Setting Up Your Content Calendar To Align With Content Marketing Strategy

Setting up a content calendar helps in being consistent and organized. Content calendar is vital for publishing content on a regular basis, in an organized manner and planned well ahead of time. There is an editorial content calendar for blogs and a social media content calendar.

Quote On Consistency

The famous musician, Bruce Springsteen aka the Boss has this to say on consistency.

Getting an audience is hard. Sustaining an audience is hard. It demands a consistency of thought, of purpose and of action over a long period of time.” – Bruce Springsteen

This applies very much to content marketing when building your small business online. It is not just enough to garner an audience. It is important to keep them interested and helping them grow as your business grows, by listening to their problems and solving them with products/services you provide.

Importance Of Content Calendar Planning

The way you draw up your content calendar should be absolutely integrated with the content marketing strategy of your small business.

The content schedule for your business should reflect the following

What subset of the general populace are you assisting?
How does your content address their problems and provide solutions?
How will the content help your small business attain its business goals set via its content marketing strategy?

Problems From Lack Of Content Calendar

Without a plan, you are going to develop content irregularly and at random which will lead to failure in strategy
Lack of planned approach leads to procrastination and resorting to activities that do not help in your content marketing goals
Lack of focus and hence inability to benefit your audience and your business
Great ideas can hit you any time and in dynamic situations and you may forget them if you don’t have a calendar to record them

Creating A Content Calendar

You can create your own content calendar using a spreadsheet. An easy alternative is to download free content calendar templates (links given below)

The Easy Way – Use Google Calendar

- Google Calendar is a perfect candidate to create your content calendars
- Google Calendar is free and has an easy to use drag and drop interface
- All you need is a Google account and an internet connection to start using it
- It is responsive by design and is multi device friendly – be it desktop, laptop, mobile phones and tablets
- Adding multiple calendars is a snap and you can differentiate between editorial and social media content calendars by using different colors
- Google Calendar is great for sharing with team members at different access levels

Getting Started

We have already created keywords, content titles and outlines. It is time we plugged them into our Google Calendar.

Login to calendar.google.com and click on a desired day and time slot to add a calendar entry. Click More Options button.

You will see a screen similar to the one below

In the description box at the bottom of the image, add your keywords (these are the source of content titles) and the content outline. If you have this information in a text file or excel sheet, use the Add Attachment button to add your file.

The font box gives you the options to color code your entry. Let’s assume you represent content that is to be published immediately that day to be in red color and green colored content that is not top priority can be published later that day. Printing the calendar is a breeze.

Running your small business entails a lot of work and you cannot do it all, especially building an online content marketing plan to grow your audience and hence paying customers. Leave the hard work to us and we can do it at a fixed monthly rate with a modest advertising fee to aid in promoting your content.