As content marketing grows in importance, there’s an emerging need for a planned approach to creating and publishing it. A key tool to manage this process is the content calendar. Here’s how to create a simple one in Evernote.

An editorial calendar defines the topics you’re going to write about and the dates upon which each piece will be published. If your blog has a regular column, such as Motivational Mondays, you can use such a calendar to lay out, weeks or months in advance, what your topics will be. If you’re planning to write a series of blog posts on a particular topic, you can use your editorial calendar to decide when each installment in the series should be published, and in what order. It’s a much more organized way to approach content than scratching your head and saying to yourself, “What am I going to write about THIS week?”

I’ve been giving some thought to the challenge of utilizing Evernote to manage my content ideas. I tend to capture ideas, but then many of them may not see the light of day for some time because I’m constantly recording new insights in my Evernote database. I decided I didn’t really need a graphical calendar to keep track of my content ideas. Rather, what I really needed was a way to tag items in Evernote as active article ideas and to designate when I want to publish them. So I came up with a simple system:

Create a tag that is unique and represents the week in which I want to publish an article. It can also be used to “resurface” article ideas for further consideration and development.

The first two characters – “wk” – are simply an abbreviation for the word “week.” The four characters that follow are for the day that begins a week and the year – so, for example, wk0119 is the week of January 19th.

Once I’ve created a tag called wk0119, then I need to make sure I use it when starting to write an article. I then simply look up a list of tags, select the appropriate one and viola – my Evernote database is instantly filtered to show only those items that contain the tag I’ve specified. If I want to look at what’s due the next week, I can select the following week’s tag – wk0126 – and so forth. So far, this system is working pretty well for me.

What do you think? Could an editorial calendar like this work for you? Please share your thoughts in the comments below!