My iPhone Calendar

We all use calendars already, right?  Sure we do!  The problem is, there are so many options available to us that many people have bits and pieces scattered over various calendars, which makes it very hard to stay on track.  There are old fashioned wall calendars, desk blotter calendars, “Dayrunner” type calendars in our paper organizers, calendars on our computers, calendars on our hand held gaming systems even, and of course, calendars on our cell phones / PDAs.

Now, I’m not here to tell you that one calendar is any better than any of the others…I AM here to tell you that everyone is different and you need to use what will work best for you and your daily schedule.  For most people, because we’re on the go constantly, that is going to be either the “Dayrunner” type calendar or the calendar that is on your cell phone / PDA.  I am a techy type person…so I love the calendar feature on my iPhone.  The one line details of my “appointments” or “events” show up at the bottom and I can just scroll through them.  Do you know why I choose my iPhone calendar over carrying around a “Dayrunner” type organizer anymore? There’s one reason…my iPhone will tell me when I’m late, it will remind me what I have to do, and if I can’t do something one day, I can just change the date and time info and roll it over to another day without having to reenter it all manually.  But either method will work…IF you use it.

Back to the main thought of this post…if you create an editorial calendar…I like to tackle it for one quarter at a time, but you can start small…say with a month, then you already know what you are going to blog about on what days.  It gives you direction and motivation.  Say you only have one blog and you want to make sure you post something new to it at least twice a week.  You pick the topics and enter them on your calendar on the correct days.  If you find yourself with some down-time, you can simply read ahead a bit in your calendar and start composing your next blog entry.  Say you have multiple blogs on several platforms…I do.  I have 3.  You could write in one blog on Monday, one on Wednesday and one on Friday.  Remember, backlinks are good, so you might want to go to your other blogs that you’re not posting in on that day and just do a quick note like, “Just posted at www.my#2blog.com, The Benefits of Using An Editorial Calendar”…with an active link to the main post.

Another idea is to start a Blog Series.  I have one, it’s my Real Estate Virtual Assistant series called “Tipsy Tuesday” (click on the Tipsy Tuesday link and then type in “Tipsy Tuesday” – without the quotations – into the Google search box on the right and search my blog for all of the “Tipsy Tuesday” series blog posts)….I try to write in it every week, but if I just can’t crunch it in, it’s not a huge deal, I simply roll the event over to the next week.  If you really want to kick up your blogging, you could have a series for every day of the week…that’s very labor and commitment intensive…but I’m sure Google would enjoy it

So that’s basicly it on the Editorial Calendar idea…just chart out your path and keep on top of it.  Plan to write a certain type of current event article, etc…you don’t have to know the exact topic you will write about 3 months from now…but I general idea of what you’re doing will greatly help to keep you on track with your blogging!