How to Build a Content Calendar (Plus a Free Template)

Creating a content calendar from scratch is one of those tasks that seems so much more complicated than it actually is. Even just opening a blank Excel spreadsheet can feel overwhelming. Thankfully, sometimes all that’s needed to get on the right track is a quick how-to and a great starter template, which is exactly what we have for you here.

In this post, we provide a guide to building a content calendar, plus a free template for the year.

The Definition of a Content Calendar

Before we jump into calendaring our content, let’s talk about what a content calendar actually is, plus a few baseline requirements for success.

We define a content calendar as a shareable resource that teams can use to plan all content activity. This allows you to visualize how your content is distributed throughout the year. We prefer a calendar-based format, as opposed to just creating a long list of content to be published, because it comes with several benefits:

• Gain inter-and cross-department alignment: Inform everyone about what is being published, when and where, so there’s no surprises or duplication of efforts.
• Get a 50,000-foot view of content: Create a clear visual of how your content is distributed throughout the year.
• Identify content milestones: Plan content around key events or important dates.
• Spot content gaps: Gain a sense of what content still needs to be planned, with plenty of lead time to line up more content.
• Inform the content creation workflow: Make sure you have your content ready in time to actually publish when needed.

Consistency is insanely critical to content success. Yes, amazing new ideas and brilliant sparks of creativity help, but we can’t rely on them alone. They’re too inconsistent and unreliable. Instead, everyone needs to be on the same page with what content is being created, plus where and when it’s being published, and it has to be done on a regular, ongoing basis. And that is precisely where content calendars come into play.

The further ahead you plan, the better positioned you are to produce a consistent flow of content.

The 4 Keys to Content Calendar Success

Whether you plan content on a weekly, monthly, or quarterly basis, depending on how quickly your industry or organization moves, there are several universal keys to content calendar success:

• Open your calendars to everyone: While not everyone should have the ability to edit a master content calendar, everyone should at least know where the content calendar is located and have viewing access.
• Iterate constantly: A content calendar is a living, breathing document, and it should change and grow as your content needs do, too.
• There’s no one right way to calendar your content: There are a million different methods, templates and approaches to take. We’re providing you with a baseline template and a proven process that we use for ourselves and Convince & Convert clients, but you should also play around with the approach and modify elements, as needed. We tinker with it all the time, too.
• Create a content repository: Don’t get stuck on ideas that you can’t implement immediately, or don’t get hung up on the “we’ll never be able to do that” ideas. Instead, create a repository of content ideas that you can tap into whenever needed.

Fantastic! Now that we have all of that out of the way, let’s get to the good stuff: calendaring all of our amazing content.

How to Build Your Content Calendar in 3 Easy Steps

Step 1: Start with Existing Content Assets

There’s a lot of focus on creating new content when we should really be focusing on creating more with less. It’s also usually not necessary to produce all your content from scratch since we often leave heaps of valuable content just lying around.

Instead, start by taking note of all of your existing content or resources to see what can be repurposed and remixed. For example:

• Slide decks: Repurpose these as videos, blog posts, or key takeaway slide decks.
• First-hand data or research: As long as you use that data safely and in ethical ways, leverage your own data or research to create infographics or news stories.
• Colleagues and coworkers: The expertise of your colleagues can be tapped for video, audio, or transcribed interviews.
• Whitepapers or reports: Break big content pieces into a series of blog posts or social takeaways. We call this content atomization, which we’ll dive into in just a bit.
• Old blog posts: Make minor adjustments and updated with fresh information. Or if they’re all on the same topic, combine them into an uber-post or whitepaper, which is a process we call reverse atomization.

Repurposing content assets takes away some of the strain of having to come up with a million new content ideas. It also helps you efficiently fill gaps in your content schedule. A single content asset can also often give rise to several pieces of content, which we refer to as content atomization. It’s the process of taking one big piece of content and spinning it out into eight smaller pieces of content. For example, an infographic can support a blog post that analyzes the integrity of the data it was based on. You could also include a video which explains the wider ramifications of its findings. So on and so forth.

Content atomization will become your best friend when it comes to content calendaring, so get to know a bit more about it, plus get amazing examples and inspiration here: 49 Tactics to Atomize Your Content Marketing.

Step 2: Identify and Create Your Content Shows

If you’re not familiar with Jay Baer’s concept of creating content shows, you can read his in-depth post about content shows. If you’re already familiar or just want the highlights, content marketers need to start to think like television networks and create content shows. In short, these content shows become predictable, steady, initiatives that our audiences can rely on and recognize. In fact, these shows are something that they actually look forward to.

Content marketers need to start to think like television networks and create content shows.
Click To Tweet

There are 3 types of shows you need to identify within your content:

Binge-worthy shows: These shows are big, steady, ongoing content initiatives that have the same theme and format. They should target at least two audiences, otherwise. they’re not worth the time or effort to produce. These are often podcasts, video series, webinar series, white papers, reports, etc. You should be able to execute this show at least twice per month. These also get plugged into your calendar first.

Binge-worthy show example: I’m a massive fan of Retro Replay, a relatively new weekly YouTube show that pits two of today’s most well-known video game voice actors against some of the most difficult and/or nostalgic video games of the past. It premiers live every Thursday at 4:00 pm PT, and includes a live chat with the hosts. Aside from being super fun to watch, this show is also a fantastic case study for what a true binge-worthy show looks like, plus how to build and engage with an audience. Seriously, check it out.

One-time shows: These shows are special quarterly or yearly shows that attack a major customer pain point or topic. Although they’re less frequent in cadence than binge-worthy shows, they’re still fairly large content pieces. Think white papers, research papers, contests, user-generated content campaigns, etc. These don’t have to have the same level of consistency, but they should still be in line with your branding and voice and tone.

One-time show example: Who doesn’t love CMI’s annual Benchmarks, Budgets and Trends report?! This yearly report is chock-full of goodness. Even though the report varies slightly in design and layout each year, it’s consistent enough that audiences know exactly what to expect.

Regularly scheduled programming: These shows are ongoing content initiatives that round out your calendar, and they don’t have to necessarily connect completely or be 100 percent consistent in theme. Like in the case of blog posts, they may have a different author, topic or format, depending on the content, but they always connect back to the content strategy and have at least one clear audience in mind. Think of them as what a local nightly news show is to any major television network.

Regularly scheduled program example: Convince & Convert’s own blog is our version of regularly scheduled programming. We have our weekly ON newsletter (binge-worthy show) and our big masterclass courses (one-time shows), and then we have our blog to help round out the calendar and provide ongoing information (regularly scheduled programming).

It’s important to note that you most likely already have content shows in your existing content assets, so check your inventory first. It may just be a matter of spinning assets a bit differently, giving them an official show title, or connecting them in more consistent ways.

If you don’t have any shows in your existing content assets, or you need more shows to round out your calendar, then you’ll want to focus on creating new content shows.

Step 3: Plan, Schedule, Publish, Promote, Track and Tweak Your Content

Regular editorial planning meetings between all those involved in content creation should be scheduled well before the next publishing period—be it monthly or quarterly. This meeting can be used to schedule the publishing content from your repository with realistic time frames and to support social media activity, email newsletter inclusions, etc.

Your planning meetings can also be used to review the visit, engagement, and revenue (if available) stats from previous periods to assess which types of content are most successful (and perhaps need to be replicated) and which are less successful (and perhaps need to be rethought).

Analytics (both web and social) and revenue data can also be used to make tweaks to already published content e.g. titles, introductions, outbound links etc to optimize visits and engagement.

Your Free Content Calendar Template (Excel File)

We’ve provided a basic content calendar for you to use. While there are a ton of amazing, wonderful content calendaring platforms and tools, we’ve opted for an Excel spreadsheet. That’s because it’s a great starting place, easy to edit and modify, and almost everyone has the ability to open the file.

Download your free content calendar Excel template now >>

Right click and save as

To add your content to the calendar and get the most out of your content:

1. Start with binge-worthy shows: Add these into your calendar first, and make sure to pay attention to any key dates or big events.
2. Add your one-time specials: Pay attention to how they overlap or complement your binge-worthy shows.
3. Round it out with regularly scheduled programming: Last, but definitely not least, add in your regularly scheduled programming. These should help fill any gaps in your cadence and keep content consistent.
4. Add content to the content repository: Don’t have a place right now in the calendar for some great ideas? Add it to the repository. Let this be your storage solution for great ideas, and check back on it often.

That’s it! Now you can edit and update it, as needed. The actual calendaring part is pretty quick, once you get your shows established. Now, bring this to your editorial meetings, and make sure to keep tabs on how content is performing, so you can adjust your publishing flow and content ideation, as necessary. Happy calendaring!

This post was originally written by Jamie Griffiths in 2014, and extensively updated by Anna Hrach, Digital Strategist here at Convince & Convert, in 2019.

The post How to Build a Content Calendar (Plus a Free Template) appeared first on Convince and Convert: Social Media Consulting and Content Marketing Consulting.

http://bit.ly/2WEj8WX

Facebook’s Future: Growth, Stories, and Oversight

Welcome to this week’s edition of the Social Media Marketing Talk Show, a news show for marketers who want to stay on the leading edge of social media. On this week’s Social Media Marketing Talk Show, we dig into Facebook’s Q4 2018 earnings call with Mari Smith! Watch the Social Media Marketing Talk Show If you’re

The post Facebook’s Future: Growth, Stories, and Oversight appeared first on Social Media Marketing | Social Media Examiner.

http://bit.ly/2SmBQTz

All About Website Page Speed: Issues, Resources, Metrics, and How to Improve

Posted by BritneyMuller

Page speed is an important consideration for your SEO work, but it's a complex subject that tends to be very technical. What are the most crucial things to understand about your site's page speed, and how can you begin to improve? In this week's edition of Whiteboard Friday, Britney Muller goes over what you need to know to get started.

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high resolution version in a new tab!

Video Transcription

Hey, Moz fans. Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Today we're going over all things page speed and really getting to the bottom of why it's so important for you to be thinking about and working on as you do your work.

At the very fundamental level I'm going to briefly explain just how a web page is loaded. That way we can sort of wrap our heads around why all this matters.

How a webpage is loaded

A user goes to a browser, puts in your website, and there is a DNS request. This points at your domain name provider, so maybe GoDaddy, and this points to your server where your files are located, and this is where it gets interesting. So the DOM starts to load all of your HTML, your CSS, and your JavaScript. But very rarely does this one pull all of the needed scripts or needed code to render or load a web page.

Typically the DOM will need to request additional resources from your server to make everything happen, and this is where things start to really slow down your site. Having that sort of background knowledge I hope will help in us being able to triage some of these issues.

Issues that could be slowing down your site

What are some of the most common culprits?

1. First and foremost is images. Large images are the biggest culprit of slow loading web pages.
2. Hosting can cause issues.
3. Plugins, apps, and widgets, basically any third-party script as well can slow down load time.
4. Your theme and any large files beyond that can really slow things down as well.
5. Redirects, the number of hops needed to get to a web page will slow things down.
6. Then JavaScript, which we'll get into in a second.

But all of these things can be a culprit. So we're going to go over some resources, some of the metrics and what they mean, and then what are some of the ways that you can improve your page speed today.

Page speed tools and resources

The primary resources I have listed here are Google tools and Google suggested insights. I think what's really interesting about these is we get to see what their concerns are as far as page speed goes and really start to see the shift towards the user. We should be thinking about that anyway. But first and foremost, how is this affecting people that come to your site, and then secondly, how can we also get the dual benefit of Google perceiving it as higher quality?

We know that Google suggests a website to load anywhere between two to three seconds. The faster the better, obviously. But that's sort of where the range is. I also highly suggest you take a competitive view of that. Put your competitors into some of these tools and benchmark your speed goals against what's competitive in your industry. I think that's a cool way to kind of go into this.

Chrome User Experience Report

This is Chrome real user metrics. Unfortunately, it's only available for larger, popular websites, but you get some really good data out of it. It's housed on Big ML, so some basic SQL knowledge is needed.

Lighthouse

Lighthouse, one of my favorites, is available right in Chrome Dev Tools. If you are on a web page and you click Inspect Element and you open up Chrome Dev Tools, to the far right tab where it says Audit, you can run a Lighthouse report right in your browser.

What I love about it is it gives you very specific examples and fixes that you can do. A fun fact to know is it will automatically be on the simulated fast 3G, and notice they're focused on mobile users on 3G. I like to switch that to applied fast 3G, because it has Lighthouse do an actual run of that load. It takes a little bit longer, but it seems to be a little bit more accurate. Good to know.

Page Speed Insights

Page Speed Insights is really interesting. They've now incorporated Chrome User Experience Report. But if you're not one of those large sites, it's not even going to measure your actual page speed. It's going to look at how your site is configured and provide feedback according to that and score it. Just something good to be aware of. It still provides good value.

Test your mobile website speed and performance

I don't know what the title of this is. If you do, please comment down below. But it's located on testmysite.thinkwithgoogle.com. This one is really cool because it tests the mobile speed of your site. If you scroll down, it directly ties it into ROI for your business or your website. We see Google leveraging real-world metrics, tying it back to what's the percentage of people you're losing because your site is this slow. It's a brilliant way to sort of get us all on board and fighting for some of these improvements.

Pingdom and GTmetrix are non-Google products or non-Google tools, but super helpful as well.

Site speed metrics

So what are some of the metrics?

First paint

We're going to go over first paint, which is basically just the first non-blank paint on a screen. It could be just the first pixel change. That initial change is first paint.

First contentful paint

First contentful paint is when the first content appears. This might be part of the nav or the search bar or whatever it might be. That's the first contentful paint.

First meaningful paint

First meaningful paint is when primary content is visible. When you sort of get that reaction of, "Oh, yeah, this is what I came to this page for," that's first meaningful paint.

Time to interactive

Time to interactive is when it's visually usable and engage-able. So we've all gone to a web page and it looks like it's done, but we can't quite use it yet. That's where this metric comes in. So when is it usable for the user? Again, notice how user-centric even these metrics are. Really, really neat.

DOM content loaded

The DOM content loaded, this is when the HTML is completely loaded and parsed. So some really good ones to keep an eye on and just to be aware of in general.

Ways to improve your page speedHTTP/2

HTTP/2 can definitely speed things up. As to what extent, you have to sort of research that and test.

Preconnect, prefetch, preload

Preconnect, prefetch, and preload really interesting and important in speeding up a site. We see Google doing this on their SERPs. If you inspect an element, you can see Google prefetching some of the URLs so that it has it faster for you if you were to click on some of those results. You can similarly do this on your site. It helps to load and speed up that process.

Enable caching & use a content delivery network (CDN)

Caching is so, so important. Definitely do your research and make sure that's set up properly. Same with CDNs, so valuable in speeding up a site, but you want to make sure that your CDN is set up properly.

Compress images

The easiest and probably quickest way for you to speed up your site today is really just to compress those images. It's such an easy thing to do. There are all sorts of free tools available for you to compress them. Optimizilla is one. You can even use free tools on your computer, Save for Web, and compress properly.

Minify resources

You can also minify resources. So it's really good to be aware of what minification, bundling, and compression do so you can have some of these more technical conversations with developers or with anyone else working on the site.

So this is sort of a high-level overview of page speed. There's a ton more to cover, but I would love to hear your input and your questions and comments down below in the comment section.

I really appreciate you checking out this edition of Whiteboard Friday, and I will see you all again soon. Thanks so much. See you.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

http://bit.ly/2UAAr9v

Facebook Ad Sequences: A Better Way to Acquire Customers

Want to lower the cost of your Facebook ads? Curious how connecting with your customers can help? To explore Facebook ad sequences that cost less and improve results, I interview Amanda Bond, a leading Facebook ads expert. Her course is The StrADegy System. She’s a regular speaker at Social Media Marketing World and a HubSpot

The post Facebook Ad Sequences: A Better Way to Acquire Customers appeared first on Social Media Marketing | Social Media Examiner.

http://bit.ly/2Gky0DU

6 Ways Social Listening Can Help Your SEO

Gone are the days of SEO being a straightforward process of keyword research, on-page optimization and link building. As Google adds other factors to its algorithm and learns to assess website quality in a human-like way, SEO becomes intertwined with other marketing tactics. One of these tactics is social listening, which has been mainly used for social media marketing until recently. In this post, I explain how social listening can benefit your SEO.

First things first: let’s figure out the meaning behind “social listening”. The term describes what social media listening (also called social media monitoring) tools do. They crawl the Web, news, blogs, forums and social media platforms (Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, etc.) to find mention of any given keywords. Keywords are usually brand names, words that describe the industry or people’s names (e.g. a CEO, an author, an artist).

Using social listening for SEO requires proper knowledge and skill. It’s very important to set specific goals and know the details of how to conduct a proper search. Here’s how to go about it:

1. Find unlinked brand mentions and turn them into links. 

With link building still being at the core of any SEO strategy, it’s vital to cover all such opportunities. Here’s the one you might not have thought about: turning existing brand mentions into links.

If your brand has been around for a while, or if your brand, company or a specific product has had any kind of popularity at some point, it’s almost certain that there are mentions of your brand on the Internet: on blogs, forums, news sites or just somewhere on the Web. Obviously, not all of them will link back to your site: writers don’t care about promoting anyone else but themselves; they don’t have your SEO goals in mind, and the idea of linking might’ve never even crossed their minds. However, that doesn’t mean they would have a problem with adding a link if you ask them. So the only real challenge here is to find the linkless mentions. This is where social listening is relevant.

To be fair, you won’t be able to get linkless mentions with every social listening tool: you’ll need one with the Boolean search mode. With Boolean search, the user sets up the search query manually using the Boolean operators, such as AND, OR, AND NOT etc. So in the case of finding linkless mentions, the user should type their brand name as a keyword and add AND NOT link:yoursite.com/* . Tools that have Boolean search as their option include Awario (disclosure: I work for the company), Talkwalker, and Brandwatch.

2. Monitor new links to your site.

Modern link building means knowing where and how your backlinks are being built. First, it’s useful to know marketing purposes: what if you can get more out of the website that already links to you? Second, you’ve got to know if your backlinks are coming from quality sites, because, as we know, links from the spammy and untrustworthy sites can seriously hurt the rankings.

With social listening, you find out about any new links anywhere on the Internet in real time. To start looking for new links, type your site’s URL in a website/web page field, which is available in most social media monitoring tools, and choose to search from limited sources: the Web plus news/blogs. This will exclude mentions that come from social media platforms (e.g. Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, etc.). You can also use the link: operator if your tool offers Boolean search.

3. Find guest blogging opportunities. 

Any SEO will tell you that guest blogging is a sound link-building strategy. It will not bring you a sudden rankings boost, but it’s a solid, tried and true way to build up your site’s reputation. This is why finding guest post opportunities is an ongoing task for many marketers. While there are always a couple of blogs that are easy to find but impossible to get featured on, there are also other blogs which are harder to find because they are not in the first two pages of Google. Yet, they might be more relevant and have a more loyal audience — that’s what usually happens in smaller communities. These blog editors are also more likely to publish your articles. 

These guest blogging opportunities can be found with social listening. To find relevant blogs, type in the keywords that describe your industry (or rather a range of topics you’d like to write about) and wait for the tool to find:

• all blogs that talk about this topic: you can go through them and find the ones you didn’t know about.
• social media influencers in that industry (people with a large following that talk about your topic a lot). Go through the people in the list of influencers (all tools mentioned before offer a feature to find influencers) to see which ones have a website with a blog. You’ll be surprised to find out just how many have a relevant (maybe not that well made) website with a dedicated audience. 

There are a number of other ways to find guest posting opportunities with a social media listening tool. All of them go beyond your usual methods and are worth checking out!

4. Keep an eye on your brand’s reputation. 

In 2010, a horrible story appeared in the New York Times. In it, the author explained how negative reputation could help brands rank better in Google and cause more sales, as bad reviews generated links and buzz around the brand. The whole approach received a name: negative advertising. Merchants were acting badly on purpose, making their customers angry and, therefore, more likely to write passionate, albeit angry reviews. 

Of course, that wasn’t a good thing for Google, and after the problem became apparent, they announced they incorporated an algorithmic solution to down-rank brands that provide poor user experience. We don’t know how it works now, although they talked about their “world-class sentiment analysis system” at some point. We do know it works, though. No more similar cases were in sight. 

You are probably not one of those terrible marketers willing to torture their clients just to get higher in Google. However, social media crises do happen even to the best of brands with the best intentions. And a social media crisis can result not only in a long-term reputation problem but also in a serious ranking drop.

This is why it’s important to keep an eye on the sentiment around your brand. A social media tool with a built-in sentiment analysis will help you notice any suspicious spikes in time and take care of the problem before it goes viral or gets big enough for Google’s algorithm to notice. 

5. Grow brand mentions. 

While link building is still absolutely essential in SEO, it is becoming less and less so. You can see how passionately Google is working towards new ways of figuring out the real value of websites, understanding their content, and being more and more capable of evaluating the Internet the way humans do. And the Internet is much more than just links. These days it’s more about being popular, going viral, being heard in its various corners. And, most of all, the Internet is about social media: taken together, the single most used websites that don’t have any dofollow links. 

What does it tell us? That we should shift our attention to linkless mentions. And it’s not just our speculation. In 2017, Google Webmaster Trends Analyst Gary Illyes said in his keynote at Brighton SEO the following:

“If you publish high-quality content that is highly cited on the internet — and I’m not talking about just links, but also mentions on social networks and people talking about your branding, crap like that. Then you are doing great.”

At the same time, we know that Panda patent talks about “implied links” as a signal that could be no less important than backlinks. An implied link is defined as “a reference to a target resource, e.g., a citation to the target resource, which is included in a source resource but is not an express link to the target resource”. Sounds like a mention! 

This is why you should work towards growing brand mentions. With social listening, you can, firstly, track brand mentions. Knowing when, where, and in relation to what brand mentions appear will no doubt give you a much better idea as to how to grow more. For example, should your marketing strategy focus more on social media? If so, on which platforms? Or maybe, you have to move to forums and blogs (e.g., try marketing on Reddit?)

Second, you can imply new techniques of growing brand mentions, such as social selling and influencer marketing. 

6. Learn from your competitors. 

All the tips above can be used to monitor your competitors and discover where they get links, where they guest post, which influencers they work with, and so on. All this information can be used in your own marketing and SEO strategy. 

The workflow is as straightforward as it gets: everything that you’ve done for your brand can be completed using your competitors’ brand names and URLs. Creating a different alert for every vital competitor will make the task even easier and let you see your progress compared to that of your competitors in a clear and detailed way.

Conclusion

Social listening is full of possibilities. It’s this new, not-totally-explored-yet technology that slowly changes the way we do digital marketing. Try using it for SEO and you might see changes you never expected to see. 

The post 6 Ways Social Listening Can Help Your SEO appeared first on Convince and Convert: Social Media Consulting and Content Marketing Consulting.

http://bit.ly/2WtM4Rv

How to Get Verified on Instagram – The Latest Advice and Analysis

Marketing budgets are shifting to influencer marketing on Instagram, so it should come as no surprise that more and more social media influencers (and wannabe influencers) are wondering how to get verified on Instagram.

Social Media Verification

Currently, most prominent celebrities, politicians and athletes from all over the world are active on Instagram and make use of it to interact with their fans globally. So, what makes these high profile entities distinguish themselves over social media? The answer is simple: It’s the blue tick that appears next to the name or handle of a person on their profile page. This tick ensures that you get the privilege to appear on top of searches and yield even more influence on Instagram. This is why how to get verified on Instagram is a popular subject of conversation amongst influencers.

I personally have become verified for my personal account on both Twitter (@NealSchaffer) and Facebook (Neal Schaffer on Facebook), although I have not yet become verified on Instagram.

http://bit.ly/2sXrqvj

How to Organize Social Media Marketing Tasks: 3 Tools

Do you need to bring some organization to your social media workflow? Looking for tools to help? In this article, you’ll discover three tools to help you better organize social media posting, monitoring, and campaign execution tasks. #1: Plan Your Social Media Schedule With ContentCal One of the biggest challenges for multi-platform social media managers

The post How to Organize Social Media Marketing Tasks: 3 Tools appeared first on Social Media Marketing | Social Media Examiner.

http://bit.ly/2BcHpdD