Drawing Up An Editorial Calendar For Your Blog

We’re at the point where we’d like to go screaming our blog name to the masses, perhaps even springing for a highway billboard or New Yorker magazine space advertisement.

Patience, my friend. If you start spreading linkage around without anything to show for it, you could hurt your credibility, not to mention your ability to draw in new readers. Without some back-content — and new content popping up at a fairly regular rate — readers will begin to wonder what they’re standing around waiting for.

When you are your own boss, it can be difficult to harness the discipline it takes to post regularly. Because sometimes you’d rather read the latest issue of Glamour. Or watch the latest episode of Top Chef. Or play peekaboo with your cat.

It is at this point that I suggest laying down the law (a suggestion that I, myself, struggle to follow because I am a lazy, easily-distracted bum). I’d venture to say that the magazine industry in particular offers us a helpful model in their use of editorial calendars.

If you stroll on over to MediaBistro’s Editorial Calendar Guide, you’ll find lists — by month — of multiple magazines’ special issues. For example, Vogue’s Escapes/Travel Issue pubs in May, while Real Simple’s Family Issue pubs in August. In addition to cover dates (the date that the mag actually arrives on bookstore and newsstand shelves), MB also provides “closing dates,” the date by which the entire issue must be completed, content, ad pages, and all.

This service is helpful, though by no means complete. If you visit the sites of some actual magazine publishers, you’ll find downloadable editorial calendar .pdfs within their online press kits. Other editorial calendars are only available via a direct query.

Here’s a partial screen shot of ReadyMade’s editorial calendar:

Domino’s editorial calendar — and all of the Conde Nast editorial calendars available in their online media kits — is less descriptive, laid out in simple list form:

What are we to learn from these carefully laid out calendars, with themed issues and regular annual issues?

• It helps to plan ahead. If you draw up your own content calendar for your blog, you’ll never be scrambling for content. In addition, it will help you to establish a regular posting schedule, which will only help you attain and keep new readers. In this age of group blogs, where readers constantly refresh the page to see if something new has been posted in the past five seconds, a blog that isn’t updated at least once a day can appear inactive, and instantly fall off of a computer surfer’s radar. The Gawker Media blogs — Gawker and Jezebel — employ multiple bloggers, so that about 70 new posts appear every day. The same is true for many of the design and gadget blogs I read. Posts are brief, snappy, and constant. Then there are those single-person blogs, such as Gretchen Rubin’s The Happiness Project, that post once a day. It’s interesting to note that, in a blog such as this, continuity is maintained by the regular features, such as making every Wednesday Tip Day, and posting a Happiness Quotation every week. Then there are those blogs such as Orangette, who only publish once a week. It is tougher to maintain an audience in this case but, by not becoming erratic in posting, this blogger reassures readers that they will always have a new recipe/essay to look forward to every week.
• Speaking of things to look forward to, regular features will help in that respect, and help you too! As I mentioned above, Rubin’s blog makes use of regular features — attached to specific days of the week — to create continuity and regularity within her blog. Nerve.com’s Modern Materialist similarly uses regular features and, looking at traffic statistics, one can see how certain features pull in more traffic than others. In addition to the positive effect such a practice has on your readership, it can be helpful for you, the blogger, as well. If you’re stockpiling ideas, which we’ll discuss next week, you can look ahead, see which feature is coming up, and then dip into your stockpile to find something that will fit, and easily pop it in.

Types of Features:

• listicles
• charts & graphs
• quotes
• profiles
• round-ups
• interviews
• test drives
• etc.!

I’m curious to hear about the types of features you guys are using on your own blogs!