This is Day 12 of the 30 Days, 30 Killer Wordpress Plug-ins Series.

One thing that all blogs need is content. So much so, that “content” has become one of those overused catch-all words that’s really pretty funny when you think about it. 😉

Now, many blog owners keep themselves on the content rat wheel. They have pressured themselves into some pre-defined post frequency, then when they feel the pressure to post they just sit down and come up with a post on the fly.

Thing is… that means you have no plan. You’re just posting to your blog for the sake of feeding the content monster and there’s no rhyme or reason to it. And, where’s the sense in that?

The solution is content planning.

Sit down and plan out your content in advance. Then, create it in advance.

calendar
A screenshot of my editorial calendar on Google Drive. Future posts pixelated. 🙂

I personally plan out the content for this blog in 3-month increments. A full quarter at a time. I keep the entire plan in a specially-formatted spreadsheet inside of Google Drive. In fact, this very 30-day series I’m doing right now was planned out about two months ago as of the time this is posted.

When you plan content in advance, it allows you to:

  • Remove the pressure of “I have to post today and I have no idea what”
  • Have your posts flow from one to the next (perhaps in a series)
  • Allow your content to “jive” with any marketing efforts and promotions you’re doing.

In my case, even though I plan out the content 3 months in advance, I obviously don’t create it all 3 months in advance. But, I do try to run a week or two ahead if I can. Once I actually create the content and prepare it inside of Wordpress, I schedule it using the Wordpress Editorial Calendar plug-in.

editorial-calendar

In my opinion, this functionality is something that should have been built into Wordpress already. It displays a full visual calendar with your posts laid out on it. To schedule posts, you can simply drag and drop them onto the day you wish them to go live.

I am a very visual person… so this plug-in helps me to easily arrange content in advance. From there, Wordpress will simply release the content at the pre-scheduled time. Other than the various social promotions that go along with a new post, the blog more or less runs on auto-pilot for the remainder of the week.

If you’re running a larger-scale blog with higher content volume and/or multiple authors, this plug-in is invaluable. It’d be damn near impossible to keep track of content timing otherwise.

But, even for a single-author blog, the visual nature of the calendar makes it a lot easier to schedule content than the standard numerical input that Wordpress uses.

Check it out: Wordpress Editorial Calendar .

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