“You must be online all the time.” We like it when it seems that way. It’s kind of like a magic trick.
Last I checked, no one pays me to just sit around online and be cool all day. I’m not a Kardashian (but if one of you wants to pay me $10,000 for a tweet, please let me know).
We have to balance being an example of the kinds of online business marketing we recommend to clients, and actually having time to do our work and live a balanced life. And this means, like everyone who wants to market online, we have time, energy, and financial constraints.
Since no one pays us to be cool for the sake of being cool, we don’t spend a lot of time on it. In total, we aim to spend about 3 hours a week on the BEC blog and website, Twitter, Facebook, monthly email newsletter, and the things we use more sparingly like Google+, Youtube, and LinkedIn.
To make sure we get done what we need to get done daily, weekly, monthly, and quarterly, we have an editorial calendar.
Wow, that sounds fancy right? Well it really isn’t. It’s just a term from the newspaper industry that is sort of useful way to think ahead.
If you are more of a visual person, you lay out what you are going to do, per day or if you are completely obsessed per hour, in calendar format.
If you are more linear, you can put it in a spreadsheet.
Here’s ours for this month where you see blog posts and newsletter topics (we have tweets and Facebook stuff in another tab):
Appreciate the color coded combination by topic: tech, business, fun. Guess which color is which?
Are we guessing what we are blogging about? Do we wonder when the email newsletter will get sent out? Nope. Because we took the time to think of it ahead. Then I can do things like write 2-3 blog posts in a row and schedule them to go online at different times. And seem like a mysterious person who is always online.
This calendar also allows us to divide up the workload, make notes for when the task is actually getting done, and tie efforts together (ex: Promote the email newsletter in the blog post the day before it’s going to go out).
For our social media clients, this is the first thing we do to get ourselves organized… and so that they know what to expect from us.
Kind of anal retentive? Maybe. Causing less confusion and helping us get more done faster? Definitely. Try making your own calendar and let us know if it helps you!
For your bloggers/social media-ers: do you have a schedule/editorial calendar like this? And maybe more interestingly, how do you make yourself stick to it?