The Editorial Schedule: Not Just for Magazines

I recently put together my 2008 Editorial Schedule, and boy am I pumped! I admit that it’s been a struggle the last couple of months to blog as frequently as I’d like to.

With this schedule in place, I know exactly how I’ll be creating content this year. I haven’t chosen all of my topics ahead of time, so there will still be plenty of room for spontaneity and creativity and HEY, I can always blog MORE.

What I’ve laid out in my editorial calendar are the SOURCES for my content, so that it’s an automatic process.

For example, to write my fifth blog post of every month, I’m going to cull through my "Learning" folder in Outlook. "Learning" is one of my 2008 Business Plan strategies, so it gets it’s very own folder for the newsletters and blog updates that interest me (and that I think might interest you).

I don’t even try to read all of these when they come in, but when it’s time to write my blog post, I can skim through the subject lines, articles and posts for ideas that jump out at me.

This is the first year I’ve used an editorial schedule, so let’s all watch and see how well it works! Hopefully you’ll notice that I’m posting more frequently.

Writing Prompt: Put an editorial schedule to work for you in 2008. Simply plot out a space for everything you want to publish this year, and fill-in-the-blanks. You can do as I did, and think of HOW you’ll write the content when the time comes, or you can go one further and actually create your list of topics for the year. If you publish a monthly newsletter, that’s 11 more spaces to fill in and you’re done! Imagine the relief!