There are plenty of tools you can use to create your calendar, from basic spreadsheets to specialized content management software (and you’ll see some examples below)—but the tool you choose is less important than deciding what information you want to put in it.
At its most basic, a content calendar only needs two fields: a title and a due date. You can add as many additional fields as you need to get each piece shipped. We have 19, including content type, category, and main keyword:
There’s no rule about what your calendar should and should not include: focus on the information you and others on the team need the most for content production. Here are some ideas to get you thinking:
Stage of the funnel your piece belongs to
User persona you are writing for
Author and contributors
Goal
Status
3. Add content to the calendar
Once you have a structure in place, the next step is populating the calendar with your upcoming pieces, making sure that the cadence is aligned with your strategy: a social media-focused approach might require you to publish multiple times per day, whereas long-form educational content might happen just twice a month.
The workload like this whatsapp number list allows both the vendor and the affiliate to focus on. Clicks are the number of clicks coming to your website’s URL from organic search results.
The goal is to have a comprehensive at-a-glance understanding of everything you and your team will be working on, so you should include:
All formats you are responsible for. For example, if you are working on both blog posts and newsletters, adding both formats helps you see task overlap and plan for capacity
Both new and old pieces. For example, if you are going to refresh or optimize existing content pieces, adding them to the calendar makes sure you are accounting for the time and resources it will take to get the job done
If you’re publishing several types of content, you may find it useful to colour-code entries to make your calendar easier to scan.
4. Add relevant subtasks
Each piece you add to your calendar requires different steps (and maybe multiple people) to get completed, so it’s useful to break down each entry into the individual tasks you’ll need to complete.
To map out the steps, think of a content piece you’ve already published and list everything that happened prior to publication; then, use this information to plan all upcoming pieces.
For example, in my previous role at Hotjar, I normally followed the same 7 steps to publish a newsletter; for every newsletter issue I planned in my calendar, I simply duplicated the list of subtasks and assigned each to a specific team member with a due date: