{Blogging} Using an editorial calendar

I really love to fly by the seat of my pants as far as blogging is concerned BUT that doesn’t work so well when you have a full and busy life, and have committed to blog three times a week.

So for about a year now I’ve been using an editorial calendar.

I really don’t get all Fancypants about it. It’s a free printable calendar (mine from Creativemamma.com). If you search Pinterest, you will find TONS.

I start with all the things I know will happen in the month – goals post, some reading for the weekend, and then on a Wed, the newsletter goes out. There are always two articles, a free printable and a recommended resource (whatever I’m selling for the month) so I put those in.

Then I try to think up some topics for organising projects, and some mindset/ behaviour things that relate to time!

Once the calendar is full, I quickly type it into my dashboard and then I generally start writing. When a post is done and ready, I highlight it in yellow. I also highlight the newsletters in orange (a brief version of the newsletter goes here; none of the personal titbits do).

I recently downloaded a WordPress plug-in for an editorial calendar which is fabulous. The best thing is you can drag and drop. If I look at the calendar and it doesn’t make sense to publish posts in a particular order, I just drag those posts to where I want them. So easy!

This is great because just looking at the photo, 6 of those posts got canned!

Do you use an editorial calendar?