problem. The fact that prospects ask these questions proves that they aren’t too basic, and people really want them answered!)
If you aren’t sure what your blogging frequency should be, start with once a week. You can always go up or down from there but weekly is an effective and realistic schedule.
Take your edited list and copy and paste the questions onto a calendar, one question per week. I prefer Google calendar for this task. Let’s say you got 25 questions (which is pretty easy to come up with), you’ve got yourself a half a years worth of blog posts. Now go for more and get up to 52 topics and you are done for the year!
You now have your editorial calendar locked and loaded!
Step 3: Write and Stick To Your Calendar
The great thing about blogging is there are no rules – your articles don’t have to be any certain length or in any special format. Blogging is just a vehicle to get useful and/or entertaining content out to your audience. So keep this task simple, and simply write out (or make a video) your answer to each question.
Try to stay ahead of the game by writing your article at least one week in advance and scheduling it to go live on a pre-determined date (this is easy to do with WordPress). This gives you a little wiggle room for weeks where your blogging falls behind. Or you can make your life even easier by writing four posts at once and getting a month’s worth of content squared away.
The most important part of this plan is to stick to your editorial calendar! Once you know what to write about, most people find it pretty easy to just answer a question they already know the answer to. But it’s easy to self-sabatoge by deciding that you don’t feel like hitting that topic that week, or should come up with something else.
Don’t let yourself go there! Remember you’re running a professional operation, just like Good Morning America. Your blog is a representation of your business and should be treated as such – not like a throw-away hobby that you sometimes get to and sometimes don’t.
September 29, 2011 at 8:57 am
What an interesting idea to approach our blogging this way. And to go one step further one could create the editorial calendar for the year as suggested by the article and add new posts ad-hoc when he feels like it. This way he would end up with more than 52 posts in a year. Love it. Thank you for sharing.
September 30, 2011 at 9:21 am
I agree with the concept of creating your entire blogging calendar in one sitting being a really cool way to get lots of readers to your article.
In realty, I would suggest doing something a little bit different. Do everything you’ve suggested however create monthly “editorial board meetings” where you analyze the questions that are coming up for that month or as Jose suggested add more ideas into the hopper. It creates a chance to continually review the editorial process – while not making it feel like a “formal” review.
September 30, 2011 at 1:41 pm
I don’t know that you can plan out a whole year of real estate blogs within 1 day… but you could certainly plan out a month or two. They you just have to stick to the game plan. That’s the hard part. Prospecting is usually only done when you’re not busy. The trick is to prospect while your busy for a constant stream of real estate closings.
September 30, 2011 at 2:11 pm
Too many of you will plan, plan, plan and then won’t blog at all because you need to plan some more.
Having an outline is fine, but try a sprint of three posts a week for four weeks, and as long the blog posts fit into one of your “categories” then you are off to a blazing year of writing about your community.
Take a few photos this weekend and then write a post using one of them. It is okay to blog about your jog on the local bike/jog/walk-trail/path… local runners may be excited to finally find an agent they have something in common with!
September 30, 2011 at 10:43 pm
Great post! Really great plan of action. I love time management and you hit the spot! Maybe you could do a course about time management with social media. I know I suck at my time management and find it hard to learn and come up with new topics and building nice/good backlinks. I’m still so young at this internet marketing although I started at the age of 15. I have information overload sometimes.
Thanks!
JanDirk
October 1, 2011 at 3:19 am
I think technology has really solved every problem we’re facing online or offline. With all of these advancements, there is no excuse for procrastinators and lazy people. Through RSS and alerts, you could literally get hundreds if not thousands of new post ideas daily. People usually believe that there is a secret for everything, but writing blog posts only requires you to sit down and start writing (no more and no less).
Great post Laura
M Stephanie
October 1, 2011 at 8:44 am
Words to live by! I do my editorial calendar 3 months at a time for (2) reasons:
1. It’s much more manageable for me.
2. It allows me to target each quarter of the year specifically to meet the needs of my people. If I notice a particular trend in comments, then I can plan out the next quarter to really get specific on their needs and wants.
Awesome post Laura! Keep rocking it girl!
October 1, 2011 at 12:28 pm
Awesome advice. But what more would expect from Laura! I have found that calendaring everything helps make life run smoothly – just make sure you calendar in some white space to be spontaneous and deal with distractions.
Something else I’ve found helpful is to keep an Evernote Notebook (cloud-based notebook) of blog post & newsletter ideas. As I think of ideas I log them there and then refer to the list before writing my next post or doing my next newsletter.
October 2, 2011 at 5:53 pm
As a magazine editor, I’ve always created editorial calendars. And I’ve suggested to others that they approach blogging the same way. It’s especially useful if you have some type of corporate blog and want to include more than one writer. You can set up a schedule, rotate your bloggers, and have the topics set in advance so nobody gets writer’s block when it’s his or her turn to take the spotlight. Just wish I’d thought of turning my idea into a topic for my own blog!
Great thinking!
October 9, 2011 at 8:45 pm
As a former magazine editor for many years I have to agree with the points you make here. Planning and organization are always the most important things to master.