Many people outside of the blogging world, especially those unfamiliar with the fast-paced world of freelancing, think that posting content to the web is done in a relatively freeform way without much of a schedule. It’s a self-scheduled, unattached life.
On the contrary, for your blog to provide consistent content that doesn’t overlap or leave gaps in your coverage actually takes significant effort on the scheduling front. Both writers and content need to be put on a calendar. Without planning, you end up with one of two results: a blank webpage or a lot of repeated content.
If you’re still struggling to hit a good balance between writers and content for your blog, you may need to improve your scheduling practices. Here are 3 tips from the pros that can help get you on track.
Create A Posting Schedule
In order to keep everyone on track with their deadlines and prevent backlogs, your blog should have a posting schedule that matches your editing capacity. For some sites, this might look like all morning postings. For example, if all of the drafts are due at EOD the day before, the editor has time to run through them.
Whatever your posting schedule, stick to it. These deadlines can help prevent excess stress on the editing end of the process while also helping to produce loyal readers. Readers really do notice your posting schedule and they know when their favorite column is due up – and when it isn’t up on time, they’re disappointed.
Build An Editorial Calendar
In addition to a moment by moment calendar, an editorial calendar tracks the content that’s going on your blog. Editorial calendars stem from newspaper and magazine offices and they take a long view, letting writers know what they’re responsible for down the line – the larger themes and topics are all posted there.
An editorial calendar can also help your blog strategize more effectively. It can help you assess your audience, how you intend to reach them, and your overall content message. The editorial calendar isn’t just about the blog topics.
Give Employees Flexibility
With all this content already being assigned to calendars, you’ll also need to assign writers to the topics and deadlines. But no matter what you do, don’t write these assignments in stone. Life happens, people have different topical interests, and sometimes schedules need to change. Empower employees to swap their own deadlines and topics, and work together to fix scheduling conflicts themselves. This also takes one more responsibility off your plate.
Once you’ve built a multiphase calendar of this nature, you’ll find that there are still bumps in the road, but that content production goes much more smoothly. By providing an editorial calendar and advance scheduling, you can better aid writers in creating important contacts, writing post outlines, and otherwise prep for the actual post. This helps to build quality into the content schedule.
Quality content only goes from brain to page with proper preparation and forethought, an aspect of blogging that too many people overlook. Don’t make the mistake of running your blog with this same perspective.
It’s the hard work that creates the content readers love.
An interesting and inspiring content. Scheduling is indeed the key. What ‘tested and approved’ tool would you recommend to keep up with the marketing team and the editors ? Thanks !
This is the sort of article I really enjoy seeing here – useful, informative, not-too-intimidating-to-beginners. Good work!
Thank you for the valuable information and resources.
I totally agree. I run my blog as a job, so I need to schedule every article.
Yes, These days, Google keep those blog up which updates their content daily. Schedule made this task easy.