How to Create a Blogging Calendar

One of the hardest things for a blogger starting out is getting into a routine and getting your blog organised (or at least it was for me). I have tried so many different online calendars and organizing apps, but none of them did exactly what I wanted them to. So I created my own. I shared how I set up my blogging calendar on snapchat and I got so many questions and messages about it, that it seemed easier to put everything into a post so that you can refer to it anytime you need to.

Firstly, the program that I have my blogging calendar in, is a Google sheet in Google Drive. You could easily do it on a word/excel document, but I like that I can view my google drive from anywhere, not just one single file on my computer.

So once you've decided on the program, be it a Google sheet or an excel sheet, you can start to fill it out like I have done below. This is what my blogging calendar looks like when it's all set up. I've titled it Blog Calendar 2016 and included all my headings which I will go through now.

So first up is adding your pages withing the sheet. I have a different page for each month and they are all marked a different colour. You can add a new page simply by pressing the + on the bottom left hand corner. You could also add a 'bank' page for ideas and brainstorming.

On the first line I've started making different columns. The first is simply just the name of that particular month (July). The second is 'Blog Ideas', This column is basically for brainstorming. Usually what will end up happening is, I'll be doing a little brainstorm of ideas and I'll think of an idea but it won't suit that month. For example it could be January and I'll think of apost that would be great for Summer or Halloween. Instead of just forgetting that idea, I'll put it in my 'blog ideas' column so that when it comes to Summer or Halloween I'll already have a lot of blog ideas done.

The column named 'Type' represents the type of post it is. My blog is dominantly a beauty and lifestyle blog. Sometimes I'm really into writing about beauty products or times, I'm more into lifestyle. So when I'm planning out my posts, I'll try to schedule them in such a way that I don't have 3 beauty posts then 5 lifestyle posts. I'll try to mix it up and this column really helps. The 'Done' column represents what stage the post is at. Whether I have photos taken, the content wrote but no images or completely done.

After the post is completed I use the final five columns to track which platforms I shared the post on. You can of course tailor this to whatever social media platforms you use. These are just the ones that I use. I find this really helpful and my directs a lot of traffic to my blog.

Along the side you will see the numbers 1-30/31 they represent the dates throughout the month. I will fill out what posts are going live on what dates there.

Lastly underneath all the month's planning and organising I have a little section called Analytics. At the end of each month, I will take some time to go over the blog's analytics and track them in this section. I have only four things that I currently like to track but you can put in whatever you like. I track my overall traffic ( the pageviews and number of visitors), where my traffic came from (was it from social media, referrals or search engines), my demographic (the age of people visiting the site, what country they're from etc) and lastly top posts (what posts did the best and worst, this allows me to see where the biggest traction is on the blog).

After you've set it up, it's time to fill it out. This is an example of what it might look like...

The above is only a rough guide. Usually I colour co ordinate posts and try to make it a little nicer to look at. But hopefully you now have an idea of how to set up and customize your own blogging calendar. You don't NEED a bogging calendar but I just find it makes life easier for me and when I know I need to publish a post by a certain date, it pushes me to actually finish the post. This type of calendar really works for me and I hope you found this post useful too.

Let me know in the comments if you use a blogging calendar!

Erin X