Day 12 of 31DBBB Challenge – Editorial Calendars

Today’s assignment for the 31DBBB is to create an editorial calendar based on yesterday’s mind-mapping exercise. I did my mind map yesterday and today I started to plan out the posts. Cathy over at Desperately Seeking WordPress (a blogger have read for a while and fellow 31DBBB) found a great tool to use. Luckily I was not too far along in the process.

Funnily enough it looks very similar to a spreadsheet I use at work to plan my web updates. Editorial calendars are an essential tool when it comes to content management and planning. Since by day I am an internet marketing professional, this is something I do all the time. I have used mindmaps professionally for several years, although I have to admit it took me a long time to get used to them and to adopt their use.

However, I had not taken the time to do any personal maps, although I have talked about them in the past. I do plan out some of my posts. When I want to use my buddy Sean to do an illustration, I usually have a specific topic in mind, so I have to draft it out in my head enough so that I can give Sean direction for the illustration. Also I have started doing book reviews and interviews with authors, so that requires coordination with the author and/or publisher. The rest of my posts are spontaneous things that swirl around during the week based on what I read or see or have happen to me – those cannot be mapped.

But I often coach my clients who are doing business blogs or other social media activities to have an editorial calendar. It is a simple and effective way to keep content organized and fresh on business blogs.

But for the 31DBBB assignment, by doing the mindmap exercise, I actually got more ideas than I had originally gotten by brainstorming the “traditional” 2D way on paper. Which is awesome because this map is about guests posts for while I am away on vacation, and I am pretty sure that some people will turn me down, so I will have buffer!

I plotted my post idea’s into the calendar template the Cathy made, I made some adjustments to the headings and printed it out. I “penciled” in the posts and once I confirm them I will put them in a final calendar. I will work on this over the weekend getting emails out to people and I will have accomplished something way ahead of time – side benefit!