Check Out This Editorial Calendar Template, WordPress Style

As you will know if you read many of my articles here on WPMU, I am a complete plugin geek. I enjoy nothing more than checking out new plugins, or plugins that I have not come across before, in the hope that I can provide something that you can use  to improve your WordPress sites.

And every now and then, I discover a plugin that just simply rocks. Something that has a real and genuine impact on my own blog. Today, I have one such plugin for you. I have been using it on my own personal blog for a few days now, and I absolutely love it.

About Posts

Here’s the deal – your blog is made up of posts (duh). One of the best things you can do for your blog is actually put some thought into what you are going to post ahead of time. I always used to fly by the seat of my pants and run with an idea on the very day that I was going to publish a post, but after a while I discovered that this could sometimes put you in a position where you might publish a less than stellar post, simply because you didn’t have time to come up with anything more inventive.

Planning posts in advance allows you to put a certain structure in place. For instance, you could plan a series of related posts weeks ahead of time, or if you cover a number of topics, you could make sure that you are keeping your content diverse from one day to the next. Finally, you may have regular posts (such as link mashups, or progress reports) that are published on a particular day or date every week or month. You’ll want to make sure that these spots are always reserved.

Editorial Calendar

In order to facilitate good content planning and management, good bloggers use an editorial calendar. The concept is extremely simple – you brainstorm ideas, then you make a note of when you plan to publish them. Simple, but extremely effective. There are a lot of benefits in having your content planned out for several weeks, as touched upon above.

My editorial calendar used to be a simple list of posts, with the dates upon which I was planning to publish them. It was better than nothing, but hardly a world-beating system. But now I use a seriously awesome plugin – Editorial Calendar.

I know – they really knocked it out of the park with the name. They must have locked themselves away for days to think that one up. But in all seriousness, it says what it does, and it does it really well. Simple, intuitive, functional; and best of all, tightly integrated with WordPress. And even better, the developers of the plugin have done all the work for me in terms of describing its features:

Now if you don’t think that is pretty damn awesome, we are just not on the same wavelength my friend. In my opinion, Editorial Calendar is a huge time saver and simply makes blogging easier. It also facilitates the publishing of better planned content.

Download it here.

Tags:

• blogging