Harness Your Digital Content with an Editorial Calendar & a Process Flow

Have you ever struggled to create content on an on-going basis?  I know that I have had those moments and so have my clients.

When one of my clients approached me today to ask me to create her a system to harness her digital content and reduce the amount of original content she needed to write each month, I came up with the process that follows.  Naturally, I wanted to share it with all of you so that you can also use this system to create a content flow that doesn’t take up all of your free time.

First Step: The Process Flow

You’ll want to modify this for your own business and you might find that you don’t need to (or want to) use some of these content streams.  For example, not all of you will be doing podcasts or vlogs.  So, just use the pieces you do have in place in your business, add a few new ones or replace them with content streams you do produce for.

1. Pick three topics for the month (1st of every month)

• Ex: social media, Internet marketing and technology
• Take a look at any important dates that month that you can tie into your content… ie: summer holidays or the upcoming new year – this will help you generate even more traffic

2. From those three topics, create a blog post title for each but don’t write them just yet

• Ex: how to host a Twitter chat, how to get more people onto your list and best tech for hosting webinars

3. Write one blog post and post it to the blog (or preschedule it using a tool like Arkli… more on that later)

• Choose the one subject that you have the most to say about as we’ll use this as a launching point for other items in the process

4. Create a vlog based on that blog post

• Using the blog post you already posted, expand more on the subject in your vlog
• In the video, be sure to mention the blog post where people can go to continue the conversation
• Post this vlog as a separate blog post

5. Create two podcasts based on the other two topics

• Using the other two chosen topics, create podcasts around them, writing out your script in full
• Use the script from your podcast as the blog post copy and use the podcast recording as a download
• Be sure to syndicate your podcast to somewhere like iTunes so people can get it automatically

6. Submit one article per month

• Taking one of your blog posts, have the post edited into an article
• Post to many article sites manually or use a service like Submit Your Article to help
• If you happen to write unique content, rework it into a blog post (or two) and preschedule these on your future editorial calendar

Second Step: Social Media Updates

Social media updates should be done at every step of the way. The best way to do this is to have an automatic system in place to post and publish your content.

I use Arkli.com as my social media campaign manager as it allows for timed content and timed social media updates to happen flawlessly. For example, I can upload a blog post or YouTube video and have it post next Tuesday at 1:30pm and then have a series of social media updates, related to that post or video, go out afterward. Nothing needs to be pre-posted or waited on.

If you don’t want to invest in Arkli, at the very least you need to have a few things in place. Your blog should automatically ping your social networks once it goes live, as should your YouTube videos. You should also use Hootsuite to plan some social media updates once the content is up to bring people back to it a few times. Posting about your new blog post once will not reach everyone.

You should also tap into your list and send regular updates that point people to all of the fresh, new content. Your first blog post, for example, could be the feature article in your newsletter and you should link out to everything else you’re doing. For that reason, monthly newsletters should recap the month (sent toward the end of the month) and highlight what’s coming.

Third Step: The Calendar

In this section, the bulleted list represents the days of the month.  Modify to suit your own schedule but I’ve proposed an example outline for those of you who don’t want to do any work.  Simply copy, plan and execute!  Dates that are left blank simply mean that you do nothing on those days.

Talk it Through…

I’d love to hear your progress reports, modified calendars or any content harnessing tips and tricks that you might have!  Leave a comment on this blog post and share your experiences with producing and organizing digital content.

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