February 1

Are you using a blogging calendar?

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As I mentioned in Is your blog connected to social media? Social Media Today released a blog post that really inspired me so I’m going to do a blog series expanding on the idea.

The Tell-All List of Blogging Tips

#3 Create an editorial calendar

via 101 Blogging Tips | Social Media Today.

use-a-blogging-planI preach blog planning and strategy before you even build the blog but I have not touched on using a blog calendar until now. Frankly, I have not been using one until I started managing so many blogs at once. I have started a few new blogs and I am running a series of tests with them, which I will be blogging about in the future but in the process I realized that I had to have a calendar.

 Le sigh. I’ve been feeling lately like I’m in Tool Overload(tm). Maybe you can relate. Password Fatigue(r) and Bad Posture Postmortem(r) have also been plaguing me lately. Plugging into the blogosphere means keeping track of a lot of “stuff,” such as:

  • WordPress
  • Evernote
  • Word
  • Photoshop
  • Chrome
  • Yoast
  • Photoxpress
  • Springpad
  • Galaxy Note
  • Mindjet

Obviously, this is just the short list and doesn’t include all of the plugins, etc. that I use to get blog posts done. So now here I am realizing that I need one more thing. I wanted it to control the different phases of blogging:

  • Idea
  • Assign
  • In process
  • Editing
  • Schedule
  • Ready for release
  • Release

It turns out that there’s a tool that does far more than I expected. It also happens to be free and I REALLY heart “free.” The tool is called Edit Flow. Check out these functions.use a blogging calendar

Roles and Notifications

I have not been using it long but I’m using it on three different blogs right now and I like it so far. One of the features can set up roles and notifications. For example, when I’m done with this blog post and ready for the cleanup, my editor will get a notification. Now that is just really cool. And having an editor is awesome, too. Follow her on Twitter.

Custom Status

If you have different procedures for how you get things done, no problem. This WordPress plugin allows you to create custom statuses so that you can customize the flow to whatever workflow you see fit.

Story Flow

blog-editorial-calendar

There is one more feature that I am finding quite handy and that is the story flow feature. It breaks everything up by category and then you can easily see what is happening with each category of your blog. If you are curious as to why this is valuable my bookmarking blog Renee Out of Office is a perfect example because it is a magazine style blog. This means that how it appears on the front page is driven by categories. I do not want the front page to get stale so I need to make sure that I balance out my categories.

So far I’m finding this blog calendar plugin quite helpful and I look forward to pushing the limits of what it can do. Before this tool I did consider many others. Do you use a blogging calendar, and if so, which one(s)?

 


Tags

blog planning tips, blogging calendar, WordPress Plugins


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