Your blogging life is about to get a lot easier.
I’m going to show you a simple trick I use to create an editorial plan for a blog.
This method is fast, simple… and very powerful.
Here’s how it works…
Pro bloggers know that blog posts come in all shapes and sizes.
They vary by vehicle,
- Text
- Video
- Audio
- Image
They vary by length,
- Pillar Posts – These are often lengthy, detailed posts that explains one of the core messages of your blog. These posts are often “evergreen” (which means they don’t age quickly). Here’s more on building pillars or what he calls “Content Hubs” from my buddy Andy Crestodina at Orbit Media.
- Short Posts – These posts support your longer form, more evergreen pillar posts by fleshing them out further and linking to them.
A good “rule of thumb” ratio is 1 Pillar Post for every 5 to 10 Short Posts.
They vary by source,
- Me – These are posts that you are creating or someone in-house is creating.
- Curation – This is content you have aggregated from other sources. Often, but not always, you will provide an analysis of the curated content.
- Guest – Someone else created it for your blog (paid or unpaid – learn more about finding guest writers here)
They vary by topic – Also known as category. For this exercise, we want to be thinking about our larger, broader topics/categories.
As an example a fitness blogger might have the following broad categories,
- Cardio
- Weight Training
- Stretching
For this example, let’s assume that your publishing frequency will be 3 times per week.
That’s it… this is all the info you need to begin editorial planning.
Here’s how you do it…
First, fill in the blanks in the following sentence…
On [DAY OF WEEK OR MONTH] I will publish a [LENGTH] post using [VEHICLE] created by [SOURCE] about [CATEGORY].
In our example the sentence might look like this…
On the first Monday of the month I will publish a CORE CONCEPT post using TEXT created by ME about CARDIO.
– OR –
On the first Wednesday of the month I will publish a SHORT post using VIDEO created by CURATION about WEIGHT TRAINING.
– OR –
On the first Friday of the month I will publish a SHORT post using TEXT created by a GUEST about STRETCHING.
Are you getting the hang of this?
Let’s get the Editorial Plan organized…
First, download this Excel spreadsheet.
Then, start translating your sentences into the appropriate cells in the spreadsheet.
It’s that simple… you now have an editorial plan.
Lastly (and for extra credit) start translating your plan into action by creating an Editorial Calendar.
The second tab in this spreadsheet is the editorial calendar.
The calendar simply builds upon what you’ve created as a plan by adding publish dates, headlines and deadline dates.
