An editorial calendar helps you accomplish a number of things including staying organized and quickly understanding everything you need to write on.
If there are guest bloggers on your site you have a quick view of everything else people are working on and stay organized in that respect. This post is all about showing you how to use Trello to create an editorial calendar for your WordPress blog.
Creating an editorial calendar with Trello
How To Create An Editorial Calendar With Trello
An editorial calendar helps you keep your mind at peace and publish articles without fretting about them.
Trello is one of the best tools designed for the very purpose of streamlining how you publish articles.
You can create topic ideas and assign them to categories like creation, editing, and promotion.
These cards can be created as a framework for clubbing together all the posts that you create for your blog. Say moving a topic from ideation to writing to publication or follow the stages above for a single topic.
It depends on what you want to achieve.
Here’s what a sample editorial board looks like.
You can do the same for your own blog
First:sign up for a Trello account. In the next step, create a board
Trello is free to use. All you need to do is create an account.
With a Trello account, you can create a board from the interface. Just click on the plug icon on top right and create a board.
Once you are creating a board you need to name the board and next you need to set it as either private or public.
Create lists to visualize and manage the content process
With Trello, it comes as easy as taking candy from a baby when it comes to content creation. Starting from ideation to research and content publishing, Trello has you covered at all stages.
This process is easy when you know how content progresses for your blog. It can be a simple three-step process starting with: ideation>>writing>>ready for publishing. Or you can add different processes. Like pitched ideas>> accepted ideas.
Content writing>.Editing>>approved
You can add more stages in editing where you outsource a header image to someone. Next, take it to scheduled and finally to published articles.
What matters is how you want the content process to be for your blog. The structure need not be the same for all your content. But think of what you want to accomplish and the best way to get there.
These stages give you an idea of what you think of accomplishing with your blog. Once you have thought of the different stages click the add a list option at the bottom to create the lists. Click and create new lists as many times as you want.
This gives you all the stages you need for the blog post.
Assign cards for each individual post
Now that you have created lists and that’s out of the way you can pick the blog post ideas from the content ideation list and add cards with individual blog post names.
Go to content ideation. Below that you will get an option to add a card. Click and add a card and get started.
Next give the card a title. The title is what shows up on under the content ideation list.
Click on the card to get an expanded list of items with more options. Here’s what I am talking about.
Here you get to do a number of things:
If you want you can add a quick comment underneath that gives writers notice on what they are expected of the article You can next add a description
You can assign members from your editorial team to work on the article and add a label and do more such things. (For assigning team members you need to have all of them registered to Trello and have access to your board. Next using @username sends them notifications whenever you want to add them in a comment or assign a task to them)
When you add a due date or label this shows up on the list to keep you organized.
As soon as the content finishes one stage you can drag and drop it to another list and this carries on until the blog post is scheduled for publishing.
Pretty easy way to stay organized and Trello is free. You can also upload attachments to your lists such as a checklist that writers have to read and get info from to understand the content creation process from a to z.
Create editorial calendar with editorial calendar plugin
The post wouldn’t be complete if I didn’t hand over a way with which you can create an editorial calendar from start to finish from the WordPress dashboard itself. The plugin Editorial calendar is free to use and anyone can use it to create an editorial calendar they like.
The plugin isn’t all that advanced as you see on Trello where you list out postsbased on where they are at the stage of publishing but does quite a number of things quite well and probably that’s what you need to help visualize.
Install and activate the plugin. Once you do, access the calendar from posts>>calendar.
This gives you a calendar where you can see the entire list of all up and coming blog posts
You also see unscheduled drafts that have not yet been assigned a date for publishing.
To change the date for a scheduled post is easy by dragging and dropping the post to a new date.
You can also drop unscheduled drafts to assign them a due date. Use the quick edit button under the posts to edit information in the calendar view.
Here are also other solutions
CoSchedule – CoSchdedule helps you manage and organize your posts and articles for both the blog and for social media promotion. The cost is $40 a month plus $9 more for each team member but the time saving and scheduling options are well worth the high price.
The editorial calendar is must-have when you want a more organized approach to blogging and pushing out content on a regular basis.
While an editorial calendar is especially helpful if you’re working with a team, solo bloggers too can benefit from a more organized approach to creating content.
The editorial calendar especially with Trello doesn’t take long to set up and amps up productivity to a big degree.
What are your thoughts?