Blog Challenged – I heard using an Editorial Calendar helps

Hi, my name is Adriana Gomes, and I’m Blog Challenged.

I know I’m supposed to post regularly, pick a day of the week and bam! Do it. I should write every week, every Monday, or Friday or whatever day of my choice, as long as I’m consistent. Then something happens and I’m derailed, just like that. My father gets sick and passes away. My husband gets transferred from the East to the West Coast. I must find good schools for my daughters. I need to sell my lovely spacious home in Atlanta and find a small fixer-upper we can afford in the San Francisco bay area, all sorts of messed up stuff, the stuff of life, or in my father’s particular case, death.

Tentative dark humor apart, this year was ridiculously tough on me, and if it was an absurd one for you as well, I’ll share my plan to get this blogging thing going next year.

First; work on my personal forgiveness, you know, letting go of the heaviness that has pulled me down in 2013. Then work on an editorial calendar, like the magazines do. I’ll create a list of topics, greatly influenced by seasons, holidays and book launches. I’ll spice it up with quotes, short stories, favorite old books, and some personal adventures and crises (I have a plethora of the latter to share). Then I’ll spread the ideas on a calendar and keep it updated as interesting news come up. It seems quite straightforward, yet tricky. I’ll give it a try.

To make things easier there are plenty of editorial calendar templates available on line:

For Google Docs:

https://docs.google.com/templates?q=editorial+calendar

A Plugin for WordPress:

http://wordpress.org/plugins/editorial-calendar/

And if you are planning to add multiple contributors, meaning you’re way ahead of me, hubspot has a nice option for you:

http://offers.hubspot.com/blog-editorial-calendar

You can also create your own Editorial Calendar on Excel:

 

 

These are just a few interesting options for your consideration. I’ll be using the WordPress plugin. And may the Muse be ever so kind to us all in 2014.