A Content Calendar You Can Actually Keep

Why they fail

A calendar is built in a planning mood, which is not the mood in which the work gets done.

It assumes each month is like the others, when most small businesses have a season where nothing extra happens.

It assigns a topic to a date, so a month where that topic turns out to be uninteresting becomes a month where nothing is published.

And it is usually more ambitious than the honest capacity, because ambition is what a planning session produces.

Start from the list, not the calendar

The order that makes the difference.

Write down everything you actually have to say: the recurring questions, the jobs worth describing, the seasonal advice, the things you find yourself explaining twice.

Count them. That number is your cadence for the year, divided by twelve.

A list of nine things is a roughly monthly schedule with three months off, which is fine and is better than committing to twelve and delivering seven.

Building the calendar first and then finding topics to fill it is what produces filler, since the slots demand to be filled.

Keep the list somewhere you add to it as things occur, rather than reconstructing it at planning time when everything seems uninteresting.

Plan around your quiet months

• Mark the busy months first.
• Assume nothing gets written in those.
• Write ahead during the quiet ones.
• Keep two pieces in reserve.
• Time seasonal pieces to publish, not to write.

The fifth is the one that catches people. A piece about preparing for winter has to be written in the summer, and a calendar that schedules it for October means writing it in October.

Keep a buffer

The mechanism that survives contact with a busy fortnight.

Two finished pieces held back is the difference between a schedule that continues through a difficult month and one that stops.

Build the buffer first, before starting to publish, which feels slow and is what makes the rest possible.

Publish from the buffer and replace what you use, so the buffer stays at two rather than being consumed.

Where the buffer empties, that is the signal to reduce the cadence rather than to publish something thin.

Most schedules that collapse do so because a single busy month arrived with nothing in hand.

A worked example

A business built a calendar in January: two pieces a month, twenty-four topics, each assigned to a date.

They published five and stopped in April, which is their busiest period.

The following year they did it differently: listed everything they had to say, which came to eleven items, and set a monthly cadence with July and August marked as off.

They wrote three pieces in February before publishing anything, then published one a month and replaced each as it went out.

They published nine that year, including through their busy period, because the buffer covered it.

The difference was not discipline, it was that the second plan matched what existed.

Assign topics loosely

Since a fixed topic on a fixed date is a common failure point.

Fix the dates and keep the topics as a pool, choosing from it when the time comes.

That way a topic that has gone stale, or one you have lost interest in, does not stop the month.

The exception is anything seasonal, which has to be timed, and that is usually two or three pieces a year rather than all of them.

Choosing from a pool also lets you write about whatever came up that month, which is where the best material comes from anyway.

Put the review slots in

Because improving existing pages competes with publishing and always loses without a slot.

Mark one slot in three or four as a review rather than a new piece.

In that slot, rewrite an existing page, update the figures on another, or check a set of pages for accuracy.

That work returns more than a new piece on most small sites and never happens otherwise, because a calendar full of new topics has no room for it.

Name which page in advance, so the slot does not become a gap.

Write down who and when

The operational half, which is usually left implicit and is why the plan fails.

Name the person, name the day, and put it in whatever calendar that person actually uses.

A recurring half-day, in the diary, treated like an appointment, is what turns intention into output.

Where two people are involved, be specific about who drafts and who reviews, since a piece waiting for an unspecified review sits indefinitely.

And decide what happens when the slot is missed: whether it moves or is skipped, agreed in advance rather than negotiated each time.

Record what actually happened

The step that makes next year's plan better than this year's guess.

Keep a line against each slot: what was published, how long it took, and whether anything came of it.

After a year that tells you your real cadence rather than your intended one, which is the number to plan the next year around.

It also shows which kinds of piece took longest, and those are frequently not the ones that returned most.

Most businesses discover they publish about two thirds of what they planned, and planning for two thirds from the start produces a schedule that holds.

The counter-case

Calendars are not obligatory.

A business that publishes well when something happens, and nothing when it does not, is producing better material than one filling slots.

The value of a schedule is that it prevents drifting to nothing, which is a real risk, and for some people the schedule itself creates the resistance.

There is also a version where the planning becomes the work, with an elaborate calendar and very little published.

List what you have, set the cadence to match, build a buffer, and keep the plan to one page.

Building one

1. List everything you have to say.
2. Set the cadence to that number.
3. Mark your busy months as off.
4. Write three pieces before publishing any.
5. Keep topics as a pool, fix the dates.
6. Make one slot in four a review.
7. Name the person and the day.

Step four is the one that gets skipped and the one that determines whether the schedule survives its first busy fortnight.

Finding the topics is covered in finding something to write about every week.

Frequently asked questions

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