Editorial calendar

What an editorial calendar is

An editorial calendar is a dated plan for one blog. Every row names a post, the question it answers, the person writing it, the person reviewing it, the date the draft is due and the date it goes live. It is a work schedule with names on it, not a list of topics somebody liked.

It is not the calendar that covers everything you publish. That one takes in the newsletter, the social posts, the sales sheets and the site pages, and it is the content calendar in the strategy pillar. This is the blog’s own calendar and nothing else: posts, authors, deadlines, the drafts currently in flight, and who is late. The narrowness is the point. A sheet that shows only the blog gets opened on a Monday morning. A sheet that shows every channel in the business gets opened in January.

When you need one

You need one when more than one person touches the blog. An owner writing alone can hold it in their head. Two writers, a reviewer who is also the busiest person in the firm, and a technician who supplies the detail cannot, and that is where drafts quietly stop.

You need one when the sentence “we should blog more” has survived three meetings without turning into work. That sentence contains no author and no date, which is exactly why nothing follows it. A calendar is the thing that turns it into somebody’s Tuesday.

You do not need one if you publish four times a year and one person does all of it. What you need then is a decision about how often, which is the publishing schedule, and it is a smaller and cheaper piece of work. And if nobody will run the calendar once I hand it over, say so on the call. A calendar cannot write anything. Blog management is the service that does.

What goes in it

• One row per post, with a name against it. Not a department, not “marketing”. A person who has agreed to it and knows the date.
• Three dates, not one. Draft due, review due, publish. Most blogs write down only the third, which is how the first two slip invisibly until the third arrives.
• The question the post answers, in a buyer’s words. “What does a heat pump cost to run through a cold winter” is a row. “Heat pump content” is not.
• A status you can read at a glance. Commissioned, drafting, with the reviewer, scheduled, live. This column shows what is in flight and who is holding it up, and it is the whole reason to keep a calendar rather than a list.
• Empty slots, on purpose. One in four is left blank so that a busy fortnight moves a single piece instead of ending the schedule.

What you get

The calendar. Ninety days of rows in a shared spreadsheet, or on whatever board your team already opens daily, with the columns above and nothing else. You own it, and it stays where it is if we stop working together.

A brief for the first few pieces. One page each: the question, the reader, the length, who to ask for the facts, and what the post should end by telling somebody to do. Enough that a new writer could pick up a row without asking what it meant.

A page on how to keep it. The ten minutes a week that keeps a calendar alive: what to do when a draft is late, when to move a piece rather than rush it, and who may publish while the reviewer is away.

A worked example

An illustration, not a client. A twelve-person landscaping firm outside Halifax has a blog of nine posts, six of them from one enthusiastic summer three years ago. Two people can write: the owner, who is articulate and unavailable from April to October, and an office coordinator with about two hours a week. The foreman knows the answers to most of the questions customers actually ask and will never write a word.

The calendar that comes out of the hours conversation has fourteen rows across ninety days, not the twenty-six the first draft listed. Nine belong to the coordinator, written from twenty-minute recorded conversations with the foreman. Four belong to the owner and are scheduled for January and February, when the crews are off. One slot in four is empty. The owner reviews every second Friday and has three working days, after which a post goes out as written. By the end of the quarter eleven of the fourteen are published, one was moved, and two empty slots absorbed a week lost to a burst irrigation main. Eleven posts, each with an author who knew it was theirs.

How it runs

1. A half-hour call. What the blog is for, who can write, who reviews, and what stopped it last time. No charge.
2. The hours count. Everyone who will touch the blog says how many hours a week they genuinely have. That number sets the cadence, and it is always lower than the number from the meeting.
3. The pieces. A list of posts drawn from what buyers ask and what you sell, ranked so the ones closest to a sale are written first.
4. The build. Rows, names, three dates each, slack left in. About five working days from the hours count to a draft calendar.
5. The handover. Forty-five minutes with everyone named on it, so that nobody discovers they are an author by reading a spreadsheet.

What it costs

An editorial calendar is quoted as a fixed price after the half-hour call, because the size depends on how many people write, how many pieces the quarter needs, and whether the briefs are included. The figure is in CAD, agreed in writing before I start, and it does not move afterwards. The pricing page shows the four ways of working here. A calendar is already part of the monthly arrangement, so if you are considering that, do not buy this separately and I will say so on the call.

What happens next

Three things usually follow. Some clients hand me the rows that need an outside hand, which is blog posts commissioned one at a time against the calendar. Some keep writing in-house and send each draft for editing before it goes live. And some, after a quarter of watching rows slip, hand the dates over to be loaded and kept, which is content scheduling. None of that is assumed. The calendar is finished work on its own, it is yours, and it is built to run without me.