Keep your communications team informed and on schedule with an editorial calendar.

First, decide how often to post per week. Don’t let ambition decide your blog frequency. You should consider factors such as:

  • The size of your staff
  • The range and depth of material to cover
  • Any other projects you may have going on

Be realistic, and keep in mind that readers value quality over quantity.

Use Google Analytics to find the hours and days of the week on your site to help you decide on what time and days of the week to blog. Publishing posts during your website’s peak traffic windows maximizes your blog’s exposure.

Build a stockpile of interesting ideas and trending topics everyone can write on. Here are some ways to generate ideas:

  • Brainstorm with your team for 30 minutes a week, throwing out as many suggestions as you can.
  • Look at the topics on your most visited pages, recurring external search keywords, and the most popular subjects in your Site Search data in Google Analytics.
  • Tap into your user responses from your webforms or third-party surveys.

Once you’ve got a comfortable idea bank, you can move onto building the actual calendar. While there are many tools available online and off for scheduling and collaboration, we recommend using Google’s web apps:

  1. Have every team member create a work-specific Google account.
  2. Create a new Google Calendar and share it with everyone.
  3. Create an event for each post’s publication date and assign a writer based on who is up in the blog rotation.
  4. Create a new Google Doc, fill it with all of your initial ideas, and share with your team. This is your new idea bank.
  5. Keep your idea stockpile fresh by updating the Google doc when you come across or think of any new ideas.
  6. If you decide to use an idea from the idea bank, don’t delete it from the document. Instead, apply a strikethrough (Alt+Ctrl+s) to track what’s been covered.

Keep your blog on a routine. If you plan to publish on Mondays, make sure you publish on Mondays. Have your posts ready at least a week before their publication dates to prevent delays in publishing. Your blog won’t be successful if your readers can’t depend on it.