Create a Content Calendar With These 3 Super Simple Steps

Every content marketer and blog needs a proper content calendar because we all know how important it is to publish new content on a regular basis.

If you are publishing new blog posts without a proper strategy or calendar then you are not doing yourself or your blog any favours. Google appreciates blogs that publish content on a consistent basis. Furthermore, this consistently is also appreciated by your readers.

After all, if they don’t know when the new blog post is coming, why would they follow your blog in the first place?

Having a content calendar is very important, but the problem is that it seems very daunting and complex.

It isn’t, though.

In this post, I’m going to specify 3 super simple steps to creating your own content calendar.

1. List Blog Post Ideas

If you start creating a content calendar without listing all the blog post ideas you have, you will never go too far.

Building a proper content calendar requires that you have enough ideas to easily manage a few upcoming months. Unless you have 20-30 blog post ideas in the tank, you will find it particularly hard to create and manage a content calendar.

So, the first step is to come up with a list of several blog post ideas that you can cover on your website. List down all the ideas that you find. Moreover, also give them proper titles to help your tasks.

If you are finding it difficult to brainstorm new blog post ideas, read the 212 Ultimate Blog Post Ideas guide by Digital Marketer. To create interesting headlines for each of those posts, I’d suggest Jon Morrow’s headline hacks.

2. Come Up With a Posting Schedule

Once you have a list of enough blog post ideas, you can move forward and decide a posting schedule for your website.

You see, there are different schools of thought regarding how many blog posts you should publish on the web. Some bloggers still believe that publishing one post per day is a great idea. Other bloggers feel content with publishing only 4 blog posts per month — one for each week.

It all depends on how much content can you easily create without sacrificing on the quality.

More blog posts per month often generate more leads. But it does not mean that you start compromising on the quality of your posts — because that’s what eventually matters.

Anyway, come up with a posting schedule that you feel comfortable with. If you can create 4 high-quality blog posts per month, it’s fine. If you can create 16 high-quality blog posts per month, great.

Just decide on a posting schedule that you feel most comfortable with.

3. Start Slotting

By now, you would have a huge list of blog post ideas and a posting schedule that you know you can easily maintain.

Now is the time to start slotting all those blog post ideas and titles into your content calendar.

You can either use a free WordPress content calendar plugin or you can use a paid service like CoSchedule. Both are awesome options, but the paid one will always give you more features.

Whichever option you use, you know what you have to do.

At this stage, it has all become very simple.

Just start slotting your blog post ideas based on the frequency you set in the second step.

One tip is to create a nice balance among your posts, so you cover all the different categories each month.

Final Words

Creating a content calendar may seem difficult and complex, but it really isn’t. In fact, a content calendar can help you do all the legwork and research before you get fully invested in your blog.

And it will save you a lot of hard work after the blog posts get rolling.