If you’re an entrepreneur or small business owner, it’s easy to get overwhelmed – juggling multiple projects, keeping track of clients, and staying on top of your marketing can leave anyone spent! As with all things, it’s helpful to have systems for managing all the moving parts of your business – that way, you don’t have to keep everything in your head. The less detail-level information you keep in your noggin, the more room you have for the bigger, more strategic level planning that can really move your business forward.

If you do any sort of content creation as part of your marketing – publishing articles, posting on a blog, writing a newsletter, etc. – you’ve probably already realized that it’s pretty challenging to keep track of your content. Especially if you are publishing on multiple sites, keeping track of what articles got published where can be really tricky!

That’s why you’ll want to create an editorial calendar where you can centralize the moving parts of your content marketing system. This can be as simple as a spreadsheet that lists your topics, where and when they were published, and where and when future posts are scheduled to be published. Having a document like this lets you stop worrying about questions like "where did I publish this article" and instead give mental space to "how can I be purposeful with my content." Also, having this information centralized can help you more effectively delegate content and article promotion tasks to a member of your team, giving you less to do!

An editorial calendar can not only help you track content that’s already in the hopper – it can also help you plan ahead for content that you want to create. An easy way to start is to list each month of the year. Within each month, note the type of content you’d like to publish – blog posts, articles, social media messages, and so on. Then, for each month, you can choose a theme for the content; this could be related to something that is seasonal in your business, holidays or national events, or just a theme that’s relevant to your readers. Giving some structure and purpose to your posts can make them more relevant and valuable.

Once you have created your editorial calendar, then it’s time to work on the to-do’s and time management part of writing your content. Make sure to carve our regular time to work on your content creation – even 15 minutes every few days gets you closer to done!