Ever find something that, every time you use it, you think “Wow, this is just awesome.” I think that every time I sit on my new couch (not having a college dorm futon after 30, is awesome, amiright?). Right up there with the new sofa, is the Editorial Calendar plugin for WordPress.
The concept is very simple: This plugin allows you to see your posts in a calendar instead of a list. It also allows you to keep a list of blog posts that you’d like to write but don’t necessarily know when you want to schedule them. Even though the concept is simple, it is a lot easier for me to visualize my blogging schedule when it’s in a calendar. When I can see that I have a post written for every Tuesday, life feels good! And if it’s not blocked out on your calendar, is it really going to happen?
How I Use Editorial Calendar
So, truth time: I love blogging (it’s the whole reason I got into WordPress development) but I’m not often inspired to sit down and do it. I actually blog on three different websites, this one, Urban Stream’s website (my husband’s company) and the website for the WordPress Meetup Group. I handle writing a lot of posts by sitting down and writing four to six of them at once. But all that writing means that I need to stagger my content right? That is where Editorial Calendar comes in. I can visually see when my posts are going to go up, and what state they are in (i.e. draft or scheduled).
Editorial Calendar also helps me come up for post ideas for the blogs. I could use Evernote, a note on my iPhone or even keep a list in my paper notebook, with ideas for blogs but I find it a lot easier to just jump into the blogs I write for and add the blog post idea to Editorial Calendar. Sometimes I put the title in the calendar so that it’s scheduled (though it won’t post unless I’ve gone in, written it and scheduled it) and other times I post the title to the unscheduled posts list. The unscheduled posts list is a great place to drop ideas that may not be fleshed out or that I’m not sure are good. That way, when I sit down to write, I already have a whole bunch of ideas to write about. It makes content creation much less daunting and means that I just have to focus on writing.
What tips do you use to produce your content? What motivates you to write blog posts?
This is part of my Better Blogging series.
* Image by photosteve101 under Creative Commons.
Kate Moore Hermes 