4 Steps to Creating an Editorial Calendar

With over 2 million new blog posts published online everyday, it’s vital that the content we produce is fresh, informative and useful. With an editorial calendar you can organize deadlines, guest bloggers and team members, all in one place, helping to ensure that content is well-planned, well-timed and high-quality.

4 Steps to Creating an Editorial Calendar

Create an Editorial Calendar in 4 Steps

Instead of flooding your blog with content as soon as you’re ready to post it, use an editorial calendar to plan content strategically, correspond your marketing and maximize your posts.

So now we’ve explained why you should have an editorial calendar, here’s how you can set one up with MeisterTask.

Categorize your articles

Keep tabs of your ideas and how articles are progressing by filtering your posts under different sections.

At MeisterTask we’ve created different sections on our editorial calendar for Proposed, In Progress and Completed, moving the articles between the sections as they’re begun, developed and finished.

proposed-progress-done editorial calendar

You can create tags to categorize the article’s level of complexity. For this we’ve created tags for Simple and Quick, Medium and Difficult.

Using these tags we’re able to plan how and when we’ll complete each content piece. If we’re commissioning a really good writer to complete a research piece, we might take an article with the Difficult tag, as we know they’ll be able to complete it well. On the other hand, if we’re looking for a quick post to fill a gap in the editorial calendar, we can take an idea from the Simple and Quick tag.

Get organised with your own editorial calendar

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Collect your stories and ideas

As the inspirational writer Belle B. Cooper has previously shared, MeisterTask can also be a useful tool when researching content marketing pieces.

We often discover articles or studies online which spark ideas for future posts, so use your editorial calendar to catch these thoughts and make sure they’re not wasted.

Create a new task for your idea on your project board, including a reference to the study or article which sparked the thought, and any additional ideas behind the piece.

m-meistercard editorial calendar

You can then categorize the article idea by the relevant tag, depending on its difficulty level – Simple and Quick, Medium or Difficult. When you’re then ready to write the article, you can come back to the task, where all of your notes are stored in one place.

You could even ask colleagues to go through your content ideas and comment their thoughts on each, so you can decide which articles to go ahead with.

Build your calendar with clear deadlines

In order to start filling out your calendar, set yourself deadlines for your ‘in progress’ articles, or add in the deadline agreed with the writer or freelancer. This allows you to plan how to best market the content, ahead of publishing the piece.

set-due-date editorial calendar

You can see which articles are upcoming by viewing your tasks by due date, so you know which articles you should be preparing to upload over the coming days.

view-by-deadline editorial calendar

You can also filter your editorial calendar by date, for example by choosing to only show the articles which are due to be published over the next two weeks. That way you’re able to see which deadlines are imminent and which articles you should be expecting to receive from guest bloggers or commissioned writers soon.

Share and feedback on articles

When you’ve been focusing on a research-intensive article for a couple of days, it can be really useful to have a fresh pair of eyes look over it.

With MeisterTask, you can upload your draft straight to the article task and comment on the task, requesting feedback from a colleague.

Upload your document directly to the task from your computer or Box account to include it as an attachment, or share a link in the note section to where it can be found on Google Drive or Dropbox. From there, colleagues can provide feedback, either directly to the document online, or re-upload the annotated document including their suggestions.

upload-documents editorial calendar

If there are multiple people on your marketing team who are contributing and sourcing content, but only one or two members who actually upload articles online, simplify the process by attaching the final article.

This will make it easy and quick for your uploading colleagues to go straight to the task once they’re ready to publish, and upload the final version ahead of the deadline.


So those are our key tips on why and how to set up an editorial calendar using MeisterTask.

If you have any questions just let us know in the comments below and we’d love to hear how you get on!

Get organised with your own editorial calendar

Try out MeisterTask