Are you feeling overwhelmed, stressed, and out of content ideas? We’re here to help!
No matter how much (or how little!) content you’re creating for your business, when you’re posting to numerous different platforms, it can get overwhelming and easy to feel uninspired. Having a content calendar that outlines what types of content you’re sharing, when you’re sharing it, and on what platform will help you and your team stay on track and help you feel a little less stressed about what to post.
We can’t give away all of our tips, but today, we’re diving into the content calendar we swear by, how we utilize it in our business, and we’re sharing a template so you can create your own!
Why You Need a Content Calendar
As a business owner, you’re wearing so many different hats and balancing so many different things at once. To help manage it better, you utilize different tools and apps. With a content calendar, it’s easier to manage the marketing projects you’re working on so nothing falls to the wayside, including your blog and social media content.
Whether you’re a team of one or a team of 50, a content calendar will help you organize all of your ideas, come up with a plan, and allow you to easily integrate all the different parts of your marketing to crate a seamless strategy. Plus, who wants to think of what content to post on the spot? A content calendar will help you plan your schedule far in advance so you’re not stressing about what and when to post.
The Content Calendar We Swear By
We love Asana for project management and Google Docs for collaborating but when it comes to planning content, we needed something that had more features so we decided to utilize Airtable to build out our content calendar. We’ve now been using the platform for over a year and haven’t abandoned it yet (unlike our paper planners..). If you’ve never used Airtable before, think of it as Google Sheets/Excel but much prettier, easier to use, and has a bunch of great functions.
Want access to our content calendar template? Click here!
A Look Into Our Content Calendar
If you’re as nosy as we are and want to know exactly how our content calendar looks, you’re in luck!
In Airtable we’ve broken out all of our content buckets for our blog content into categories to make it easy to organize the different types of content we share on our blog. From there, we have blog topics, the status of the content (idea, outlined, drafted, scheduled, published), and areas for our page title and meta description. This makes it easy to collaborate with our team on content that is being written, is in process, or has been published to our blog.
Once content has been published on our blog, we update the status to ‘published’ and add the URL to the post directly into the content calendar so when we’re sharing content in emails or on social media, it’s easy to grab the link!
Once we have our basic information into the document, it can be a lot to look at so we love utilizing the expand feature for each individual content idea. This gives us a big picture look at all of the information we have gathered for the post, any notes, and any media we’d like to use.
The Fields We Utilize in Our Content Calendar
Since Airtable has the ability to create as many fields as you could need with different customization options, we’re really able to customize our calendar to work best for us. Here’s a glimpse into our categories and the field types.
- Topic (Long Text) – The topic of our blog post
- Status (Single Select) – The status of our blog post; Categorized by: Idea, Outlined, Draft, Scheduled, Published
- Date (Date) – The date the blog post will go live
- Category (Multiple Select) – The category the blog post falls into (currently hidden but grouped by the category)
- Blog Post Title (Long Text) – The title of our blog post as seen on our website
- Asset (Attachment) – Any images/video/etc. to be used in the blog post
- Page Title (Long Text) – The title of the blog post optimized for search
- Meta Description (Long Text) – The meta description of the blog post optimized for search
- URL (URL) – The URL of the blog post
- Notes (Long Text) – Any notes, ideas, etc. we have for the content
We also have our content calendar grouped by category so the blog posts/topics are easier to comb through. Our categories are as follows:
- Business Tips
- Blogging Tips
- SEO Tips
- Social Media
- Strategize
These are also the categories we utilize on our blog!
Why We Love Airtable
Airtable makes it SO easy to collaborate with your team, which is why we utilize the platform for our content calendars (both for ourselves and our clients!).
Amazing Templates – While I did create my own content calendar template, there are so many other templates that Airtable has created for you to utilize (explore them here!). From event planning and apartment hunting templates to legal case tracking and product tracking templates, there is a template for everyone.
Easy To Use – I love how easy it is to use Airtable for your business and customize the different fields in your document.
Application Integrations – Another great feature of Airtable is that it easily integrates with so many different applications and tools to make your workflow seamless. To integrate your apps with Airtable, simply use Zapier, Automate.io, Workato, or Integromat. Some of my favorite websites and apps the platform can integrate with are Asana, Dropbox, Eventbrite, Google (Gmail, Google Calendar, Drive, etc.), Slack, and WordPress.
Different Views – When we’re working on big picture stuff, we love utilizing the main view (pictured above!) but when we’re planning out content, we love the calendar view. It’s easy to click and drag content to different dates and the information is updated in the project details automatically. Such a great feature, especially when we’re adjusting out content calendar!
