As someone who loves writing blogs, I get excited when it’s time to make an editorial calendar. With new years just around the corner, it’s time to start working on next year’s calendar.
But, along with feeling excitement, I am overwhelmed thinking about coming up with a year’s worth of content ideas, a feeling many other marketers are familiar with. By creating a process and organizing yourself. So, how do you do that? In this blog, we will answer that question by:
- Providing a step by step process to making an editorial calendar
- Offering content ideas.
Let’s get into it!
How to Make an Editorial Calendar in 3 Steps
1. Keyword Research
Every blog needs to be optimized for search engines, otherwise, your time spent writing it will be for naught because no one will be able to find it. To make sure your work is optimized, you need strong keywords. The first step is to go to your favorite keyword research tool, ours is Moz, and start researching keywords that arerelated to your blog.
If you are a garden center, you will want to be looking for a keyword like “how to care for your plants”. As you go, make sure you take note of all the relevant keywords you find. Document their volume, CTR, and difficulty. High volume, low difficulty, and high CTR mean it’s a good keyword. Keep track of your keywords and their data in a spreadsheet.
For more on keyword research, check out this blog on choosing keywords for beginners.
2. Come up with a Schedule
For this step, you need to decide your posting frequency keeping in mind what’s realistic. Ideally, we all want to be posting a few times per week, but that’s not doable for everyone. Start posting biweekly or weekly and work your way up to your desired schedule. Remember, editing can take awhile.
As you make your schedule, fill it in with your keywords so you can make sure you are not posting similar content one week after another.
3. Choose your Topics and Write your Titles
This is the fun part, coming up with titles and ideas for your blogs. Next to each keyword, write out some potential title ideas. Make sure to make them engaging and creative, your blog title needs to stand out in search results.
There are many tools you can use to come up with great titles. Here are some of Colibri’s favorites:
Another great tool is Capitalize My Title which you can use to make sure your title is properly capitalized.
Content Ideas
Once you complete these three steps you will have a schedule and titles for your blog that match your keywords. It may sound easy, but it can be hard to get started because you need to come up with ideas of what to write about. Here’s how to do that.
First, choose your niche. Are you going to write content about coding or parenting? The options are endless so choose something you feel passionate about. Then decide what will make you stand out from the competition.
Once you have found your niche, it’s time to come up with content ideas. There are a few ways to do this. As you do keyword research, you should get some ideas by looking at the suggested similar keyword. For example, if you type “SEO tips” into a keyword research tool, it might suggest keyword like “white hat SEO” or “on-page SEO”. These keywords can help you come up with more content ideas. You can also use tools like Google Trends to come up with topics.
Another way to come up with content ideas is to look at your competition for inspiration. You don’t want to copy what they are writing, but by looking at their content you can get some ideas.
Our last tip for coming up with content is to ask your readers what they want to read! You can ask your social media followers or even post polls. You may be surprised at how many people have ideas.
Takeaways
Creating an editorial calendar should be fun. It can be difficult to get started but after you get going, it can be pretty fun to come up with content ideas. Make sure you do your keyword research and base your content on topics people want to read about.
Colibri Digital Marketing
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