Editorial Calendars – Getting Your Blogging Stuff Together

This post was originally published in 2014.

Here we are on the downhill side of the January 2014 NaBloPoMo challenge. I am doing pretty well with it. I have missed a day here and there (like yesterday), but not many. I find myself getting into a blogging rhythm. This month's writing prompt/theme is 'pressure', and I do feel some pressure to blog every day, as intended. It's a good pressure, though, like a great deep tissue massage right under the pointy part of the scapula, where all of us writers feel tight from being hunched over the keyboard all day.

Until now I have been 'pantsing' the topics. I abandoned the daily blog prompts relating to pressure early on, in favor of challenging myself to include the word 'pressure' in every post. Writing to topic just wasn't my thing, for two reasons. One, at the beginning of this challenge, I had lots of random ideas I wanted to riff on. Two, I found after reading the blog posts of others participating in the challenge, it gets a little dry reading posts about the same topic over and over again. This is definitely not a knock on the posts themselves. Of course they were all unique and I enjoyed reading them. But after eating soup for lunch every day this week, sometimes I feel like having a pizza, amirite?

Three weeks in, my random ideas are put to bed and it's time to grow up, stop pantsing and start planning. Some time ago I saw some posts about editorial calendars for blogging and loved the Type A linear discipline of them. Here's a link to one of the articles by Mike Stelzner. I don't know about you, but these suggestions are a little too high powered, and frankly, pricey, for me at this point in my blogging career. This second article by Andreea Ayers is a little more my speed. It's good advice that will cost nothing but your time.

So today, having an unexpected morning off, I am going to town on my editorial calendar. Look for a first draft of it in a future blog post.

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