I believe that having a calendar for your content is one of the main steps in your content marketing planning. Today, we’re going to show you 3 plugins to create an editorial calendar in WordPress.
For example, I’m used to working with several tools at the same time (I even use a computer with 2 monitors and notebook). They are essential tools like Evernote for important notes, Chrome, Outlook, among others that end up being open simultaneously. However, I understand that there are people who prefer to open as few windows as possible and, if possible, do everything within WordPress itself better.
This goes for planning the publishing schedule for your blog. You could use Excel, which would give you much more freedom for this task. But, the good news is that there are plugins that can suit you and help you set a publishing date in an organized way, for each post.
Plugins for Creating Editorial Calendars
Editorial Calendar
Editorial Calendar is one of the most popular, for good reason. It’s simple, but it has what a blog needs to stay organized with the posts.
Posts can be easily moved from one date to another, and you can still see what days you have posts scheduled, whether they are draft status, scheduled or published.
This is a free and great plugin to start with. However, if your blog grows and you have multiple authors, this plugin will not suit you.
Edit Flow
Edit Flow is one of the best free WordPress plugins for creating and managing editorial calendar for multi-author blogs. Features such as editorial comments, custom status notification, and user groups. This makes it easy for blog owners to rely on collaboration from other team members.
For example, the editorial comment feature provides the opportunity for team members working on a specific post (writer, editor, etc.) to communicate with notes within the panel of that specific post. This improves communication, reduces email and keeps all conversations about the post in one place.
Custom statuses help you quickly see how things are for each post. For example, if you have an editor on your team, it can filter posts by “Need Edit” status and find only those that need editing. As the name implies, these statuses can be customized to suit the workflow you create on your blog.
CoSchedule
CoSchedule is a premium WordPress plugin that costs $10/month. As expected, it has more features than the two plugins I mentioned.
The thing that makes this plugin different from the others is that, besides being able to leave notes for other team members, you can actually add tasks for each post and assign them to team members. The tasks can be anything you want.
Also, you can create and program social media posts while you write your post, so that you don’t forget to do it later. This can help you to be more consistent with your presence in social media, and can bring more social media referral traffic to your blog.
If you are getting started, this plugin may be more than what you need. But it’s still worth it, even for a single blog.