On May 9, 2012 I faced up to the fact that this blog needed an editorial calendar but I did not have one. My comment then was…
I know it. I tell the few people I’ve been coaching about the importance of planning their blog posts with an Editorial Calendar. “Try to go out 3 months”, I tell them, “6 weeks minimum”. Their reply, “Yes, I know, but that’s hard to do”.
You know something, they’re right! I’ve been rolling ideas around in my head over this for a while. “Should I begin with a description of the clients I’m working with or should I deal with specific topics?”, I ask myself. So far, I haven’t heard too many clear-cut answers.
What’s a blogger to do? Well, what I’ve decided to do is produce a few posts, like this one, to learn a few things. For instance,”How much can I bite off in one post?” or “How much time is it going to take to produce a post?” Since there are very few readers currently, any damage control required will be minimal.
It’s the Challenges
It’s not that the task is any different now, but I believe my vision of what “OK, We Can Do This!” needs to address is in sharper focus. Three developments have contributed to this perspective:
- We completed six months of weekly emails at the Tri-Town Teachers Credit Union. That and the challenges of getting their blog going have reinforced earlier judgments on the primary obstacles to a successful content marketing strategy.
- My work with Robin Roscillo (Back Office Solutions) to develop a web site/blog with a focus on content marketing has emphasized the need for understanding the audience.
- Finally, I recently gave a presentation at on Chamber Leads Group on the subject of content marketing. I’ll cover that in a later post, but for now I can say my earlier statement that small businesses see Time, ROI, and Technology as the major challenges to going forward with anything like a content marketing strategy, especially one using social media, is spot on.
My takeaway from these experiences is that there are really four challenges to implementing a successful internet based content marketing strategy:
- Time
- ROI
- Technology
- Understanding the targeted customers
My Assignment
If “OK, We Can Do This!” is going to help anybody, then it must address these challenges. Obviously, then the editorial calendar must be built around this set of four challenges. I am confident that help can be found for all four, but identifying that help won’t be like “picking the low hanging fruit”. It will take some work, but, hey, that’s where the fun is.
For now I’ve settled on a schedule of one post per week, minimum. My calendar alternates week-to-week between a post dealing with the experiences of a particular business, and a post covering a more general topic, like this one.
I won’t put the whole calendar in here (it goes to 2012 YE), but here’s few weeks to show the reader what I mean.
| Week of | Business Specific | General Topic |
| 7/9/12 | Editorial calendar | |
| 7/16/12 | TTT email analysis | |
| 7/23/12 | Leads Group presentation | |
| 7/30/12 | Progress on Tri-Town Apple |
It’s a Start
I know it’s fairly simple and once a week may not be enough, but it’s a start. I’m sure the calendar will undergo many changes as we go and I do hope to crank it up to a steady two posts a week. For now, I can say that finally I have my editorial calendar.
I would be very interested comments to this description and blog editorial calendars in general.
OK, We Can Do This! 