Part I - Mastering your content calendar: A 2024 goal guide for writers and authors
Have you ever wondered how companies seem to know what to write every week of the year like they are some sort of magic toad that never gets blocked? I'm about to blow your mind...
Hi Friends,
This is a brand new year and I’m trying our a brand new format. You have told me that my posts are very long, so I’m trying to break them up over multiple days and make them easier to read. This is a big change for me, so I’d love your feedback about how you like it.
As for the article, I was talking to my dear wife a few weeks back about making a content calendar for her company, which led to me going down a deep and delicious rabbit hole about how to create a content calendar.
That led me to create a simplistic sample content calendar proposal for her using ChatGPT1 which led me to use it to help me plan my own 2024 content calendar2, which then led to this article for you. As usual, I’ve packed it full of information and drawn on my own experiences so you have plenty of take-aways to inform your own work.
Do you use a content calendar or any kind of planning tool for your content? Want to jump on the strategic content train with me this year? Who are you bringing with you?
Let’s go!
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I recommend reading (and spending some time with) my companion articles;
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STOP ONE - How we feel…
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I’ll be honest. The thought of creating a content calendar makes my jaw clenches and every hair on my body stand on end. Then, this song just starts playing in my head.
Now, I love that song quite a bit, but only because it mocks the idea of creating random content for mass consumption. Yet, here we are, talking about how to create a content calendar because the cosmos has a sense of humor!
So why, if I find creating a content calendar so disagreeable, am I talking about creating one? Why oh why?!
Because my friends, life is insufferably long and you have to keep doing this work forever. After enough time, you just run out of things to talk about and it’s nice to have something to fall back on and say;
“Oh yeah, I am gonna write about that now because past me told me it would be a good idea.”
Thanks past Russell - you’re a true gem!!
I have been writing articles about building a creative business since 2008 and it’s so hard guys. It’s so hard to keep having things to say, but if you don’t have things to say then people will fade away and stop paying attention. Or maybe they won’t. I know the whole thing about subscriptions is that people are there to support you, but like…they do eventually want some decent content. 👀
People ask me all the time how I keep having things to say and the truth is that until this year it wasn’t much of a problem because I didn’t have a publication to feed. I could write when I wanted to write and not write when I didn’t want to write.
AI is homogeneity on steroids and I find it the perfect resource when I want to stop sabotaging myself and actually write something people want to read.
Additionally, I have a tendency to climb onto the same 4-5 hobby horses repeatedly and readers can only deal with so many essays on how hypercapitalism is destroying their creativity and making them miserable before their eyes glaze over.
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So, a content calendar helps me talk about new things, give myself direction, and keep my focus on the rails.
I still hate it, though. I hate it so much that it’s taking everything in my power not to flip this computer over and light it on fire. If you’re like me and fight against your best interests until you’re beaten and bruised, then creating a content calendar is one of the benefits of using an AI program like ChatGPT to help you.
I actually used it to create this content calendar for 2024. I can’t say I will stick with it every week, but it is nice to have a structure to fall back on if I don’t have any ideas.
And here’s the BEST bit; it will keep me ahead of my own game! Who doesn’t want that? This is where I think AI can be seriously effective, at augmenting and enhancing us, instead of stealing our jobs.3
You see, content calendars should be based on best practices to some degree, and AI is great at generating generic, bland, middle-of-the-road analyses culled from billions of (often stolen)4 sources.
AI is homogeneity on steroids and I find it the perfect resource when I want to stop sabotaging myself and actually write something people want to read.
It can’t force me to do it well or in a manner that won’t turn off people who read it, but at the very least it can compile best practices from across the internet. 🌍 💻
CONFESSION: If you cannot tell, this is an article my AI editor told me to write because January is all about setting priorities and creating calendars we stick to for the better part of three weeks before our bad habits creep in and ruin our lives again.
If you’re like me and fight against your best interests until you’re beaten and bruised, then creating a content calendar is one of the benefits of using an AI program like ChatGPT to help you.
I’m not saying you should become a slave to an omniscient AI that hallucinates more than Keith Richards on LSD, but it is nice to have an arsenal of posts in your library that you can reference when people ask things like:
“How do I defeat writer’s block?” and
“How do you know what to write every week?”
This is me trying to stop self-sabotaging myself in 2024 by admitting to a bunch of (brilliant) writers that I used generative AI to help me plan my first article of the year.
This may have been ill-advised, but I am in it now…deep into it. When’s the next stop?
Still with me? Good!
STOP TWO - So… what is a ‘Content Calendar’?
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A content calendar (also known as an “editorial calendar”) is a written schedule of when and where you plan to publish upcoming content. Content calendars typically include upcoming pieces, status updates, planned promotional activity, partnerships, and updates to existing content. - Brian Dean5
At its most basic level, a content calendar organizes the basic unit of publishing (articles) and lays them out in a manner that makes sense across a certain period of time.
So, as I mentioned above, January usually sees a lot of traffic related to setting goals and focuses on prioritization. Because of that, it behooves us as creators to create content about those topics in January because traffic is at its peak during that time.
For instance, this is the Google Trend6 line for Halloween in the past year.
By this, you can see that if you start talking about Halloween before July, people are just not going to care. This is why if you are launching a Kickstarter for a Halloween book, you should launch it close to Halloween.
Even though people won’t get the book until after Halloween, you still want to launch as close to Halloween as possible because that is when traffic, attention, and excitement will be at their peak.
By contrast, this is the trend line for Christmas.
Again, this tells us that we probably shouldn’t talk about Christmas in March. In the same way, we can use Google Trends to find trend lines for all sorts of things.
You are more than welcome to tune out and do your own thing. Maybe it will work. However, if you release a Christmas book in March, it’s probably not going to do well because nobody cares about Christmas in March.
Or we can just Google “What should I write about in March?” And there’s probably a billion of these articles out there because we’re all trying to get that good good SEO which means creating homogenous articles meant to scale.
STOP 3 - What is SEO?
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SEO means Search Engine Optimization and is the process used to optimize a website's technical configuration, content relevance and link popularity so its pages can become easily findable, more relevant and popular towards user search queries, and as a consequence, search engines rank them better.
Search engines recommend SEO efforts that benefit both the user search experience and page’s ranking, by featuring content that fulfills user search needs. This includes the use of relevant keywords in titles, meta descriptions, and headlines (H1), featuring descriptive URLs with keywords rather than strings of numbers, and schema markup to specify the page's content meaning, among other SEO best practices. -Mailchimp 7
For a long time, SEO was how you won the internet. If you could rank high for relevant terms in your industry, people would find your website more than your competitors, which would lead to you being found more, widening the gaps between yourself and everyone else.
That gap between yourself and others is how you build attention arbitrage.
What's Attention Arbitrage? It's the practice of people selling your attention to other people. The attention sellers (in the online world examples are platforms like Google, Facebook, LinkedIn etc.) sell the opportunity to gain the attention of their community members or subscribers. -AOK Marketing 8
I searched the internet for a good 20 minutes to find a definition of attention arbitrage, and the above was the one that came up again and again on search, meaning it is highly optimized for that search term.
It so happens, though, that I hate that definition even if it is the best one that I found. That is one of the downsides of SEO. It often surfaces middle-of-the-road but easily shareable articles to the top.
In short, arbitrage results from a gap between demand and supply. If there is more demand than supply, the delta, or difference, between the two is arbitrage.
For attention arbitrage, we are trying to create a gap between ourselves and others in the industry. The wider the gap, the more we will create a self-propagating cycle where the gap widens. I tell clients “the wider the gap, the wider the gap.”
That gap between yourself and others is how you build attention arbitrage.
It’s very hard to wedge yourself into a topic and create a gap. One of the ways we can do that is by leveraging attention around a topic to bring traffic to your publication. It’s why you see lots of think pieces about similar topics when they are in the news.
That traffic drives more traffic. By talking about a topic, people are increasing the arbitrage for that topic as more and more people talk about it. That is what I mean when I say “the wider the gap the wider the gap”.
Once something goes viral and more people talk about it, more people start talking about it, causing more people to talk about it, until it burns itself out.
If you hate this with every bone in your body, I do, too. I want the world to work differently, but it doesn’t. I want human psychology to work differently, but it doesn’t.
You are more than welcome to tune out and do your own thing. Maybe it will work. However, if you release a Christmas book in March, it’s probably not going to do well because nobody cares about Christmas in March.
STOP 4 - Identifying Your Content Goals
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What's your aim for developing a content marketing plan? Why do you want to produce content and create a content marketing plan?
It may seem obvious, but these questions are the core of a useful content strategy. Look at high-level business goals, notes from meetings, and notes from your team, then do some solo research to make sure your goals have staying power. -Hubspot 9
“What you measure you manage” as they say, so before we create a content calendar, we should identify our goals. I think in general most goals should be smart goals, and the best way to make smart goals is to make SMART goals.
The SMART in SMART goals stands for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound.
Defining these parameters as they pertain to your goal helps ensure that your objectives are attainable within a certain time frame. This approach eliminates generalities and guesswork, sets a clear timeline, and makes it easier to track progress and identify missed milestones. -Kat Boogaard 10
Most writers “want more traffic” or “to make more money”, which is like…well, I won’t lie, it’s not a great goal.
Is $1 more money? It sure is. Will it satiate you? Unlikely.
Is 10 more website visitors more traffic? Yup. Will it move the needle? Not very much.
Setting smart SMART goals allows us to create achievable goals and then set a plan in order to make them a reality. Maybe you don’t care about traffic, and possibly you are fine talking about the same thing every week even if you’ve beaten that dead horse unrecognizable.
If you hate this with every bone in your body, I do, too. I want the world to work differently, but it doesn’t. I want human psychology to work differently, but it doesn’t.
If that’s you, then you probably haven’t read this far. However, if somehow you are still reading, then you should do your own thing.
That said, I have a rule. You can try to change things and then you can complain or you can refuse to change and then you have to shut up about it.
I honestly don’t care either way. That said, if you want more traffic and more satisfied subscribers, it behooves you to use traffic sources and trends to your advantage.
How many times have I seen writers talk about how Substack doesn’t have good SEO because they aren’t ranked on their topic? A number approaching infinity at this point.
Then, when I go look at their articles, I find they don’t utilize good keywords, the article is formatted like garbage, and it makes no sense as a coherent narrative. If you want things to rank, you have to create articles to rank.
I’m not saying you should follow the nonsense SEO experts talk about with keyword density or metadata, but in some ways I am saying you should at least be aware of that stuff and test it before dismissing it entirely. Some people just study this stuff all the time, and you can take advantage of what they say when advantageous.
Or you can go your own way and not care about this stuff. Honestly, if you do that you’ll probably be much happier.
If you do want to implement some of this into your strategy, then you don’t have to do it with every post, either.
This article is one that I plan to use to drive traffic and increase engagement with you all, but not all your posts have to be set up that way.
Posts like this used to be called epic blog posts11 or cornerstone content. 12
Cornerstone content is the core of your website. It consists of the best, most important articles on your site; the pages or posts you want to rank highest in the search engines. Cornerstone articles are usually relatively long, informative articles, combining insights from different blog posts and covering everything that’s important about a certain topic.
Their focus is to provide the best and most complete information on a particular topic, rather than to sell products. Still, they should reflect your business or communicate your mission perfectly. -Yoast 13
The recommendation was to have 5-10 posts like this when you launch your site and then put out another one every few months after that so you can expand your reach.
These pieces of content are also great ways to stop having to answer the same 10 questions over and over again because you can just send them to a piece you’ve already written.
I’m not saying you should follow the nonsense SEO experts talk about with keyword density or metadata, but in some ways I am saying you should at least be aware of that stuff and test it before dismissing it entirely.
Ok… I’m going to open up comments for you to chat about my admissions with AI, content planning, SEO and our controversial opinions of it and my use of graphics and imagery… anyone fancy a chat?
We’re safely in the station now. Wasn’t that a wild ride? If you’re ready to continue, you can read part 2 right here.
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🧙🏼♂️ Russell
I recommend reading Growth, or something like it, Where to invest your time and money when building an audience for your writing, and How to build a substantial body of work that allows you to fight imposter syndrome without burning out to help round out this article.
If you are not a paid member, you can read everything with a 7-day free trial, or give us a one-time tip.
I print my calendar from my mac and write out how it all might work 3 months in advance but I haven’t done that for January onwards yet as I wanted to see how my December content landed. I always send my Notes from the Sea the first day of the month no matter what day that is and I love that structure.
I did used to do a linked in post Mondays and Fridays but I pulled back to just one now... still experimenting over there as it’s like a graveyard of career past with a lot of Substack enthusiasm! 😅
I don't have a content calendar, per se. What I DO have is my Drafts folder. When I get an idea, but I'm not ready to flesh it out, am not in the right place or don't have time, or I need to do more research, I start an article, and I just leave it in Drafts. That way, when I sit down to write, I have several pieces to choose from, and I can flesh them out, schedule them, and so forth.
Due to the nature of my illness, I can't commit to publishing or posting at specific times. I may WANT to post every Saturday and every Monday, but I can't guarantee from week to week that I WILL. I'm not really able to focus and write well when I'm sick.
I may change my habits, though, and at least maybe list what topics I'd like to cover each month. I'm also sure that, once things pick up for me, I'll be forced to create a content calendar. Until then, though, I'm happy with my current system.