Advantages to Creating an Impactful Editorial Calendar

As you establish your content strategy, it's vital to begin considering yourself a publisher. Publishers plan everything out in advance based on their annual cycle as well as their product cycle.

In advance, they know exactly what type of content they must produce for February and why. If you think more like a publisher, you're going to be much more successful in your content strategy implementation.

Also, you want to remain flexible for breaking events throughout the year. Check out these 10 amazing advantages that Editorial Calendars provide you and your brand.

1. Create Engaging Themes

Editorial calendars allow you to develop an overall theme for the year or the quarter, based on the promotion of your products and/or services, as well as the time of year.

Planning everything in advance makes it easier to be prepared and come up with your ideas, content, and images for easy promotion.

2. Simplify Discovering Your Unique Voice

By planning out your marketing year in advance, it means you'll also be planning your product creation. If you provide services, you'll already know in advance which services you'll be focused on.

This will simplify having to know what type of content you should create and in what tone you want to use. You'll understand in advance when you need it, and what for. When you have a plan, finding your voice becomes a lot easier.

3. Makes It Easier to Diversify Content

If you know in advance what the topic of your content needs to be, it'll be easier to create different forms of content for your needs.

Plan in advance to create blog articles, vlogs, podcasts, videos, reports, and more, based on a particular subject or theme designed to market a particular product or service.

By avoiding creating “on the fly,” your content will be more cohesive and diversified.

4. Keeps the Content Ideas Flowing

Creating an editorial calendar provides you the opportunity to create a sweet situation for yourself. You make it easier to keep content ideas flowing.

Some people believe planning makes content “boring.”

The truth is, planning makes content effective, appropriate and enjoyable for your target audience. It gives you time to create appropriate titles and outlines, to ensure that you get the message out that you want out.

5. Enables You to Create Quality Content

Advance planning of your content gives you more time to develop high-quality content that speaks to your audience. Whether you're writing and editing the work, or hiring others to do it for you, it's important to plan in advance the type of content needed in order to produce top quality content.

6. Keeps Your Website on Topic

It's easy to get off topic sometimes if you haven't planned your content in advance. It happens to me all the time.

By writing down what content you'll be creating before you create it, you'll have time to veto ideas that go off topic, or reschedule them for the right time and place.

If you try to produce content at the last moment, you may wind up with irrelevant or incorrect content that has no purpose. You may even have content filled with errors (spelling and grammar) that makes reading your content difficult.

Even poor quality images go out when not inspected properly.

7. Becomes Your Roadmap to Helping You Accomplish Your Goals

Consider your editorial calendar as your GPS or roadmap to content and reaching your audience.

You can look at it in one glance and see where you'll be in the future. You'll learn what you're supposed to be doing right now and when you're losing track and focus.

You won't go into each day clueless and frustrated about where you've been or where you're going.

8. Helps Increase Collaboration

Having a publication calendar that is publically visible can also increase collaboration. If you have opportunities for guest writers and bloggers, they can look at your publication calendar and decide what to write about within your guidelines.

In addition, it will help your Power Crew of freelancers and people who work with you understand the direction you're taking the business.

9. Attracts More Visitors

Having a set calendar causes you to post content regularly, thus increasing the rate of visitors to your website. Your audience will learn to expect certain content from you at certain times and will appreciate knowing when what and where to go to view it.

10. Sets Expectations and Deadlines

Even if you are just setting deadlines for yourself, it's important to do get it done. If you have no expectations of yourself or others it will be difficult to build a truly profitable business.

For instance, if you are building a clothing business, but you are unable tell customers when the clothes will be delivered, you won't sell anything.

Set specific expectations and deadlines for yourself and anyone you outsource to in your Power Crew; this will help you meet your goals.

The Rundown

By having a publication calendar you'll ultimately have a more organized and planned business that will generate more income in the long run.

Content that is distributed and marketed based on your editorial and/or publication calendar will see more success than content that is haphazardly promoted without any vision, goal, or plan in place.