 Welcome to The Journey. Today we're going to give you six steps to create an editorial calendar. Everyone here has some of your favorite social media accounts are able to post on multiple platforms and multiple times for a week. Well, we can almost guarantee it's not without some help. Keeping up with content creation can be challenging. I've heard that once or twice and one of the only ways to ensure that you execute and consistently publish high quality content that drives results for your brand is through using an editorial calendar. Do you have one? I'm curious. Let us know below. But let's talk about what an editorial calendar is, why it's important, and how to create one to help you stay on track and reach your business goals. Yeah, it's basically a schedule that outlines your content publishing for the weeks, months or even years to come if you're that ambitious. While its name implies that it's a calendar, it's far more than that. You can have dates for scheduling and publishing, but it also includes the relevant details needed to create a streamlined content creation process that produces content aligned with your brand goals. So why is an editorial calendar important? Well, when you use an editorial calendar that includes both scheduled dates and details about the content, it can help you to organize yourself, your team, and your plans. It also helps you identify gaps and avoid content notification. Now let's get into how to create an editorial calendar. First, you're gonna want to decide how often you want to publish. There's really no magic number for how often you should post and each platform is definitely unique. You need to choose what is right for you based on your goals and your resources. I start with a schedule of once a month and then decide if you can post more than that. Don't push past what you think you can do. It's better to be consistent even if infrequently than to really post a lot of content sporadically and then disappear and ghost your followers. Reusing content for multiple streams such as like using a clip from your new YouTube video as an Instagram reel to promote the original video is very useful in a common marketing strategy, but it can get complicated to manage without a calendar. You don't have overwhelmed viewers who follow you on multiple platforms and risk they don't want to engage with any of your content. And also, I bet your brand has some pretty important dates. You don't want to ignore those. So go ahead and mark important dates throughout the year to have content to match. And then by syncing your calendar with a schedule of what is going on with your business, you'll be ahead of the game and you won't be left scrambling to just post something or anything. I'll have more meaning like maybe your anniversary. Hey, we've been open for five years. That's super exciting. Have content to match. And to add to that, look at the holidays to look at important dates around the holidays, especially when it impacts your business. Consider the big holidays and even the small ones. Decide if you want to engage in any of the holiday marketings and then plan if you want to release warm wishes, posts or other fun theme holiday content to really get in the spirit and be timely with your content. I'd also encourage you to look at social holidays. So don't just focus on nationally recognized holidays. Also look at a calendar of fun social holidays, which are unique days that are often celebrated on social media through hashtags. So there's days like national dog day, hashtag national cheese lovers day. There's for sure a hashtag pizza day. And then what that can do is it can give you some fun inspiration for posts and it can help you to promote your posts when it's published and just piggyback off of some user generated content as well, which is just going to get you some more exposure for your brand. Definitely. And this can all be overwhelming to post. So we recommend working backwards to assign deadlines. So start with the date that you want to publish and then work backwards to assign due dates for each step of the process from creating a title to then creating the content and then creating the captions, things like that. So blocking your calendar for times to work on your content is also just as important. If you don't set aside time to do this, there's always going to be something else that's going to take priority. So block off an hour or two a week to set up that editorial calendar and give it some of that TLC. And you'll definitely thank yourself later and be sure to anticipate changes while an editorial calendar is great because it for sure assigns set dates for creation and publishing. You can't expect it to be set in stone. Things will happen that will change the dates on your calendar. So is life and anticipate that shifts in the world and your business that will likely cause your calendar to change? I'd encourage you to be flexible and know that even with the best planning, no editorial calendar is permanent. Doing this can help you build SEO value, attracting followers, drive existing audiences back to your website, generate leads and initiate sales. But it can be difficult to achieve these results if you don't have a plan to consistently create content for your platforms. Use what we've taught you about how to create an editorial calendar and get to work. All right, that's a wrap and good news. Your journey doesn't have to stop here. We have over 200 videos for you to check out. 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