How do you organise and plan your posts? Do you have an editorial calendar?
I like to keep things fairly informal but do use a spreadsheet to help me keep more organised than I used to. Here’s how it looks for dPS:
The left two columns are my blog posts. I publish two posts per day – one scheduled for the US audience in the morning and one for the afternoon. I’m usually scheduling these 2-3 days in advance (but up to a week or two in advance if I’m taking a trip).
The 5 columns on the right are my Facebook posts on the dPS Facebook Page which I plug in a day or two in advance also. The times at the top are Aussie time zone times but they tend to go up more during the US morning through to evening – every 4-5 hours.
The Facebook updates are a combination of:
- New posts on the blog (2 per day)
- Highlighting old posts in the archives (1-2 per day)
- Discussion Questions (1 every day or two)
- Links to hot threads in our forum area (1 per day)
Note: Much of what I do I posted about last week in my post on increasing Facebook Engagement by 200-300%.
I do move them around a bit depending upon what is happening on the blog on any given day. If something hot is happening on a post or forum I’ll push that into the schedule faster for example.
The green colour signifies that the posts are scheduled. If they are white they are just penciled in but not set to go live yet.
That’s how I roll – what about you? Do you schedule posts far in advance? Do you use a system or tool to help you do it?
Hi Darren,
I am not faithful to my publication calendar and I am not good at keeping it so simple. I really appreciate seeing your template.
I use LinkedIn Groups for my social media strategy and Oktopost (affiliate link: http://opsk.it/oktopost) helps me tremendously. I do use the editorial calendar plugin to schedule drafts and coordinate with my guest authors.
To focus on all my goals outside of creating content, I manage my time with the free website weekplan.net. I can manage my roles as a daughter, wife, friend, employee, blogger, etc. I can also make sure that one “role” doesn’t take-over for multiple weeks in a row. It syncs beautifully with google tasks (in the paid version) and I have a dashboard just for collaborating with my blogging team.