In this lesson, you’ll learn how to:

1. Implement a standard for managing your editorial schedule to give yourself accountability to publish

on time.

2. Save time later on by not reworking half-baked ideas or adding more to your scope after a project is already

in progress.

3. Publish quickly with a thought-out strategy that focuses on reaching your goals.

Note: This worksheet suggests meeting with your team to gather advice several times throughout the process. Some folks are adverse to meetings, thinking they aren’t productive. To the contrary, helping your team feel like a part of the process—that they defined how you’ll all work together to succeed—will help everyone take ownership in the success of getting organized.

That positive emotional experience will help you keep your editorial schedule on track. I highly suggest communicating with your team frequently throughout this process, though you could fill out this entire worksheet and book a workshop of sorts with your team to run through your thought process all at once.

Section 1 ////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

Define Your Team Responsibilities And Roles

Brainstorm all the steps you may need to plan, create, publish, and promote the perfect blog post: – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –

In that list, circle the minimum number of steps you need to make an amazing post successful. Hint: Ideas, writing, designing, editing, and promoting probably should be on your list to ensure a successful process.

How To Use Your Time Effectively With Even Better Project Management And Organization

Rewrite the minimum amount of responsibilities necessary to ensure a successful blog post from the points you just circled. Write these steps in chronological order from first to last.

Note: The fewer the steps, the better. The easier you make this process, the more likely you’ll be to follow through. Think strategically about the amount of work you can realistically invest in every blog post you publish, and create a process that reflects that amount of effort. You’re aiming for this to be a real strategy you can seriously execute—not hopes and dreams of perfection.

For each of the steps you just created, list the names of people in your company who will need to help you to make your blog posts successful. Based on their responsibilities, give that person a role.Tip: The numbers in this list should match the steps you outlined above. Step 1 in your process will match the person or people you mention in point 1 in this list.

Steps People Role

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Role Responsibilities

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For the roles you gave to your team members, write a brief definition of their responsibilities. This exercise will help you communicate your expectations for their involvement in your process:

Meet with each person you’d like to involve in your team to introduce them to your idea. While you won’t have much detail on your process at the moment, your meeting agenda will cover:

–Your goals with your editorial schedule (5 minutes).

–How you intend to meet those goals (10 minutes).

–Why this person is the best one suited for her role and responsibilities (10 minutes).

–Questions and answers (5 minutes).

Focus On Your Team's Strengths

Those who write about the topics they love and know like the back of their hand are going to create superb content that your audience is going to love. Gather information from your team to help you focus on their strengths:

Go to Google Drive, log in to your Google account, and click the "New" button. Select "Google Forms", which

is sometimes under the "More" popout.

Name your survey.

Add questions to help you classify what roles each person in your team would like to pursue, their strengths,

their interests, their preferred content formats, and their audience. Questions could be:

What role would you like to play in content marketing?

What type of content would you like to create?

What do you enjoy most when it comes to creating content?

What topics most interest you?

Who would you like to write for?

Click the "Send Form" button. Grab the link to share your survey and send it to your team or enter email

addresses to send the survey right there.

Review the responses by exporting a spreadsheet which is now your go-to resource when you decide how to organize your team.

Section 2 ////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

Communicate E�ciently With Agreed-Upon Tools And Processes

Project management is tough unless everyone on the team is using the same tools and processes. It’s time to choose

the tools you’ll use to flawlessly execute the process you’re organizing.

Brainstorm a list of current tools you use for team communication and workflow:

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Brainstorm a list of current tools you use for idea generation and planning:

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Brainstorm a list of current tools you use for actually creating the content:

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Brainstorm a list of tools you don’t have now but need to make your editorial schedule successful:

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The goal now is to consolidate the number of tools you use to get more organized.

In the three lists of tools you currently use, cross out the ones you could consolidate into other tools (whether

new or ones you already use).

Critically analyze your list of new tools you might need to organize your editorial schedule. Cross out the ones

you could consolidate into other tools (whether new or ones you already use). The goal is to choose the best

tools for the process, not just the ones you already have. Take this into consideration in your critique.

Re-write the short list of tools you’ll use in your process, along with a definition of how you’ll use each tool (the purpose of it existing in your process):

Tool Purpose

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Organize Your Process And Naming Conventions

While everyone on your team could manage content di�erently, it’s much more e�cient to have one version of the truth for your process:

Understand where you will save content.

Understand how you will name your files with the goal of simplicity:

Use ISO date standard format at the beginning of your file names for dating your files (YYYY-MM-DD)

to organize your file structure.

Use keywords in your file names.

Use some descriptive information to help you understand what you’ll find when you click to open

the file.

Example: content-development-process-halloween-diagram.jpg Apply this structure to your files, folders, and notebooks to help everyone manage your content consistently.

Review your tool and organization process ideas with your team.

Show your thoughts from “Communicate E�ciently With Agreed-Upon Tools And Processes” and “Organize

Your Process And Naming Conventions" to your team to gather their input (you could save time by doing this

virtually, or you could meet in person to discuss your thought process).

Agree as a team to commit to using these tools together. Remember, learning something new takes time, but

retrogressing back to less productive behavior impacts the entire team negatively. Set a period of time

(possibly three months) to learn the tools and processes.

Schedule a retrospective meeting three months from now to review lessons learned.

Section 3 ////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

Run The Perfect Content Planning Meeting

In the first lesson of this course, you planned out the first leg of your editorial schedule. As you work your way through the first blog posts you'll publish, it's time to involve the team even more in the groundwork of your strategy to help them feel like the owners of the work they'll create.

1. Content Brainstorming (What should we write about next?)Timeline: 25 minutes In your meeting invite, ask everyone to come prepared with several ideas.

Review recent success stories.

Check out new trends in the industry.

Review your blog post ideas backlog.

Brainstorm new ideas based on recent lessons learned with your blog post performance.

2. Theme Discovery (Make a high-level game plan.)Timeline: 15 minutes

What topics do you need to cover right now?

What key themes are important to your schedule?

3. Scheduling (Decide who, what, and when.)Timeline: 20 minutes

List the blog posts you’ll create, pulling the best ideas from your content brainstorming area. Choose who, what, and when:

Idea Who When

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Schedule your next content planning meeting for when you’ll be halfway through publishing these ideas. The timeline will depend on how aggressive your editorial schedule is.

Define Your Blog Post Requirements

For each blog post idea in the to-be-scheduled list you just created, write a creative brief of notes to help your writer stay on point to deliver the content you expect while avoiding time-intensive revisions. Answer the following questions for every blog post idea:

What problem does this blog post solve for our readers?

Turn the problem into a user story to help your writer approach the content creation through the lens of the reader.Tip: This helps you answer the question, “What’s in it for me?” Readers consume blog posts because they are selfish—they need the information for some reason. This helps you understand what that reason is.

As a __________, I want to __________ that will help me __________.

What type of blog post will this be?

List

Research, data-driven

Success sharing

New method

Infographic

Expert advice

Guest post

Case study Other: __________

What additional content formats does this blog post need to be successful?

Header graphic

Inline graphics/charts

Video

Podcast

Webinar

Description of additional content formats and their purpose:

Add the ideas, along with their creative briefs, into your editorial calendar according to the schedule you just defined.

Section 4 ////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

Try This Breakthrough Approach For Your Workflow

For each of the steps you identified in section 1, break them down into specific tasks that will ensure a successful blog post. Remember: The simplest approach is always the best place to start.

Step 1: ________________________________________

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3. Re-write those tasks to begin with a verb you can assign to a team member.Example: Start every task with a verb that specifically tells your team what they need to do: Task #1 | Write blog post | Nathan | 14 days before publish

Work backward from your publish date to plan deadlines for each of the tasks that are realistically achievable

for every team member. If it helps, include the team members’ names in the table.

Review this workflow with your team to get their feedback.

Add this workflow into your task templates in CoSchedule or your other editorial calendar.

Task Who Deadline

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Manage Multiple Projects At Once While Nailing Every Deadline

There is always room for improvement. As you move forward, you may feel the need to tweak your workflow to help you meet your deadlines—especially once you get multiple blog posts in the works at once.

Review the tools, timelines, habits, and distractions that are preventing you from getting things done.

Dissect every detail of your workflow, not skimping on any minor details.

Locate roadblocks and problem areas and solutions to the issues:

Get organized now, and e�ciency will follow (which means you will save time and do the right things):

1. Do one thing well. Actually, as we like to joke, "Don't half-ass two things. Whole-ass one thing." It's silly, but

there's a lot of truth to that.

2. Set your deadlines, ship on time, then reflect on what worked, what you could do better next time, and what you should stop doing.

3. Once you have your process ironed out for that one thing, add in another project. And do it slowly, just like

you perfected your first project.

4. Plan time to reflect on your growing pains as you add more projects to your editorial schedule, reviewing

again what's going well, what you could improve, and what you should quit doing.

So start slow and build your publishing momentum as you learn something new, building toward publishing more content consistently. At first, you’re perfecting your content and workflow process to build the expertise you need to publish even more.

Remember: You've got this!

Roadblocks Solutions

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The marketing calendar for everything.

“I use CoSchedule to promote every new blog post and to re-promote my most popular posts on a regular basis. It is a one-stop solution.

It is simple, elegant, and an indispensable part of my toolbox.”–Michael Hyatt, Award-Winning Author & Blogger

Nathan AdlerRiverScene

Michael HyattAuthor

Jay BearConvince & Convert

Learn more at coschedule.com

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