This content from: Small Business Marketing Blog - Strategies That Increase Sales
One of the reasons I’m such a big fan of WordPress (it’s one of the main tools we use in delivering our Managed Marketing Services) is because there are so many great tools that and plugins that are developed and shared by members of the WordPress community. Today I want to tell you a little bit about one of those tools – the Editorial Calendar plugin.
Regular readers here know that we Duct Tape Marketing consultants believe in using a calendar to keep your marketing system on track. Mapping out your topics, events, announcements, etc., on a calendar is a great way to make sure you create blog content on a regular and consistent basis. The Editorial Calendar plugin gives you a nice, visual way to do just that right inside your WordPress dashboard.
WordPress already has a handy feature that allows you to write posts today and schedule them to appear on your blog in the future. This is great for people who like to bang out several posts in one sitting and then release them throughout the week (or month). The Editorial Calendar makes this a little bit easier by providing a visual calendar, which makes it more intuitive for those who want to publish a post every Monday and Wednesday for example.
Personally, I like like the drag and drop calendar interface because it allows me to plan my schedule, but then easily rearrange it as needed. For example, I may make a plan to write about certain topics as part of improving my search engine rankings for a particular set of search terms. I can map out my post topics for the coming month that will focus on those terms. Let’s pretend I publish new posts every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. On Tuesday night, the news is all-a-buzz of a new mega merger that results in the new TwiGoogleBookLink+ social network. Of course, I have to write about that and publish it on Wednesday. I have two posts (the mega merger news + my original post) or I can quickly drag my original Wednesday post to a different day.
If you combine the Editorial Calendar plugin with the ability to leave a post in Draft mode (so the public never sees it) you can come up with creative uses for the calendar beyond just scheduling blog posts.
Here is a short video from the plugin’s author demonstrating the features of the editorial calendar plugin:
The WordPress Editorial Calendar Screen Cast from Zack Grossbart on Vimeo.
