How to Use Google Calendar for Your Content Calendar

The easiest way for us to keep track of our content is with a Google Calendar. We use this free tool to track when we plan to post content and what content post. The best part is it can be shared with any Google account, so clients can keep track of our document and make their own changes if they need to. 

We start with a totally blank Google calendar month view with only default calendars like “Birthdays” and “Holidays in the United States” turned on.

Then we refer to the post types detailed in our content strategy and create separate calendars for each post type. This usually ends up creating 4-8 calendars. Then we uncheck “birthdays” or any calendars we’re not interested in keeping on our monthly view.

Next, we refer to our post times and logistics to determine when we will post each type of content. For example, we might post one blog per week on Tuesdays. Then we’ll create a post for Tuesday and put it on the “blogs” calendar. We can have the event repeat weekly so that we don’t have to create four separate events every month.

Then we continue on with the process, adding post types to the calendar based on frequency and logistics. Here’s a sample content calendar we made for a client based on the month of April 2018.

google calendar as content calendar

Note that this was a fairly new client with little social presence. That means we had not determined appropriate post times for every type of post. We found that posts targeted at 905 business professionals performed better later in the day at the end of the week and early in the day at the beginning of the week. So those posts have scheduled times, but the rest are “all day,” indicating they require more experimentation. 

We also determined we wanted to stay top of mind by posting every day, but not clog the audience’s news feed by posting more than once per day. For our first content calendar, we created a scheduled post for each day. We got the calendar and the content approved before scheduling it out, keeping us ahead on content!

Once we have our post schedule created, we can even use Google Calendar to detail what the posts will be about.

 google calendar as content calendar

The editing section of the calendar allows you to schedule the time of each post and add notes. We put a quick summary of what the post’s topic was for both us and the client to see.

We create one of these each month. Then during the content creation process we always have a preplanned document to refer back to when creating content. And we can adjust the current month’s schedule based on the past months’ performance! It’s an efficient system and we’ve found it works great for us and helps the client better visualize our content plan.

What system do you use to organize and plan your content?

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