Let me guess… you keep telling yourself you’re going to blog regularly, but it doesn’t happen. So then you say to yourself that one day you’ll be able to hire someone to just do it for you. Am I right?
The only way you’ll actually get those posts done, whether or not you hire someone, is if you have a plan.
Since blogging is kind of a wash, rinse, and repeat process, I made it easy on myself and set up a Trello board. My checklist and SOPs are all right there so I can save time on the tedious and focus on the writing.
Using Trello for Your Blog Editorial Calendar
There are a number of tools you can use to set up your blog editorial calendar, but I prefer Trello for a few reasons:
- Checklists. I can copy my checklist card over and over for each blog post I create. It’s the fastest way I know to work through the entire process for publishing a new post.
- Visual. Trello is much more visual than spreadsheets so it’s easy to see exactly what’s been done and what’s coming up. And anywhere you have gaps.
- Simple. I live for simplicity. Trello is easy to use, affordable (free!), and most people in the online world are familiar with it, which makes it easy to use with your team.
How to Create a Blog Editorial Calendar with Trello
List 1: Blog Info
This is where you’ll store all the necessary information for your blog. You’ll want to include your links, categories and tags, checklists and workflows, resources, graphics, and inspiration.
- Card: Blog Name
- Add links to your blog pages and any other details you might want.
- Card: Categories + Tags
- Add your blog categories and most common tags to the checklists.
- Card: Blogging Checklist
- Update the 50+ step-by-step checklist to match the steps in your blogging SOP.
- Card: SOPs
- Add the titles of your blogging SOPs here and link to each one. Don’t forget to include SOPs for graphics.
- Card: Title Formulas
- This is a reference card to help you generate attention-grabbing titles for your blog posts.
- Card: Graphics Resources
List 2: Ideas
There are several ways you could organize this list. You could sort your ideas by blog category, post topics, type of post, or anything else you can think of. I personally prefer to sort mine by the main blog category, since some posts have may have multiple categories.
To generate ideas, I recommend scheduling time once per month to do a brain dump onto your editorial calendar. Take 30 minutes and see what you can come up with. If you struggle with it, type in some keywords related to your blog into Pinterest. You may come across some things that help you think of new ideas.
Use one card per idea so that you can take notes on the back and rearrange them as needed.
List 3: In-Progress Posts
As you, and your team if you have one, work through a blog post, you can move the card into each section of the In-Progress list. This will help you see at a glance where a post is in the process. If you only have one person completing all of the work, you may not need this list.
List 4: Upcoming Posts
Here you can create a full schedule of your posts for a year, or more if you decide. Obviously, this is where the calendar really comes into play. If you don’t schedule your posts, I guarantee you’ll just keep putting them off another week until you realize months have passed with no new content. Unless you’re some kind of self-discipline ninja.
Your minimum goal should be one post per month whether you are just starting or you’ve been at this for a while. You always want to be generating some kind of content! If you want to go for more, try bi-weekly or even weekly.
Remember: Quality is better than quantity.
List 5: Published Posts
When you’ve finally checked everything off the list, it’s time to move your post over to the published list and get going with the next one! It’s incredibly motivating to watch this list grow as you see more and more published posts.
This list also makes a nice inventory of things that you can repurpose in your newsletters and social media. Make sure that you are always circulating those evergreen posts! If you aren’t, why are you even bothering to blog?
List 6: Need Revisions
Finally, move posts to this list when they need a little love. You should be reviewing posts on a six-month cycle so that they are always up to date. No one wants to read your stuff from 3 years ago. That’s old news!
If you find mistakes or decide to update your pin images, you can move the posts to the revisions list until you are ready to deal with them. It’s like a to-do list for your blog posts!
Take Action
Reading this post is great, but it won’t do you any good unless you take action!
Create your own Blog Editorial Calendar, or get my Trello version as part of the Trello Transformation!
Start by scheduling 3 months of blog posts and see how long it takes you to work up to a full year of scheduled posts. Having posts written in advance will take a huge weight off your shoulder and free up the brain space you need to work on other aspects of your business.
