Content calendar

What a content calendar is

A content calendar is a dated list of what will be published, in which channel, by whom, with a due date for each step along the way. Some people call it an editorial calendar. The name does not matter; the dates and the names do.

It is the point where a strategy becomes work. A plan says "answer the eight questions buyers ask". The calendar says the permit question is drafted by the 14th, reviewed by the 18th and published on the 21st, and it says who.

Why most calendars fail

Almost every business has had a content calendar. Almost every one of them stopped by week six. The reasons are consistent, and the calendar I build is designed around them.

• It was sized for the team you wish you had. Three posts a week looks right in a planning meeting and is impossible in a real month. A calendar is built from the hours actually available, counted, and then cut by a third.
• It listed topics, not tasks. "Blog post about pricing" is not a task. Draft, review, images, publish, share: five tasks, five dates, and the review date is the one that matters, because that is where things stall.
• Nobody owned the review step. Drafts wait on the busiest person in the company. The calendar names the reviewer and gives them three working days, after which the draft goes out as written.
• It had no slack. One busy week and the whole schedule is behind, and a schedule that is behind is abandoned. One slot in four is left empty on purpose.

What goes in it

One row per piece. For each: working title, the buyer question it answers, format, channel, owner, draft date, review date, publish date, and the one measure that will tell you if it did its job. Nothing else. A calendar with twenty columns is a database nobody updates.

It is delivered in whatever your team already opens every day. A shared spreadsheet, a project board, a printed sheet on a wall: all of these work, and the one you will look at is the right one. If you have no preference it is a shared spreadsheet, because it survives staff changes.

How it is built

1. Count the hours. Who can write, review and publish, and how many hours a week each genuinely has. This number decides everything after it.
2. List the pieces. From the strategy plan if there is one; otherwise from a short session on what buyers ask and what you sell. Ranked by how close each sits to a purchase.
3. Set the cadence. The number of pieces the hours allow, minus a third. Weekly, fortnightly or monthly: the honest answer is the right one.
4. Place them. Highest-value pieces first. Seasonal pieces timed to land six weeks before the season. Slack left in.
5. Assign and date every step. Draft, review, publish. Names against each.
6. Hand it over with a one-page note on how to keep it: what to do when something slips, and when to move a piece rather than rush it.

A 90-day calendar takes about a week from the hours conversation to hand-over.

A worked example

An illustration. A dental practice has an office manager with about three hours a week for this and a dentist who will review drafts but only on Fridays. Three hours a week is one short piece a fortnight, honestly counted. The calendar gives them six pieces over 90 days, not the twelve the first draft listed. Each answers one question new patients ask on the phone. Review dates are always Fridays. Two slots are left empty. Ninety days later, all six are published, on time, and the empty slots absorbed a staff holiday and a broken website form. That is what a calendar that gets kept looks like: modest, and finished.

Two calendars that look alike and are not

A content calendar and a social media calendar are often the same spreadsheet, and that is usually a mistake. The content calendar carries the pieces that take real work and last: a service page, a guide, a case study. The social calendar carries the short posts that point at them, and there are many more of those. Keeping them on one sheet means the twenty small items bury the three that matter.

The same goes for the email calendar. Build the content calendar first. The social and email calendars are then derived from it, because every post and every newsletter should be carrying something the content calendar already produced.

What it costs

A calendar is part of every content strategy plan and every Content Engine month. On its own it is a small fixed-price piece of work, quoted after the half-hour call once I know the size of your team and how many channels are involved.

Keeping it going

If nobody in the business has the hours, the honest option is to say so. Content production management is me running the calendar: chasing drafts, doing the reviews, loading the dates and publishing. Or an in-house person learns to run it through coaching, which ends when they no longer need it.