Originally published on the RelationEdge blog, August 29th, 2015

The RelationEdge blog was deactivated in February, 2020

If you write for or maintain a blog, you’ll know that one of the hardest parts of your job is to come up with consistent, engaging content. Posting regularly to a blog is one of the best ways to market your business and grow a community around what you do. In fact, companies who regularly post to a blog receive 97% more links to their websites than those who don’t. Those who update regularly over a long period of time see more results as well — blogs that have over 51 posts see an increase of 53% traffic, blogs with over 100 posts see an increase of 3x that traffic, and blogs with over 200 posts see 4.5x the traffic — posting frequently is key when you decide to host a blog on your website.

With that in mind, what’s the best way to make sure that your blog is maintained with engaging and informative content? A resource that we have found essential is a content or editorial calendar. A content calendar summarizes the strategy for blog content; outlining major themes, topics and resources for your blog. A plan of 1 – 6 months helps to create a long term strategy for what your blog content will be, and can be used to guide your efforts and plan how you will use your resources. And face it; having a written plan with due dates and schedules is one of the best ways to keep you accountable.

Since we’ve convinced you that a content calendar is the way to go, here are 7 steps that you can follow to build a content calendar of your own!

Step 1: Determine How Many Posts You Will Write

Before you start to develop a strategy around topics or themes, you need to know how many posts you are planning to write, and how often you will be posting. Hubspot recommends that bloggers try to post over 16 posts per month (4x per week), but for many companies, that schedule can be unrealistic. If you’re just starting a blog or just starting to post regularly to your blog, 1x per week is a great goal, though statistics show that at 10-11 posts per month is when you will start seeing the most traffic results from your efforts. If you have the resources, aim for 3-5 posts per week. If not, make sure you set a reasonable goal. Posting once a month is better than not posting at all, after all!

When determining how many posts you will be producing, don’t forget to consider creating different kinds of content such as: whitepapers, infographics, or ebooks. These engaging and informative types of content are read and shared more often than blog posts, and sites that feature infographics have 12% faster traffic growth than those who don’t. Keep in mind how many of your resources will be taken up by these types of content — infographics, ebooks and whitepapers are often longer, involve more research, and require graphic design assistance that blog posts do not.

Step 2: Determine Where Your Content Is Going

The next step of building a content calendar is to decide where the completed content is going to end up. Likely, much of the content that you produce will be going to your own blog, but you should also plan to contribute some of those posts as guest posts to important blogs and websites in your community. Contributing guest posts is a great way to build your brand’s authority, equity, and send signals to search engines and communities about your contribution to the web. Acting as a thought leader in your industry is a great way to build trust and respect with potential clients as well.

Determining where your posts will end up will help you with the voice and approach to each topic – after all, you would write differently for your own community than you would for someone else’s. Once you have determined a possible placement for a guest blog, be sure to make notations about their style guidelines and length requirements to your content calendar so you can minimize the number of revisions you will need to do to meet their standards.

Step 3: Develop a Theme

Now that you know how many posts you want to write and where you will be posting them, you can start developing content topics! One of the best ways to do this is to develop themes – a broad theme can help to guide writers and topic choices, and also create a comprehensive experience for your readers. For best results, plan out your themes for a few weeks or months at a time. This will help you to appear as an expert on your chosen topic areas (and after researching and writing multiple blog posts on a topic, you will become an expert!) and will also make it easy to refer to earlier blog posts as resources. You can also build on previous posts and create a series of posts, which can then be repurposed into a whitepaper or ebook — the possibilities are endless!

Step 4: Pick Individual Topics

Step four is to pick the individual topics for each blog post or type of content. Using the themes you chose earlier, break each theme down into individual posts, each covering a part of that theme. Think about how blog posts can refer to each other and how they can work together. Have some fun with topics too —throw in a quiz or an anecdotal story to add some personality to your blog and drive engagement.

You can also use this step to develop your headlines. Copyblogger has found that on average 8 out of 10 readers will read your headline, but only 2 of 10 will read the rest. Writing a great, engaging headline is a large part of having a successful blog, so take your time here and write headlines that will intrigue and interest your readers.

Step 5: Expand Your Scope

Since you don’t write the blog posts in your content calendar right away, you should write a brief description about what you want each post to be about before you forget. Include in this description the goal of each post, the questions that you will answer, and any specific notes about the content that you will need to remember later. Don’t count on just your memory; the more information you add here, the easier it will be for you to write these posts later.

Step 6: Resources

This step is quick, but vastly important — add links in your content calendar to articles, blog posts, and books that you will use when researching each blog post. Again, this will make it as easy as possible to start each blog post when it’s time to write it, and you won’t spend valuable time trying to find that one resource that you remember from weeks ago. Also, if there is more than one person writing for your blog, including resources will make it easier for other writers to craft the blog post you were envisioning and meet your expectations.

Step 7: The Most Important Step of All – Approval

If you write and maintain your own blog alone, you can skip this step, but if anyone else reviews and approves your blog posts, this is the most important step of all — gaining approval. There’s not much worse than spending hours of effort on writing a blog post about a certain topic only to find out that your manager doesn’t like the topic, and wants you to write something else. Avoid this by going through your finalized content calendar with anyone that has a say over what goes on your blog. Make sure that everyone has come to a consensus with what blog posts should be about before you start to work on them.

If you follow these seven steps, you should be well on your way to maintaining a frequently updated blog with interesting and engaging content! Do you use a content or editorial calendar when you write for your blog? How do you organize yours?

Originally published on the RelationEdge blog, September 24th 2015

The RelationEdge blog was deactivated in February, 2020

Anyone who has worked tirelessly on a writing project and has found a typo despite multiple edits, knows the ultimate frustration of writing: finding your own mistakes. This isn’t unique to just one writer, all of us have felt our stomachs sink just after we press send on the email; “Did I really just type ho instead of how? How did I miss that?”

The good news is that it’s not your fault. Well, not your conscious brain’s fault, at least. Research has shown that familiarity with what you’re editing makes it harder to see errors, and easier for you to miss obvious mistakes while editing. It turns out that part of being a good editor is unfamiliarity with what you’re editing—which is bad news for the writer that just finished a draft and needs to get it out the door right away. As novelist Zadie Smith said in her essay That Crafty Feeling “The secret to editing your work is simple: you need to become its reader instead of its writer.” With this in mind, how do you properly edit your own work? How can you change yourself from the writer, to the reader?

Your Brain Is Working Against You

The old adage “familiarity breeds contempt” is fairly accurate when it comes to editing your own work. The more familiar you are with what you’re reading, the more difficult it is to see typos, awkward phrasing, or any other mistakes. Your brain works against your goals, filling in the blanks and glossing over errors in your writing—it knows what you are trying to say, and will read what’s written as if it is saying what you want, whether it’s written that way or not. Psychologist Tom Stafford describes this phenomenon quite well in an article for WIRED: “We don’t catch every detail, we’re not like computers or NSA databases… Rather, we take in sensory information and combine it with what we expect, and we extract meaning.”

An article in the Journal of Research in Reading confirmed what many writers know through experience: familiarity with a text has a negative impact on detecting errors. This is bad news for writers, as no one is more familiar with what you’ve written than you yourself, making you the worst person possible to detect and fix errors in your own work.

In an ideal world, every writer would have an editor at their beck and call, available to review everything they’ve written before it’s published; but we all know that this is far from reality. Proofreading well means you have to trick your brain into thinking it is reading something for the first time. If the secret to editing is becoming the reader instead of the writer, what can you do to help trick your brain and edit your own work properly?

5 Tips for Editing Your Own Work

The overall key to editing your own work is to make what you’ve written look unfamiliar to you, or to approach it differently than how you wrote it – this will make your brain work harder to understand what was written, and make it more likely for you to see mistakes.

Print It Out

Reading off of a hard copy changes the way type looks and gives your brain more of a tactile interaction with what you’ve written. Something as simple as running your finger over the text while you read it can effectively change the way your brain interprets what you’re reading, and can be key to tricking your brain into thinking it’s reading what you’ve written for the first time.

Read It Out Loud

Using your voice changes the parts of the brain that process what you’ve written, and will make awkward phrasing and difficult sentences more apparent. An added benefit is that reading what you’ve written out loud will help you to see how the text flows: chances are, if what you’ve written doesn’t sound good out loud, it won’t read well on paper.

Read It Backwards

Starting from the last sentence of your work, read what you’ve written backwards. This doesn’t mean reading each individual sentence backwards word by word, but instead reading each sentence individually, out of context. The removal of context allows you to focus on each individual sentence, helping you see mistakes, and making your brain work harder to fill in the blanks.

Step Away

Sometimes taking a day or two away is the best way to see problems with what you’ve written. If time allows, give yourself a few days in-between writing something and editing it. Even better, work on something else – the change in pace will reset your brain and help you see editing mistakes easier.

Use an Editing Tool

If you’re pressed for time, try using a tool like Grammarly or Hemingway Editor to look over your work. These tools aren’t subjective, but they are very effective at pointing out when you can replace a complicated word for a simpler version, or when you’re using the passive voice (my personal vice).

Stop Your Brain From Sabotaging Your Writing

Ultimately, the best way to get results from your writing is to have someone else look at it. Whether this is a professional editor, or even just a peer, the perspective that a new set of eyes can bring to your writing will improve what you’re trying to say, and reduce the number of mistakes. Though we encourage you to ask for assistance when it comes to editing, these tips will help you tidy up your work if using an editor isn’t an option.