Well, I guess we can’t really say that we’re at the beginning of the year any more, seeing as it’s the first of February.
If you haven’t already, it’s time to start planning your yearly editorial calendar. It’s a great, and really structured way for planning editorial content around holidays for your blog, Facebook, etc.
You’ll need to start with some kind of a calendar, printed is an option, or you can use a tool like Google Calendar.
Next up, get a resource like the one below that lists all the holidays for the year.
Now you can start to plot in the dates on your calendar. For each of the dates, brainstorm some ideas for posts around those dates.
For example: Valentine’s Day
- Blog: decadent Chocolate dessert recipe (publish 1-2 weeks before V-day)
- Facebook: Silly Valentine’s Day memes
- Twitter: Share links to your blog post, or publish similar memes to the ones on Facebook, use the hashtag #valentinesday
- Instagram: photos that feature roses, love, chocolate, candy hearts, use the trending hashtags
- YouTube: demonstrating recipe on how to make decadent chocolate dessert, makeup technique for a romantic date
Once you have brainstormed a list of ideas, you can start to work backwards and plug them into your calendar. You know you want the posts to be published at an optimal time so they get the most traffic, so you’ll have to work on them prior to that and plan ahead.
Hijacking a holiday can be a great way to get blog traffic, because people are already searching for those popular keywords or hashtags.
Don’t forget about past year’s posts that are holiday-related. Be sure to pull them out and recycle them. You can either build a page dedicated to all your posts for that particular holiday, or create a post with all of them. Be sure to reshare them on your social networks with the appropriate hashtags. Valentine’s recipes will trend, no matter if they are a couple of years old.
Here is an American version of the holiday calendar.
What tools do you use to create an editorial calendar?
