Toolbox Saturday: The Editorial Calendar Plugin

Welcome to the first edition of Toolbox Saturday! Every Saturday I will talk about a tool or technique you can use to make your blogging, content creation or social media efforts just a little more effective and efficient.

When I decided to ‘relaunch’ my blog, I wanted a plugin that would help me visualize the posts I have running for the rest of the week, and month.  Basically, I was hoping to find a plugin that would show me all the upcoming posts that were due to publish, on a calendar.

Luckily, that’s exactly what I found with the Editorial Calendar plugin.  Here’s a screenshot of what it looks like for this blog in September:

At a glance, I can tell what my editorial calendar looks like.  I can see the first week is ready to go, and the remaining weeks still have work to do.  Also, I love how it lets me get a list on the right side of all the unscheduled post drafts I have ready to go.  Over the last 11 years of blogging here, I have started a lot of posts that never made it past the ‘draft’ stage. This gave me a way to see what all those drafts are.  Now granted. some of the older drafts covered topics and information that may have been relevant 5-10 years ago, but no longer was.  So those were scrapped, but I also found many great ideas that had been buried for years in my drafts section.

I’ve heard so many bloggers, the vast majority really, say that they have plenty of ideas for posts, they just don’t have the time to write. I have the opposite problem; I struggle to come up with ideas for content.  Once I figure out an idea for a post, the actual writing of the post takes no time at all. So anything that can help with the content creation process, I want to know more about it! I also assume that a lot of you, whether you are a blogger for your business or a content manager for your company, you have more time to pick up tips and tricks on the weekend. That’s why I wanted to run Toolbox Saturdays on the weekend, so more of you would have time to implement these tools and tips on your own blogs to help take your blogging efforts to the next level.

Hope everyone has a great weekend, see you on Monday!

PS: My buddy Andy Crestodina at Orbit Media asked me to pass along this link to take his blogger survey.  He’s been doing it the last few years now and it’s always interesting seeing the results.  I’ll share the results from this survey in a later post when they are ready!