How to Create an Editorial Plan for the Blog

Whether you have a blog or want to start one, you should know that you need a lot of discipline to develop your site for the long term.

If you don't have a blog yet, you should know one thing from now on: the biggest challenge of any blogger is not the technical side, nor the problems of search engine optimization. The biggest challenge is actually creating long-term content.

If you are new to blogging, we recommend our guide on how to create a successful blog.

If all these technical means are learned and become a routine, the creative side is the one that most of the time gives us headaches. Therefore, when it comes to writing articles, you don't have to wait for the creative idea to hit you every time.

Because always the key to success in blogging is content, to be successful, you need an editorial plan for the blog.

What is an editorial plan?

Whether you are a blogger, a vlogger, a social media manager, a reporter, a public relations and communications man, a podcast manager, you need an editorial plan.

This is a plan of topics to be covered in your content. Depending on your needs and the complexity of your project, an editorial plan may contain the following elements:

• Podcast articles / videos / topics;
• Keywords to optimize each content produced;
• Date of publication of each type of content;
• The category/section/subject in which each type of planned content falls;
• Sources of inspiration for each type of content created;
• The text of the publication on social networks for each subject created and the hashtags used;
• The author, publisher, or team that implements each type of planned content.

The editorial plan can be produced in the form of a Word document, to be created monthly, on your laptop. Or, it can be an Excel with the information you are interested in, from the above. It can be a common document on Google Drive, accessible to a whole team, to be completed periodically. Or it can even be a project to manage using a project management tool such as Atomyo, Trello, Basecamp or Asana.

You can only summarize your plan with the first two elements: article headings and keywords.

The choice is yours. All that matters is that you need to update your monthly plan with new topics, in order to keep a constant publication on your blog.

Update the blog editorial plan at the end of each month for the following month. This way you will not miss the publication of a new article every week

What are the steps to make an editorial plan for the blog

1. Choose the right keywords

Any editorial plan, whether for a blog, vlog or podcast, starts with a series of keywords.

When I say "keywords", I mean word structures, questions or even whole sentences that people search for on Google, using text or voice searches. This is why you need to know in detail what your audience wants to know, in order to be able to develop content around these topics.

More detail in the article on how to do keyword research.

When choosing the keywords, you need to put yourself in the minds of your audience, knowing what expectations they should find. You should also keep in mind that each article should be based on a unique, unique and informative keyword.

An informative keyword looks like this: "how to blog", "peach jam recipes", "how to lose weight", "how to read a tire", "how to install Windows 10", etc.

If you find that your audience is looking for keywords that are strictly related to a particular service or product, keep those keywords for the sales pages on your site, if applicable. However, do not use them in articles, as this would mean competing with other sites that use these words in the composition of sales pages. It would be a little difficult. ????

2 Identify the articles of the subject

When you are a specialist in a particular field, you can hardly think of a beginner.

Think over 90% of your audience, whatever your field, are beginners. This means that they have not had to deal with your domain, either they want to learn, or they want to find the information that you have and they did not know.

This is why he identifies these simple subjects so that everyone understands them. Find article topics based on the level of knowledge your audience is in.

Here is a brief example of an editorial plan we created last year:

Editorial plan for the example blog

As I mentioned in the content marketing guide, your audience can be made up of three steps:

Education - here are the people who don't know your field of activity. They are beginners who need theoretical advice, who answer the question "Why". These people are not at all ready to buy from you, perhaps to discover you for the first time. Usually, these articles are the most read on a blog.

Consideration - here are the people who theoretically know your field of activity. They have little experience and look for practical information that answers the question "How". These people are not ready to buy from you, but they would be ready to become leads: download an ebook, subscribe to the newsletter, follow you on Facebook.

Decision - here are the people who, in principle, are no longer looking to learn something. They have experience in your field, but they need someone or something to help them perform. Here you are interviewing. Whatever you sell, here you have the possibility of presenting, in the decision articles, which answer the question "What". Typically, these are the least popular articles on a blog and require paid promotion to attract traffic.

Your goal will be to create articles from the three categories on a monthly basis. However, keep in mind that the articles in the first two steps should account for 80% of the total number of articles on your blog.

Keep in mind that planning saves you a lot of time compared to the actual writing process.

I hope I have included in this article the basic tips you need to get started.