Episode 81: How to Use an Editorial Calendar to Stay On Track

Brad Dobson: Welcome to the Path to Profit Podcast with your hosts, Dr. Minette Riordan and Brad Dobson.

Minette Riordan: Hi everybody and welcome back to the Path to Profit Podcast. I’m Dr. Minette Riordan along with my freaking awesome husband Brad Dobson.

Brad Dobson: I am freaking awesome today!

Minette Riordan: You are freaking awesome every day!

Brad Dobson: We stayed out of the mudslides, we stayed out of the fires.

Minette Riordan: It’s been a little crazy here in Santa Barbara and Ventura counties lately. But welcome to the Path to Profit Podcast. If you’ve never been here before, we are all about helping creative entrepreneurs to build profitable businesses. Looking this month, in fact I think this is our last podcast of the month, where we’re talking about all the different aspects of business planning that we use. And last episode we focused on promotional calendars and the natural segue from promotional calendars is-

Brad Dobson: Wait. Wait, was Emily Levy on last episode?

Minette Riordan: No, she’s the next episode.

Brad Dobson: Oh okay. I got that confused in my head.

Minette Riordan: No, so episode 82 will be Emily Levy talking about what to do when switching niches [crosstalk 00:01:22].

Brad Dobson: So, I totally screwed up your drum roll then.

Minette Riordan: Drum roll, we’re talking about?

Brad Dobson: Editorial calendars.

Minette Riordan: Editorial calendars. Yep. It’s not sexy but it certainly is-

Brad Dobson: We’re going to make it sexy.

Minette Riordan: … useful. We’re going to make it sexy/

Brad Dobson: It’s the best thing ever.

Minette Riordan: It is the best thing ever.

Brad Dobson: Systems like this are the best things ever. They help, a lot.

Minette Riordan: I know, if you’ve been following us for a while, you know that Brad loves to geek out on systems. I love free, colorful printables. Together, we make it all happen in some crazy, fantastic ways.

Brad Dobson: So-

Minette Riordan: Can you start with the quote?

Brad Dobson: Yeah. That’s a good idea because I was just about to wax poetic about editorial calendars.

Minette Riordan: I know you were. You can wax poetic about editorial calendars in a minute, but first, I love this quote. It’s super silly.

Brad Dobson: Yeah, I had to look for a few because I wasn’t sure. If you look for quotes about editorial, it just really doesn’t work at all.

Minette Riordan: You couldn’t find any. But this is all about organization and planning.

Brad Dobson: That’s right, so that’s what I looked for. This is from A.A. Milne, “Organizing is what you do before you do something so that when you do it it is not all mixed up.” Pretty simple stuff.

Minette Riordan: It is simple stuff.

Brad Dobson: Kind of reads like a Winnie the Pooh quote.

Minette Riordan: Yes.

Brad Dobson: Which is appropriate.

Minette Riordan: So if you don’t know who A.A. Milne is, he is the author of the Winnie the Pooh series and a childhood favorite.

Brad Dobson: So that’s really funny because I always assumed that was a woman.

Minette Riordan: Oh really?

Brad Dobson: Yeah.

Minette Riordan: Oh, gosh, I always assumed it was a man.

Brad Dobson: I just have no idea. Anyways, “On with editorial calendars,” said Pooh

Minette Riordan: A.A. Milne is a man. Editorial calendars and honey. Buckets of honey. So, speaking of buckets of honey, you want to wax poetic about editorial calendars now?

Brad Dobson: You goof. I guess we’re kind of crazy today.

Minette Riordan: We are crazy, but it’s an emotional couple of days.

Brad Dobson: So this is a key part of your content creation.

Minette Riordan: It’s a key part of our content creation, for sure.

Brad Dobson: Well, content creation is a key part of most folks jobs, I think, for online.

Minette Riordan: Yeah, can you back up just for a second and talk about … So, in our last episode we talked about promotional calendars where you’re looking at your whole year and you’re really planning your marketing promotions from the perspective of what you want to create this year. An editorial calendar really shows us how we’re going to carry out those promotions. So, it’s really kind of a deep dive. Like, can you talk a little bit about how you see the distinction between the promotional and the editorial calendar, because they’re two different animals from a planning perspective. Or, two different [crosstalk 00:03:58]

Brad Dobson: Well, promotions is for promoting things you’re going to sell. Editorial is for how you’re going to get fresh new content out to people, especially on the internet. So the main force behind this comes from the need for digital and internet based folks to give their a lot of internet content away, a lot of their best stuff away, through content, whether that’s through blogging or Pinterest, or YouTube or whatever it is to entice more people into your eco system so that you can then sell to them. The point is to be organized about your editorial content and how that gets out there.

Minette Riordan: From a creative perspective, one of the things that we hear over and over again from our clients, when we say, “You need to be creating more content. You need to be writing more. More blog posts, more newsletters, more Facebook posts, more social media,” wherever it is that you’re creating content. And remember, the primary place that you’re creating content for is where your ideal clients that are hanging out.
But I get the sense all the time from people, “I don’t know what to say. I don’t know what to write about.” An editorial calendar solves that issue, so not only does it get you organized, it actually helps with your creative flow. I don’t know about you but I have ideas for content all the time. I put them in notes or I put them in Google Keep. I talked about Google Keep on our blog recently, and about how he uses that to capture ideas. So, when I actually sit down to write a blog post I have a bank of ideas. I already have a list of content that I think would be useful and interesting to our creative community.
The editorial calendar takes that even one step further. So when I sit down on Monday to write the blog post that needs to go to our virtual assistant on Tuesday, so she can get it posted and promoted on Thursday, I already know what I’m going to write about. When I’m really organized, I have looked at that editorial calendar ahead of time, and I tend, from a creative writing process, to think about things in my head for a long time so that when I actually sit down to write them I go, “Blah,” and they come out really fast. People are amazed at how little time I actually spend writing 1000 words. I wrote a thousand word blog post this morning in less than an hour because I’d been thinking about it for a lot. Not consciously, but subconsciously it’s just ruminating there. So editorial calendars are both creative and super organizational as well.

Brad Dobson: Yeah, definitely. I guess we’re kind of rambling a little bit, but we’ve taken an extra step this year and taken on something that Pat Flynn mentioned in his Smart Passive Income podcast, which is to work with themes on a monthly basis. So you may have noticed that December was goal setting month, and we had a series of podcasts and blog entries related to that. Now January is business planning, and so on, and so forth. By putting those themes together on the calendar, ahead of time, we’re able to do some of that. Our minds are able to work on those things in the background and know that for a whole month we’re going to be focused on one topic. It allows us to dig deeper, rather up than just random blog post ideas or random podcast ideas, we’re able to actually focus on a set of them.

Minette Riordan: We also created core things to our business, because I think that in the past we’ve rambled in our blog, we’ve rambled in this podcast. Having themes that are specifically related to supporting our community also makes it easier to create content. So, what Brad is saying that we went from this big promotional plan to an editorial calendar and even under the editorial calendar, we continue to create more organization and processes by looking at thematic themes.

Brad Dobson: Thematic content. Thematic themes.

Minette Riordan: I had a word brain freeze there, at themes, at thematic content. Because when you have a theme in place it makes it so much easier to generate your content for podcasts, for blogs, for social media, for your email newsletters, for all the marketing that you’re doing. Can you maybe dive a little deeper and share what’s actually on our editorial calendar?

Brad Dobson: Yeah. We use a Google sheet for this, a spread sheet.

Minette Riordan: And there’ll be a link to it in the show notes, right?

Brad Dobson: Yeah, and we’ve updated that recently to go with a prettier format, a more effective format.

Minette Riordan: It’s more colorful. I’m happy.

Brad Dobson: We use that to communicate between ourselves and our virtual assistant, in terms of when a blog post is ready or when a podcast is ready for processing, or so on or so forth. So, the most obvious thing, if it’s a blog entry or a podcast episode, would be the title.

Minette Riordan: Or at least the subject, if you don’t know the title. Oftentimes, we’ll put subject matter in and fine-tune the title to include our keywords.

Brad Dobson: Yeah. You might have keywords-

Minette Riordan: You should have keywords.

Brad Dobson: … so you’ve preplanned. You’ve done some analysis of SEO matters, and you know what keywords you want to try and hit. Let’s say you’re doing a Pinterest entry, which we don’t do anything in Pinterest, but maybe that’s-

Minette Riordan: Except surf.

Brad Dobson: Yeah, right. But maybe that’s-

Minette Riordan: I like Pinterest.

Brad Dobson: Maybe that’s key. Or let’s go with Instagram. Instagram’s a better example. Let’s say the main part of your editorial is Instagram posts, so the core item is the photo, or a video, but most likely an image. What’s the subject matter of the image? Perhaps what colors? What branding’s going to be on it?

Minette Riordan: You could put in a link to the image or the Dropbox file where the image is stored.

Brad Dobson: Right, but you might be planning out. Say you know that on Thursday, or the second Thursday of next month is something to do with some core theme in your business. You don’t know what the image is yet, but you know what the colors, you know what the keywords are you want to match. Then you can start looking for imagery, or taking imagery or creating related to that. Similarly for blog posts, except it’s more words and less image focused than Instagram. What other ones? YouTube would be another one.

Minette Riordan: Sorry. I was trying to give them a really specific. So, for those of you that use Google spreadsheets, it’s a great way to do this but you could also do it in your bullet journal. You could do it in a weekly paper planner. The way that we start the process, you guys know I love paper calendars, we have a big at-a-glance blank calendar with no dates on it. We start filling everything in manual and then translate it to the Google spreadsheet so that we have some flexibility and we can see everything at a glance. But you need to have the date of publication of the piece content, where it’s going to be published, the title or subject, what images will be used. No matter where it’s going, you’re going to have images or video. The type of content is email newsletter, Facebook, blog posts. The URL, if you have somebody that you’re working with, they need to know where to go to find everything. Do you have a Google folder where you’re storing everything so everybody has access and can find it?
You should be including keywords, like Brad said. I think it’s Buzz Sumo is one of our favorites for doing keyword research right now.

Brad Dobson: Yeah. That’s B-U-Z-Z-S-U-M-O.com.

Minette Riordan: We can put a link to that in the show notes as well. Also, if you’re doing a lot of Instagram posts or Twitter posts, hashtags are really important. You can list the hashtags, especially if you’re delegating the actual implementation of an Instagram or a Twitter post, a Twitter tweet to someone. We don’t use Twitter a lot. It’s not my personal favorite. We’re totally Instagram and Facebook junkies. So if you’re looking for us online that’s where you can find us. But, the hashtags.
It’s also really important, who is the task assigned to? For example, first a blog post might be assigned to me to write the content. Then it gets assigned to the VA. For a podcast, there’s multiple steps. It’s me and Brad, then Minette creates sketch notes for each episode. Brad does editing for the audio to put the intro and the outro on it. Then it all gets bundled together and sent off to our VA for final processing, for the blog post to get created and the promotion to happen. The editorial calendar is what helps us track all of that. It keeps everybody organized, especially me, because I’m the one who needs it the most. It’s a great, great, effective, and super simple tool. We often think these things are really complicated but it’s actually really simple.
So, how far in advance should you plan an editorial calendar?

Brad Dobson: I’m thinking at least a couple months. Longer is probably better. You could go with a quarterly approach. But it does need to be a rolling type of thing so you have that content out in front of you. You’re especially going to plan content around major items, whether it’s if you have a live event of something like that, or you’re an Etsy store and you have to sell on a certain holiday, there’s going to be themed content that you could preplan. But, I think at least a couple months.

Minette Riordan: Yeah, you know, our goal is to get 60 days out. A quarter, for me personally, seems like a long time because things change. I think I also want to add that even if you plan 60 days in advance, it’s not set in stone. Things change, things come up, or themes sometimes will change. Blog content, one of our clients might ask a question and we’re like, “Oh my gosh. That’s a great question. We never thought about that.” So we might do a different podcast or blog post to address a very specific question. But I would say 60 days is great, and we love looking at whole quarters.
I think the other thing to look at is how your editorial content is helping you fulfill the goals from your promotional calendar. That the content marketing isn’t just for creating content’s sake, which is a mistake I know that I’ve made in the past, but it’s getting really consistent with your connection between promotions and content.

Brad Dobson: Yeah, and this is a really key point that you’re bringing up. Like you said, it’s definitely one that we’ve missed before and we’re getting a lot better at it. One of the items that we can add to each editorial calendar entry is a CTA, a call to action. The point is that your theme, the theme of your content is helping people solve a problem, but it points them to something that you’re promoting. So in the middle of the blog post you’re going to have a little box, or a pop up, or something that says, “Hey, you might be interested in this.” Or you give them a call to action to purchase some of your stuff or to perhaps ascend further up through your funnel. But that’s crucial.

Minette Riordan: Wasn’t it Ryan Deiss that said, “You’re probably not putting enough calls to action out there”? Wasn’t there something that you learned very specifically about calls to action?

Brad Dobson: Yeah, I can’t remember. I learned a lot of things.

Minette Riordan: Digital Marketer is another one of our favorite resources for education about online digital marketing. So, you know, one of the things that we’ve learned in our journey — I’ve been doing this business for 5 years now — is about delegation and about, “It doesn’t have to be all us.” I had a VA who was supporting me. Then I had Brad and Brad’s like, “I got to figure this out on my own.” Then we got to the point where Brad’s like, “Okay, I can’t do all of this. We need support.” So, I think the best part about the editorial calendar is how easy it is to communicate with our team, whether that’s one people or five people.

Brad Dobson: One people.

Minette Riordan: One people or five people. I am one people. But, I would love for you to share a little bit about how useful it is to have an editorial calendar, even if it’s just you.

Brad Dobson: Oh, gosh. Yeah, and whether this is just your sticky notes on your calendar, or your desk calendar, or it’s more of a formal spreadsheet, or even if it’s in your Google calendar, it’s about being organized. You just have to have that organization. You need lead time to think about these things. You know, there’s genius’s out there who can just snap a photo and have an award-winning Instagram post. I don’t know about you, but that’s not me. I need to prepare this stuff and do a good job of creating great content. I’m going to do that by pre planning it. By having head space ahead of time to get me on track to produce the right thing. Be intentional about it.

Minette Riordan: Like I said at the beginning, creatives struggle often with consistency, with unfinished projects, with that, “I don’t know what to say, I don’t know what to write about, I don’t know what to share.” So if you’re wondering if an editorial calendar is useful for you, I think it’s even more useful for those of us who are super creative. It’ll help you to manage your bright shiny idea syndrome, so that you stay focused on the themes and the content that matters most to your community. It’s so easy for us to write about, talk about, blog about, Instagram post about the things that we’re passionate and excited about, and if you’re building a lifestyle brand that can be very useful. But if you’re actually trying to sell something and make money, then you have to be creating really high quality, valuable, educational content that appeals to your ideal clients and solves specific problems for them.

Brad Dobson: Yeah, yeah. And that could be as simple as training videos for the new pen system that you’ve created for Zen tangling. Or it could be much more complex posts about complex systems, or whatever it is. But, yeah, definitely.

Minette Riordan: So we wanted to end by sharing the seven specific ways we use an editorial calendar. So if you’re driving and listening, don’t take notes. If you’re sitting at home you might take some notes. Or you could check out our show notes and my sketch notes as pathtoprofitacademy.com/podcasts, with an S.

Brad Dobson: Hit the podcast button.

Minette Riordan: Hit the podcast button on the homepage at pathtoprofitacademy.com and you’ll find all the show notes and the details of everything that we’re sharing today.

Brad Dobson: Let’s try this, Alexa, take notes. Let’s see if anybody complains about that.

Minette Riordan: Alexa take notes. Will Alexa take notes?

Brad Dobson: I don’t know, we’re going to find out from our listeners.

Minette Riordan: That would a good question. It would really help if we had an Alexa, you could actually text it. So, what’s one reason or one of the main things that we get from using an editorial calendar?

Brad Dobson: Yeah, it’s the team communications. We’re able to use a shared document that everybody knows about, and looks at, and gets notifications on. That’s great. No emails, no other messaging involved. It’s just a matter of, “Here’s where these task are” and everybody knows it.

Minette Riordan: Including our communication with each other, right? It minimizes the back and forth and the scattered conversations a lot of time. So the second method, or the second reason we use an editorial calendar. It helps us organize our content and promotions. We said that already, but just to summarize. And how about the third one?

Brad Dobson: It makes sure that we don’t forget about affiliate promotions that are upcoming. In the past we’ve signed up for affiliate promotions and then at the last minute we remember, “Oh, we have to send out an email to our list today.” That’s not appropriate. This is a way to pre-prepare those things and get them on the schedule.

Minette Riordan: Absolutely. In fact, one of our former guests and our good friend Katrina Sawa 00:21:08 just asked if we’d help promote her book launch in March, so it needs to go in the calendar now, so we don’t forget. Really, planning ahead. Also, if you have colleagues, or friends, or affiliate partners who say, “Hey, will you promote X for me?” If you have your promotional and you’re editorial calendars created, you can look at them and go, “Why yes I can. I don’t have any other promotions going out that week.” Or you can look and say, “I’m sorry I can’t promote that, we’re already doing a launch of X product or we’re promoting someone else’s event.” So it allows you to, or how do I want to say that? Stops you from doing too much. Right? Stops you from doing too much.

Brad Dobson: Yeah. There’s definitely times on the schedule when there’s promotions you can’t do.

Minette Riordan: Then it allows us to be really intentional with our content creation. I think that’s so important. We’ve talked a lot about that today, about using themes, or you could even have a theme of the week, a theme of the month, a theme of the day, but that really being intentional to create content that’s a value to your ideal clients.

Brad Dobson: Oh yeah. Critical, critical. Without it, it’s just haphazard. You’re not helping anybody. After that, I guess we’re on number five. It’s an easy to view list of upcoming meetings that we can talk about.

Minette Riordan: Upcoming items that we can talk about during our meetings.

Brad Dobson: Yeah. Upcoming meetings, upcoming items.

Minette Riordan: Got to put your glasses on.

Brad Dobson: That’s right. I should do that.

Minette Riordan: I try and make the print really big.

Brad Dobson: Right. So it’s all out there in front of you. There’s no questions about it. You’re not guessing what it is.

Minette Riordan: So Brad and I, at least once a week sit down and look at our upcoming editorial calendar so that we’re on the same page about what needs to be created, when it needs to get created. It’s so easy to just be able to log into our Google template, to that Google sheet, and know exactly what’s coming up. Then, we also, during those meetings, can look at what’s coming and say, “Is this still valid? Or do we need to make a shift, or a pivot? Or is there something that would be more useful right now.” Intentionality of content creation is really crucial. That’s number six

Brad Dobson: Yeah. So, I guess, I know it’s kind of stale, but integrated editorial and promotional items force more consistency.

Minette Riordan: It’s not stale, it’s summarizing.

Brad Dobson: That’s right. So, if you’re looking at this from the perspective of the person at the other end who’s receiving, for instance, your emails or all of your Facebook posts, you want to have some sort of thematic consistency. Otherwise, it just all looks haphazard, once again. So having a schedule ahead of time in integrating editorial and promotional means that you can turn that into … yeah. You can thematasize it.

Minette Riordan: We got to come up with some new … It’s all about the cadences, right? We got to go back to our conversations around cadences.

Brad Dobson: Yep.

Minette Riordan: So the last thing, number seven, is that it completely eliminates overwhelm and allows us to stay ahead of our content creation and avoid last-minute, “Oh my gosh, I have to have this tomorrow.” Which I have been famous for doing to Brad, sadly. So the editorial calendar has been our biggest gift to each other in the way that we plan in our business. It keeps us sane and you don’t get burnt out. You don’t get frustrated. You don’t overwhelm your VA or ask your VA to do something at the 13th hour that really unreasonable to ask of them. So whether it’s just you, you and your spouse, or you and a team, it makes every thing … Our big theme this year is grace and ease, right? It creates more grace and ease and your business.

Brad Dobson: Yeah, and you get a chance to get ahead. That’s the neat part about content creation is that you can, for the most part, unless you have some specific Live things, like Facebook Live, you can do so much of this ahead of time. Once it’s done, one you have 30 days’ worth of content scheduled with Hootsuite or MeetEdgar, or whatever it is that you use, then you’re free to do promotional things and other things that are going to move the needle on your financials. But you can definitely get buried by this if you’re just doing everything at the last minute.

Minette Riordan: Yeah, and I think I would wrap up by saying the whole theme of this show and the focus of the Path to Profit Academy is getting you on the path to profit, and creating consistent, high-quality content is one way to do that. So the more thoughtful and intentional you can be about that, the faster it’s going to boost the bottom line and have some of that profit flowing into your business.

Brad Dobson: Good stuff. Get out there. Use an editorial calendar, folks. It helps you.

Minette Riordan: Yep, and you can totally snag a copy of ours at pathtoprofitacademy.com/podcasts, click on Episode 81 and make sure that you download a copy of that. Feel free to cut and paste and use it for your own.

Brad Dobson: Good stuff. Love you guys.

Minette Riordan: All right. We’ll see you on the next show with Emily Levy, where we’re talking about, “What do you do if you want to switch your niche.

announcer: Thanks for listening.