Table of Contents:
Without a content calendar, your content will fail.
Do you believe that? I did when I began in 2017.
I even went as far as planning out a year's worth of content. And while it sort of worked, I always thought there might be a better way.
Then 2020 happened. And all the content planned for the year of COVID-19 likely went out the window. Imagine if you spent hours writing and designing all those posts and then had to throw them away.
That was the first crack in my belief in the importance of content calendars.
Since then, I've been on a journey of figuring out how to balance being proactive with planning out content and being flexible with being spontaneous. If you fail to nail this balance, your content can become stale, irrelevant, and less personal.
In this chapter, I aim to share a better way than the old stale content calendars. With Content Pillars and a Macro Content Piece, you're positioned to be agile and flexible, which is required for successful content planning.
Let's cover the old way of Content Calendars, but first, let's differentiate between Content Calendars and Content Planning:
Content planning is needed for content success. I will die on that hill.
When you fail to plan your content intentionally and creatively, your content will be vanilla. I'm not talking about planning when you will release X content. I mean the planning you've gone through (chapter 3 to now), which focuses on the premise and the audience. I call this your Content Strategy (Plan).
You need that strategy whether you have a content calendar or not. You must spend the time planning if you want your content to succeed.
Yet, you can achieve content success without a direct calendar. You can plan and lay the guardrails while being agile and spontaneous with content creation.
So, what's a content calendar, and why would anyone use it if it's not needed?
At its core, a content calendar is a publishing schedule for your content.
Whether it resembles an actual calendar or is simply a list, a calendar focuses more on the "when" than the "what." This usually applies to social media and may include more considerable content assets.