How to Organize Your Online Content
How set up an Editorial Calendar like Digital Media
If you are a blogger, content marketer, or social media manager (or someone highly dedicated to their personal web presence), you’re going to hear the term “Editorial Calendar” thrown around at some point…
So what is an Editorial Calendar?
An editorial calendar is a detailed list of all the content that your organization produces, when that content will be published and where the content will be published.
For a place like Digital Media, this organization is needed, we create blog posts, podcasts and workshops daily, so we don’t want to leave it to chance that it will be posted to social media.
Where to start?
You have a few options for creating a digital editorial calendar, one a basic excel spreadsheet, or what we use — Asana.
Asana is a workflow organization system, and we use it to break our huge projects down to individual tasks. We upload files to it and tag people, it’s advanced, helpful, and FREE (for a basic account at least).
Learning how to use Asana will help you be workforce ready, so I recommend making a personal account for running your blog/Youtube channel or adopting it to your organization.
(For those not familiar with Asana, I recommend perusing this quick start site, it offers videos, tutorials and everything you need to get you started.)
Now that you have Asana…
- Create a project named “Editorial Calendar.”
Once you’ve typed in your calendar name, press “create project.”
2. List the months and give space to divide your tasks.
Since Asana lets you date your items, it’s best to organize your items visually month by month to create that “calendar feel”.
To create tabs, simply type in the month name followed by a colon “:” Press enter.
The shell of the calendar is complete!
3. Use custom fields to designate (note, you must have a Premium Asana account to use custom fields)
To create a custom field, go to “view,” “task by Custom Field” and then select “Manage Custom Field…”
Press “Add Field to Project,” to create a new field, then set up the three fields I have listed above:
Content Stage
Content Channel
Social Media Posted
Break down of the fields (make sure you have the drop down option selected)
1. In Content Stage, add the following options:
2. For Content Channel, add your content publishing platforms.
For DM we have quite a few, but your organization’s channels may look like “Blog,” “Newsletter” and “Flyer.”
Making sure to select “Drop-down” for the type, change the options for each channel you use to publish.
3. Social Media Posted…
Use this field to designate where each piece of content gets “pushed out” — or published on social media.
I’ve created an “ALL SOCIAL” option for DM so all of our Social Managers know that they need to publish the event or post to their accounts. However, certain pieces of content may only need to be posted on one platform — this is where you choose from your field options.
Once your fields are in place, the “easy” part begins, using it.
Use the drop down boxes you just created to list your new task in the calendar, by the end it should look like this:
Once the month is completed and all of your pieces have been published and posted on social media, mark the tasks as completed.
That’s it!
For more questions about editorial calendars check out these helpful posts:
