The editorial calendar

Editorial planning is one factor that has helped double the traffic on this site over the last year. At it’s core, an editorial calendar is simply the plan for what you will write and when you will write it. There is nothing new about editorial calendars;

Traditional print publishers have used editorial calendars in some form for centuries to manage the publication of books, magazines, and newspapers. – Wikipedia

Until a few hours ago, the editorial calendar for JimRaffel.com looked like this.

This Week
Mon – Testing and Validation is the last 1 percent
Tue – Life’s not perfect – it’s about getting where you are going
Wed – She Said, He Said – Jim or Shelby on Writing vs Blogging
Thur – She Said, He Said – Jim or Shelby on Writing vs Blogging
Fri – Review of iPhone 4S turn by turn GPS apps

Next week – Year in review posts.

Two weeks out – 2012 plans, 3 words and posts similar to last year.

Our calendar has become somewhat inflexible on Wednesdays and Thursday as Shelby Sapusek and I continue to nurture the brand that has grown out of our She Said, He Said project. Aside from that, we can move most Monday, Tuesday and Friday posts around.

So when Ilene Haddad asked me via Twitter for more information about our editorial calendar, I decided it would take a blog post to explain. I had not yet written any of this week’s post so I decided to change the editorial calendar to look like this.

Mon – The editorial calendar
Tue – Life’s not perfect – it’s about getting where you are going
Wed – She Said, He Said – Jim or Shelby on Writing vs Blogging
Thur – She Said, He Said – Jim or Shelby on Writing vs Blogging
Fri – Review of iPhone 4S turn by turn GPS apps

So, “Testing and Validation is the last 1 percent” will either never be written or appear some time in the next couple of weeks. I made that decision because I thought the scheduled post was the weakest.

Editorial calendar value

The writer in me loves that a few days after putting the calendar together many of the posts virtually write themselves. The subconscious goes to work on the idea and a couple of days later the idea turns into words on the formerly blank page; and in usually 30 minutes or less. That sure beats staring at a blank page at 9 p.m. the night before you need a post for your blog.

Also, good editorial planning normally leads to more site traffic and more comments. This is tough to quantify but I do keep pretty close track of this site’s traffic and I can tell that well-planned weeks do better in visitors and comments.

The “no plan” alternative

However, running on empty and burning the candle at both ends are no excuse for me not to write all the time. It just means some of what I do is better writing than other times. Later this week, Shelby and I will write about the topic of writing vs. blogging. We’ll explore what differentiates the two. This post should be a good companion piece for those upcoming posts.