In the early stages of food blogging, many people are recipe-dependent. You add flair here and there but rely on recipes to learn new techniques and explore flavors.
But as you hone your skill, you find recipes limiting. They staunch your creativity and become a total time-suck. Instead of spending hours pouring over cookbooks, you dive right in -- relying on your instincts and knowledge to create a new dish.
Many people approach blogging the same way. While you might start off with a strong strategy and detailed to-do list, repetition commits the process to memory, So now you write when you feel like it and choose the topic on the fly.
But here's a pro food blogging tip:
Stop that nonsense… stop it.
While writing is a creative process, blogging for business is not. It's all about strategy and intention. That's why you need an editorial calendar -- no matter how experienced you are in food blogging! We're looking at you, kid.
What's an editorial calendar?
An editorial calendar is a spreadsheet, document, or software that gives you a timeline and plan for your content marketing. It can:
- Provide a place to brainstorm new topics
- Assign editorial or design tasks to members of your team
- Track the progress of a blog post
- Remind you of all the details that go into a winning post
- Create a publishing and promoting schedule to maintain a consistent online presence
Not convinced? Here are a few more reasons why every foodie needs an editorial calendar.
Your followers won't forget about you
When you don't have an editorial calendar, it's easy to drop off and go alooooong time without posting. And when you're inconsistent, people forget about ya.
One statistic shows 6.7 million people were blogging in 2016.Quite the competition.
Not to mention you lose out on traffic, website visits, affiliate links...and therefore, moolah.
It adds strategy to your (sparkling) creativity
Blogging is all about providing value to your readers. It's important to understand what they want and deliver it in a digestible way. If you throw ideas at the wall and hope it sticks, you might not get the traffic your website needs (and your wall would get very dirty).
Having a record of your content will help you figure out how many people are reading your posts, what posts theyaren't reading, and what content your readers (actually) want.
It saves you time
An editorial calendar keeps you disciplined and on task. Sometimes the smaller details, like including inbound/outbound links, creating meta descriptions, or adding an Instagram caption can slip your mind.
In the long run, forgetting steps can create more work if you have to go back into WordPress and revise.
You can stop reinventing the wheel
With a strategy in place, you can focus on writing and scheduling. You don't have to create a to-do list or decide when and where to post every time you create a post.
You can plan in advance for holidays, like National Donut Day, the Super Bowl, or Christmas (as if you'd forget about Christmas).
And easily see what evergreen content you can repurpose when your schedule is busy.
Our favorite tools for editorial calendars
You can find an endless amount of tools for creating your editorial calendar. Trello is a blogger favorite.
Not sure how to use it? The girls at Think Creative Collective have an affordable and comprehensive course on using Trello for your creative business. You can also find more Trello templates here.
But, we're pretty minimalist here. We believe in getting stuff done...today. And in producing content in bulk and then scheduling it. So, we love our simplistic, easy to use, Google Sheets Template.
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