Why You Need a Content Schedule and How to Maximize It

Summary

Understanding the supplemental gain of a content schedule comes in optimizing one. The whole idea of the scheduling approach shows the most conducive ability to transform leads into sales — as no one can ever go wrong with content scheduling.  Depending on how much content you plan to publish in a provided period, content development comes with more vigorous work. Transform your current marketing approach, and work on a strategic and structured one. With a viable content schedule, productivity and convenience are both essentially assured.

As a content writer, scheduling your content creation and distribution is as essential as generating your work. You might have better ideas and strategies to think of. However, a lack of information and consistency during posting might cause you many downfalls.

This article contains all you need to know about creating a content schedule. This would be helpful in content writing services and maximize audience engagement. We will also explore the definition of:

• Content
• Content marketing
• Creating and distributing valuable
• Relevant and consistent content information

So, what are content marketing, defining content, and content schedule? How do you manage proper scheduling to promote accountability and profitable customer action?

The Relationship between Content and Online Marketing

As humans, we have all encountered various definitions of the term “content” in numerous fields. However, we aren’t talking about satisfaction or the contents of a substance.

Our focus, when referring to “content,” is on online platforms. Online marketers’ definition of content is a piece of useful information or creative material on your website directed towards driving growth.

Producing relevant content on time is one of the best assets a content writer could think of since it is one of the key drivers for market growth. The easiest way to produce timely information material is by creating a schedule to publish posts at an appointed time to reach your target audience.

Some types or examples of content include:

1. Blog post
2. Case study
3. Longform content
4. Video or image content
5. White paper
6. Infographics
7. Book content (E-books)
8. Templates, tools, and checklists
9. Webinars and classes
10. Email address subscription content
11. Photo essays
12. Live Q&As
13. Podcasts
14. Image and video essays
    

What Makes a Defining Content?

In the previous section, we talked about the definition of content in the internet marketing world. However, it is no secret that most the mainstream content doesn’t attract as many viewers as great content would.

If we were to categorize content based on customer behavior, great content would receive more attention (shares, likes, reads, retweets, discussion, and more). Simply speaking, an excellent content marketing strategy goes the extra mile to contain more information and other media like image and video data.

What factors do we watch out to determine the quality of a blog post, image, e-book, video content, or other site information?

1. Examples of great content are those that are original.
2. Consistent content creation and blog or site updates
3. It employs a marketing strategy that has a call to action. It is an actionable post that can drive customers to buy some goods or push for certain services.
4. Another example of good content is one that is short and precise content information with no fluff.
5. Great content is accurate and contains trustworthy information.
6. A good definition is that it contains strong informative headings and headlines.
7. An excellent example of good content is engaging and thought-provoking enough to drive a discussion.
8. Quality content provides answers, an exposition, or solutions to the topic in the heading.
9. It features multimedia like image content, video, and other media-related data.

Introduction to Content Marketing

The content marketing definition given by Content Marketing Institute (by Joe Pulizzi) is that it is a strategic marketing approach that focuses on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly-defined audience and ultimately drive profitable customer action. Here are some potent examples of content marketing.

Based on this definition, many examples of content marketing strategies are directed towards cultivating relevance rather than pitching sales products. Always think that content marketing should be an essential marketing strategy because it drives customers to get to know your company and brand and even leads them to buy what you offer.

Many significant companies get content marketing services only because it works. But, how do you explain the concept of content marketing to people when it is often misinterpreted?

How do you explain content marketing to anyone?

Using content marketing or working as a content marketer leaves you with the regular job of helping others understand what you do. Although definitions of content marketing are clear, explaining it is challenging.

As one of the front-liners of the concept of content marketing, the Content Marketing Institute (CMI by Joe Pulizzi) launched a book that answers the most common questions beginners think about.

Using the content marketing institute as a reference here explains the concept of content marketing to people.

If you explain the concept of content marketing to anyone, you will need to present different examples clearly and understandably for them. If you can, find a user-friendly piece of information that focuses on sharing information directed at the audience and user experience rather than marketing the product.

How you explain content marketing to a user is quite different from how you think you can share the definition with a seller. Content marketing requires them to get their audience’s attention without using mainstream ideas expected in the marketing world for a business.

On the other hand, for a user, examples of content marketing feature a non-sales strategy that captures your attention by focusing on your need rather than the product.

Some of the reasons the Content Marketing Institute believes marketers start using content marketing are:

• For their business to be discovered by the right people (potential customers)
• They utilize content marketing as a strategy to acquire new customers.
• It is a strategy that helps a business to reallocate resources by reducing the cost of traditional marketing.
• Content marketing helps you build a strong customer base that consists of an engaged audience.
• This also helps to increase the revenue generated from existing customers.

What are the Benefits of Content Marketing?

Using content marketing is a valuable marketing strategy that has been around for years. What benefits made content marketing stand the test of time?

A great way to explain why content marketing has not gone extinct is by sharing some remarkable benefits. Some advantages the content marketing institute notes that a business can get from content marketing are:

1. A company will be more inclined to make content marketing part of their strategy because it leads to sales increment, produces better customers who are more loyal, and saves on costs.
2. The definition of content marketing features the importance of relevant information that promotes value. If we take the fact that customers love things that add value into consideration, one can safely say that content marketing is the future of the business and marketing world.
3. Without good quality (great content and information), marketing is next to impossible. The limitations of mainstream marketing over the years without content marketing stand as one of its actual values.

Some other benefits of content marketing include:

1. Content marketing has an uncanny ability to boost your site traffic and SEO.
2. It lets a business or company improve its brand conversion rates.
3. You can establish expertise, authority, and trust (E.A.T.) with content marketing.
4. It generates business leads.
5. Content marketing creates awareness for your business brand.
6. With content marketing, definitions, and the personality of your brand are clearly established and gives it room to shine with useful information.
7. Content marketing allows your brand to connect with your different viewers by providing essential information.
8. Content marketing is an excellent public relations (PR) strategy.

Considering all these benefits of content marketing that the content marketing institute has used, it is more difficult to ignore the definition of content and its role in your business. It even leads one to want to learn and understand the concept and definition of content scheduling to create a strategy for implementing site uses of content marketing value in one’s business.

Here are some of the things you should know about Content Marketing:

What is a Content Schedule?

A content schedule is a calendar consisting of all your plans and upcoming content efforts, including the publishing period, events, collaborations, promotional activities, and other essentials you wish to organize. It will help you execute the plans your site uses throughout the year or for a certain period (if you want to customize).

Irrespective of the method of content marketing you employ, creating a content schedule is an effective way to implement them.

Different Types of Content Schedule Calendars You Can Use

If you plan to use the scheduling strategy to maximize your content engagement, we will discuss some steps in creating a content calendar. However, before that, let us see some mediums and their definitions, which you can use to organize your schedule.

There are numerous platforms and applications you can learn to use for free and set up your schedule, and there are also manual platforms you can use. Here are some of the content calendars you can use when planning.

Spreadsheets

If you use collaborative workspaces or multiple devices that require synchronicity, online spreadsheets are the best for use. These spreadsheets are designed for convenience, accessibility, ease of access, and sharing of information.

If you want to enjoy a seamless user experience as you make your content schedule and business strategy, you can use spreadsheet apps like:

1. Microsoft excel
2. Google sheets
3. Airtable
4. Smartsheet
5. Zoho Sheet
6. EtherCalc
7. LibreOffice Calc
8. Quip

All you need to do is input your email address and invite potential collaborators or other partners in the same company. The best part of a spreadsheet product is usually the ease of using it.

Printed Calendars

A printed calendar is one of the more traditional means people use to mark crucial detailed information and dates. Although it is more manual and is losing popularity, you could use it to manage your content writing services at home.

You can place it near the areas where you perform tasks to remember to condition yourself to accomplish your objectives. If the calendar is something you have to leave at home or in the office all the time, it won’t be as effective as necessary.

Planners or Journals

One of the other means you can employ when planning your content calendar is using a journal or planner. Many people worldwide buy and utilize them because they come in handy for writing life goals, thoughts, notes, and other information.

Since they help write ideas, they can also serve as a safe space to organic your content schedule. However, one must be careful not to lose them since there is no backup file.

Software Applications

There are tools and applications specifically designed to create a content schedule. It is a way of providing added features that send reminders and monitors your progress.

It is more beneficial to select the planning medium that suits the definitions of your brand, your lifestyle, and your character. Finally, here’s a step-by-step method to create and make the most use out of your schedule book or other calendar mediums.

1. List your good content ideas, pieces, and events. You could also include personal efforts that help you condition yourself in preparing to work.
2. Once you have already written your notes down, consider which information needs to be published first. Adding time elements is crucial.
3. Structure your days. You have to be detailed in this step because you need to input specific tasks or events at a particular time in your schedule book. One way of doing it is to be as straightforward as you want, depending on your eagerness to follow the schedule.
4. Customize your content schedule. It includes adding color elements, alarms, notifications, and categories for each task.
5. Finally, you need to know and test the routine. A content schedule is made to be followed and used, so you have to ensure you do it.

Why Should You Create and Stick to a Content Schedule?

Organized and well-thought-of content schedules would guide content writers to redefine their contents and objectives. It is an efficient method for executing and planning your work reviews on a specified course of time.

Scheduling content for a whole month or year can be overwhelming most of the time, but creating consistency in a business builds a solid market base for writing websites.

Some disadvantages come with creating a content schedule. However, here are seven advantages of knowing more about the content calendar and its benefits, which maximize your content creation and distribution.

1. Maximizes High-Engagement Times

Most content writers create when they have time and post during these moments in the absence of a schedule. This time is mostly during the weekends or after office hours when they get the most active readers who are resting.

Fixing a good posting schedule when your target audience is active online helps improve your reach. Even if your content is beautifully crafted, without an audience, its worth diminishes.

Maximizing high-engagement times with your customers lets you put up materials at times when they are available to read it. When your post is always being read during maximum engagement periods, it creates an avenue for discussion that adds value to your work and improves your brand’s reach.

2. It Helps Reduce the Occurrence of Writer’s Block with Proper Strategizing

When creating a content schedule, an important aspect is to get a potential topic or structure, a process known as ideation or strategizing. Although there are helpful tools for generating content ideas, it is still stressful to develop a new scheme daily or weekly.

This approach will help you:

• Create unique ideas since you have all the definitions of your topics ready before writing.
• Avoid writer’s block because having a structure makes it easier for ideas to flow, especially with great content examples available.
• Outsource writing tasks to experienced content writers.

3. Develops Consistency with Your Readers

Most people watch series because they can consistently anticipate a particular date every week it airs. Dropping quality content on your blog or social media (even memes) on a regular schedule can make your audience have something to anticipate, and they get a reason to revisit.

Content website owners prefer implementing schedules, mostly when posting content so that the audience would have something to look forward to and read at a particular time. Creating calendars has been increasing its importance in strategizing and managing overall work in their desired timeframe.

When you can develop a pattern with your readers, they get a positive dependency on your posts, look forward to it, and sometimes motivate you to create. If you continuously publish your content writeups on your platforms, the readers will find themselves used to depending on the particular time you set.

On the other hand, people who randomly post a blog, content, or video, especially with long intervals between posts, may create engaging content but depend on Google and different search engine optimization strategies to bring site visitors who read.

When most readers return a bunch of times and see nothing, they find someone that can give them what they need, and you end up pushing the market to your competitors.

4. It Helps You Prioritize Content Writing

When you can develop a pattern with your readers, they get a positive dependency on your posts, look forward to it, and sometimes motivate you to create. If you continuously publish your content writeups on your platforms, the readers will find themselves used to depend on the particular time you set.

Keeping a content calendar would benefit not only your content writing services but yourself as well. Sometimes, content writing efforts and deadlines are overwhelming that eventually leads to losing track.

The knowledge you have a schedule means you must create a post, blog, video, or content materials on time and increase your team’s accountability. It would be best to consider the demographics and the peak of engagements when choosing a timeslot.

• If you work on writing websites like WordPress, the best time to post is from 12 p.m. to 6 p.m.
• According to CoSchedule, blog posts are mostly on traffic services on Monday at 11 a.m.
• The most reasonable time to post on social media platforms is weekdays, especially on Wednesdays and Fridays.

A content schedule allows people to keep themselves organized and aligned with their upcoming works. It encourages us to accomplish a particular task, depending on the individual intervals, while it guides users in prioritizing which ones must come first.

Everyone in charge of every aspect of free content release puts their best forth to make sure you are within schedule. Some people make the mistake of keeping the plan a secret. Hence, the people essential to creating content do not understand the urgency of the work you need to release.

5. Maintains Consistency For Your Brand

Your eagerness to follow your schedule conditions you to start a routine. Whether you know it or not, it can enable your consciousness to do specific tasks at a dated moment, especially if you’ve customized your schedule long-term.

For example, if you have included in your schedule that visiting your websites must be performed during weekends, then developing that habit is high. Irregular or out-of-date posting lessens your audience’s reach while decreasing their appreciation of your content writing efforts.

6. Increases Audience Engagement

You’ll always have an option to wing it, but you must realize that it won’t work for you in the long run. And when you learn to publish your item immediately, the chances are you fail to acknowledge that the information you’ve been writing is something you had already discussed on a prior date. Additionally, it doesn’t help that a randomly chosen topic that doesn’t appease your readers will take a toll on your overall engagement.

Having a content calendar in your check is useful in locating possible errors and producing timely content. To further engage and keep your customers, you have to realize the crucial factor that a content schedule fulfills. It will take you a notch higher in maintaining relevant content and publishing new content that suits your audience’s interest.

Here are some of the ways you can do to increase your audience engagement:

Invest Time	Insert yourself into a platform where your target audience is already interacting.
Smart Recommendations	Give smart recommendations about further information that a reader should check out.
Better Visuals	Include photos, videos, infographics, and other media.
Collaborate with Influencers	Connecting with the appropriate influencers is a great method to increase audience engagement.
Be Creative	Let’s get back to social media. Use your imagination!

7. Content Schedule Builds Reputation

Another aspect that can help you elevate your content engagement is successfully earning your readers’ trust, leading you to be considered a reputable source. Both scenarios apply to advertising and guest contributors. And all of it won’t be possible if you don’t plan with the help of an editorial calendar. It will further enable your advertising to attain synergies in your content material.

If you’re a guest contributor, you can expect that your editorial calendar is a pivotal instrument in helping you manage various contributors to your website. All you need is to provide them with a specific date and time to prepare and avoid duplicating content topics.

Helpful Points to Remember When Scheduling Content

Considering the benefits of scheduling and its tendency to become overwhelming, writers’ work reviews should optimize scheduling tips. Here are four of the points you may want to get to know and remember while scheduling.

Find Balance: Your Content Should Be Informative and Relevant

Your schedule will have to be balanced to keep your posts from becoming excessive. Enjoy sharing your knowledge with your precious audience but also keep a balanced schedule. If you are posting on social media as much as ten times a day, it may be useful, but all your posts may not get discovered.

If you follow that pattern with your blog, it just becomes free spam in the long run. Once or twice a week is a perfect balance for blogs, and one to five posts every day on social media works well.

How Often Should You Post on Social Media?

In order to balance your posts, list out the different social media platforms on which you can plan to post your content, then figure out how often you want to publish on each platform.

Facebook	1 Post per day. Posting to Facebook once a day is best or you’ll start to feel spammy.
Twitter	15 Tweets per day. Most retweets happen within an hour, so a higher daily frequency is best.
Pinterest	11 Pins per day. The best results occur with 15-30 pins per day when spread out throughout the day.
Linkedin	1 Post per day. Curate or reshare a post every other day.
Instagram	1-2 Posts per day. Most brands share on Instagram on average 1.5 times a day, but not more.

It’s Almost Impossible to Go Wrong: There is no Wrong Way to Schedule Content When Writing Websites.

Your target audience is the main factor to consider when making your schedule.

You have to post early enough in the morning because most people check their phones and repost. The same principle applies to blog posts. When do your readers check their phones (is it better to post in the mornings or evenings?)

Know When Your Audience is Usually Online

Like I said earlier, timing is crucial. Although you may be online always, everyone isn’t always free to check web updates. Additionally, posts (especially on social media) do better within the first few minutes you put them up.

You Can Experiment with Refurbishing Older Content

With things like social media posts, you can repost old and previously used blogs as a memory. However, with your blog, you can try refurbishing those pieces that did well when posting them and adding new images or relevant videos. Eventually, you can check and see how it does.

Why You Might Not Want to Schedule Content

The biggest problems with scheduling are that it can restrict your creativity and can be overwhelming. But, you can always get help and try outsourcing or using helpful apps.

Being aware of content scheduling’s potential disadvantages helps you prepare in advance for them and find ways to tackle them. Here are some of the drawbacks of scheduling content.

It Could Inhibit Creativity

Most of the time, the person who organizes the schedule isn’t always the same person who writes. It is not uncommon for the writer to have limited rein and creativity on the topic, despite wishing otherwise.

It’s best to reduce the effect of limited creativity by allowing writers to tweak content to reflect their taste and passion if they want to. The only necessity is ensuring they are writing in line with SEO recommendations.

It Does Not Take Recent News and Changes into Account.

That is a downside to scheduling that occurs quite frequently, mainly when you use auto-updating applications. Your platform wouldn’t feature new changes and events.

For example, people who scheduled content for the first half of 2020 did not realize that a pandemic would strike around the world. They might have had to learn the hard way to generate significant changes to their schedule to fit the theme of COVID-19.

It Becomes Overwhelming When You Have to Organize Everything at Once

Immediately people are free to do something; they tend to micromanage and do everything at once —which could easily be overwhelming. Even if you are not trying to micromanage things, when your company decides to schedule, they usually aim for the bigger goal.

Setting manageable and realistic goals for writing will help you avoid becoming overwhelmed and makes them easier to get. One example is, that instead of writing years’ worth of content, try working bi-monthly or quarterly to reduce the workload.

Better still, you can implement schedule planning for each month instead.

Your customers and active readers will not fault you or your company for working at a pace you can carry. People are more likely to have a problem with subpar content creation.

Wrap Up: Find Out What Works For You

Sticking to a content schedule is essential, especially with writers working on writing services and websites to create and distribute valuable, relevant, and consistent content. It also helps individuals learn how to develop organizational skills that could benefit them. Additionally, it features key points that maximize the definition of content creation and distribution.

When you think about content and its worth, you may feel compelled to keep creating or fake it till you make it. But this shouldn’t be the case. All you need is to find the method that works for you and your creative process. If you used a schedule and struggled with sticking to it, you can always hire reliable website writers like iWS to help you meet your timeline.

See: 11 Tips to Become a Successful Content Creator