Key Takeaways
- What questions to ask to choose a content calendar
- Free content calendar template
- Full guide
Listen In
Watch the Podcast
Raw Transcript
Hello and welcome to the Small Business Sweet Spot. I’m your host Barb Davids and this show is dedicated to helping small business owners like you get more organic website traffic and also to help create and distribute content and analyzing the numbers so that we can make better informed marketing decisions. It is action oriented, direct and conversational and if you’ve been looking for SEO or content marketing help, please stick around to the very end where I share about the group coaching program, Small Business Sweet Spot.
I’m so glad you’re here. Let’s go. If you’re feeling completely overwhelmed with your content, you might want to consider a content calendar.
So how do you choose one? There’s about a million kazillion different platforms out there and a content calendar will house all of your posts for social, your blog posts. It’s like an all-encompassing thing. It’s a living, breathing document so that you have links to all of your blog posts, your social posts, links to the creative, links to the documents that have, not even if like for your blog posts, but you can even have links to the documents for the writing of the blog posts of how they were written first, right? They have to be somewhere before you put them onto your website.
It has those, it could have the how many times things are getting posted. And I like them because it gives me a very large picture or an overview of everything that I have coming out for the month so that I can see what topics I’ve addressed or what topics I haven’t addressed. So it helps me stay on track with that and be like, oh, I haven’t talked about this in a while.
Maybe I should talk about that. So how do you choose one? And there are some things that you’ll have to answer and ask yourself in order to get to the right one. And I would even say that it’s highly unlikely that you’re going to stick with the first one that you like because things change in your business or the functionality changes of the platform, or maybe they go out of business.
I mean, you’re relying on some other tool. So it’s possible that they might not be around forever. Some of the typical ones of course are like Trello, Asana, ClickUp, that kind of thing.
So they all act different. They all have similarities, but they all have different functionality in terms of how that works with an editorial calendar and they look different. So how do you choose? What are some of the questions that you might want to ask yourself in order to find a content calendar that will work for you? Here they are.
You want to consider how much content you’re publishing. Are you going to include promotions in the content calendar? Are you going to include launches? Are you going to add social posts as well to the editorial calendar? Or are you just going to use it for blog posts? So what exactly do you do in your business that you want to keep track of? That’s the first question you want to ask. The next question you want to ask is who needs access? So as small business owners, many of us are doing everything for our business and we don’t have a team of members or outsourcing too much.
But you do still want to ask that question because if you are outsourcing a couple of things and they’re not necessarily in your team or they’re not an employee, can they have access? A lot of tools will charge extra. So that’s something that you want to keep an eye on when you’re looking at which one works for you. Along the same lines of how much content you want to put into your calendar, you want to visualize which channels you want to keep track of.
So is it all going to be on the same calendar or are you going to keep them like, for example, in one section of the tool for social and then another section for blog posts? So what might that look like? And as you’re going through some of that, the question might come from your workflow. So for example, a lot of the times I’ll do my blog posts and then everything flows from that. So I don’t need to put everything on one calendar.
I can just put my blog posts and then I have my social posts. I don’t put my videos in there because they just kind of come afterwards. But that is one question that you’ll want to ask.
All right. The big question, is it free or is there a fee? So that’s going to depend on the functionality of the tool. A lot of the times you can get trials, but then they ask you to pay for it later.
So that’s something to look at. A functionality that a content calendar might have is auto publishing. So for example, I think it’s like Flick, Flickr, Flicktech, something like that.
It’s a social posting platform and it allows you to put everything in a calendar and automatically publish to your socials. The catch with that is sometimes it won’t, right? Depending on the format, it might not publish because it doesn’t have that capability. So you end up having to do it by hand anyway.
So that’s just something to consider is, is it going to publish automatically or are you going to just publish everything manually or not through the tool? Maybe, maybe you use them, the inherent publishing inside of the actual platform like the Instagram or the WordPress. Okay. So those are some of the questions that you want to ask.
And then you have the tools that also have the ability to prioritize things for you or flag them or put them in certain levels of workflow. So a lot of the times people will use Asana or Trello for those. They have boards and you have one in editing, you have one in review, you have one in research, and you can just quick move them over.
And then you have things like ClickUp and it’s a little bit more, I think it has a lot more opportunity to customize. That’s my favorite one. And it also has a calendar and a task list.
So the way that it’s presented is also another thing that you can take a look at. And my favorite is the free option, which is Google Spreadsheets. I like using this one just because of the simplicity of it.
It’s easy to see a whole month in review. And then I can have as many columns or rows as I want. And one way to find templates for this, an easy way is to type into a web browser, into Google or whatnot, and type the following site colon docs.google.com slash spreadsheets slash, then put a space and then do in quotes content template.
Or you can also do editorial template. And what that’s going to do is do, it’s going to give you back results of all the templates that Google has in its index, in its system, in the Google Spreadsheets realm. So that’s one way to find it.
Or you can just create a new one. I also have a template that I am willing to give you with, it’s really, really basic. So just be aware of that.
There’s not a lot to it. I make it super simple. And I will put a link to that in the show notes so that you can grab that for your own.
All right, that wraps up this episode. And as always, if you would like some more information on the subject, there is a supporting blog post available and the link is in the show notes for you. And I will see you next time.
Cheers. Thank you for sticking around. I hope you enjoyed the episode.
If you’re looking for SEO and content marketing help, consider joining the small business sweet spot. It’s a group coaching program where you can get answers to your questions about your business directly and clarity around the marketing strategies that you would like to implement in your business. You can find all kinds of information at compassdigitalstrategies.com. And if you liked the episode, please tell a friend.
Cheers.
