Tips for Bloggers: My Editorial Calendar

I've gone through countless editorial calendars for this blog, so many that I can't even count them. I've tried montly planners, Google calendars, excel spreadsheets, custom planner pages in my Louis Vuitton PM agenda, and a planner made especially for content creators.

I thought that the last one, The Content Planner, would be the one for me. I pre-ordered it last Fall and patiently awaited for it to arrive. I custom created it with the stickers included and I loved that it was made especially for bloggers, business owners and content creators.

However what started happening was that I was changing my editorial calendar so frequently that writing things down just didn't help. My calendar layout had cross outs, washi tape, and eraser marks all over it and at some point I just threw my hands up. I couldn't take it and for once, a traditional handwritten planner was not for me.

Credit

I change things too much and have too many other smaller, more compact notebooks for me to jot down ideas to use something like The Content Planner... even though I am very in love with it, it just turned out to not be for me.

Since April, I've been using a Google Spreadsheet (my obsession with Google Drive has grown significantly over the past month and that's an entire other post) with a template I found from another blogger, Dana from The Champagne Edit.

The layout is perfect for me, for now -- I say for now because I get bored easily and I know at some point this might run its course. However, right now I'm obsessed.

I customized it a bit to work for me and the thing I love most is that I can see everything in a nice spreadsheet, can move things around quickly but it's also giving me a little more information than a traditional Google calendar (which I used for a while).

It's also very easy to have the keyword column there because it's my least favorite part about writing a post but when I schedule something, I can easily just copy and paste (or if I'm writing something for a content series, I can just copy and paste the keywords and add/remove a few).

I will say that it did get a little confusing at first because there were so many rows that had past posts so I would have to scroll down so far to get to the present. I just ended up hiding those rows instead of deleting them that way I have them to reference.

I also like that I have this on the go; before when I had regular planners, if I wanted to change something I'd have to wait until I got home to make the edit. This way, if I'm at work or on my phone I can make a quick change and won't have to think about it later. Having access to documents anywhere and everywhere is becoming more important to me.

Because of my love for this calendar layout, I started using more Google programs, like creating tabs in this same calendar for posts I want to write or have to be rescheduled indefinitely for a variety of reasons.

I also have a spreadsheet for analytics, which was something I tracked in The Content Planner but never tracked before. (such a bad blogger!)

This calendar has been such a blessing and I'm so grateful Dana shared it!

xoxo
B