Regularly creating and publishing quality, informative content to your blog and other platforms is critical to the success of your overall digital marketing strategy. However, rather than simply posting whenever you get a chance, you can keep your efforts on the right track by establishing what professional content writers call an “editorial calendar.”

An editorial calendar is essentially a schedule of the different types of content you aim to post in the next month—or even the next quarter or year. It may include the topics of your blog and other pieces of content, the dates by which you’ll develop drafts, the dates at which you’ll publish each piece and any other relevant information. Ideally, the calendar would cover all of your content writing activities, such as your planned blog posts, white papers, articles, social media content, videos and press releases (among others).

By setting up an editorial calendar, content writers reap a number of key benefits:

• It maintains consistency: Creating and posting content on a regular basis shows readers that you are committed to providing them with useful information and insights on a consistent basis. Publishing content infrequently makes it much more likely your readers will lose interest, and an editorial calendar helps you stick to a regular schedule.
• It keeps ideas organized: By placing your blog content ideas into your editorial calendar as soon as you think of them, you can avoid forgetting a great idea that might be useful in the future. You can move your ideas around as needed, but having all your ideas in one place makes sure nothing falls by the wayside.
• It prevents repetition: Having a good record of all of your editorial calendars means you can more easily track which topics you have already covered, allowing you to avoid being overly repetitive with your content choices.
• It helps ensure greater quality: When you have your content writing planned out ahead of time, you can see far in advance which posts will take more time and effort to research and put together. If you are too often rushing to finish your content, the quality of your pieces will likely decrease.
• It allows for better outsourcing: If you are working with a team of third-party content writers, having an editorial calendar keeps everyone on the same page. The most effective copywriting service providers make editorial calendars part of their regular processes, especially when providing material for ongoing content marketing campaigns.

As you look to refresh or ramp up your content marketing efforts, remember the value these schedules provide to your strategy in a number of ways. And if you are you looking into working with a professional content writing service, be sure to ask about if the company and its team can assist with topic generation and the establishment of editorial calendars.