How To Create A Content Calendar For Your Blog (Without Tears)

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So you’ve found a content calendar template online. It looked really good in the screenshot – all colour-coded and organised, with a column for keywords and publish dates and social media scheduling and the phase of the moon, probably.

You downloaded it. You spent an afternoon filling it in. You felt incredibly productive.

And then you abandoned it by like… week three.

Sound familiar? 🙈

And look, hi, I get it. I will often download tools and templates and think they’re going to change the way I do life. And honestly, they might! If I only sat with them long enough to make them for me.

Which is part of it, right? Your content planner needs to work for YOU. So many content calendar templates you find online are built for marketing teams. People who have multiple people on their team, maybe they have scheduled meetings, or someone whose entire job is updating the spreadsheet. IMAGINE.

They are not built for one person who is also trying to actually write the blog posts, and live their life, and remember to eat lunch (something I’m terrible at, btw!). They’re not really built for us.

So let’s talk about what a content calendar actually needs to do for a solo blogger – and how to build one that you’ll actually use.

💡 And yes, if it’s all a bit much, you can always just download the content planner that I use every single day. Which means it’s specifically for solo-bloggers!

What is a content calendar, really?

At its most basic, a content calendar is just a plan for what you’re going to publish and when.

That’s it. It doesn’t need to be fancy. It doesn’t need to be a specific tool. It doesn’t need to make you feel like a marketing director at a big company. It just needs to answer two questions:

What am I writing?
When is it going live?

Everything else is optional. If tracking keywords and repurposing plans and social captions all in the same place works for you – brilliant. But if all you need is a list of post ideas with rough dates next to them, that is a completely valid content calendar. And don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. 🤣

Why bother having one at all?

Because winging it is exhausting. Trust me. I know. I’ve been there. Look, I wrote a whole blog post about the three types of blogging schedules I’ve had over the years.

When you don’t have any kind of plan, every single publishing day becomes a bit of a panic. What do I write about? Is this idea good enough? Should I be writing something more seasonal? What did I post last month … and was it too similar to this?

Having some sort of content calendar or planner or spreadsheet removes most of that decision fatigue. When you sit down to write, you already know what you’re writing. You’ve already made the hard decisions. All you have to do is write. And maybe like, do some keyword research. 😉

It also helps you see patterns and gaps, too! If you look at a month of planned posts and notice you’ve got five “how to” posts in a row and nothing that’s personal or conversational, you can spot that before you publish, not after. Which is something I’ve definitely done in the past – oops.

Or if you realise you’ve forgotten that a big seasonal moment is coming up and you have nothing planned … having a calendar catches that early enough to do something about it.

And for me at least, there’s something about having a plan that just makes you feel less like you’re drowning. Even a rough plan. Even a simple one. Just knowing what’s coming next makes the whole thing feel more manageable.

And if you’re posting a lot on your blog, then this is really important – we don’t want you burning out!!

So let’s build a simple content planner for your blog

Start with your content pillars

If you’ve already worked out your content pillars, this part is easy. If you haven’t, that’s worth doing first, especially if you’re new to blogging. It’s gonna make everything here much more straightforward. And painless. Or at least … less painful. Ha.

Your pillars are the framework your calendar hangs off. Or the shelf they sit on. Or whatever metaphor you’d like.

Before you start filling in post ideas, look at your pillars and make sure you’re planning content across all of them, not just the ones you feel like writing about this month.

If you’ve got three pillars and you’re only ever planning content for two of them, that’s useful to know. It might mean that third pillar isn’t really a pillar, or it might mean you need a gentle nudge to go write something in that area.

Decide how often you’re going to publish

Before you can plan a calendar out for your blog, you need to know how many slots you’re filling. And that means being honest with yourself about how often you can realistically publish.

Not how often you want to publish. How often can you actually do it, consistently, without burning out or letting the quality slip? Coz they’re different.

For most solo bloggers, once a week or once a fortnight is completely sustainable and more than enough to build a blog that grows. Publishing twice a week when you’re already stretched is not better than publishing once a week consistently.

So pick your number. One post a week. One post a fortnight. Whatever it is, that’s what you’re going to work towards planning around.

Plan in blocks, not one post at a time

Something that might be helpful for you is planning your content in blocks. Or plan way ahead. You’re looking ahead at more than just the next blog post … but more like the next month or quarter.

It sounds like more work upfront, but it’s actually way less work overall, because you get into a planning headspace once rather than switching in and out of it constantly. And you’ll be able to see those content clusters and connections as you’re planning which is going to be helpful for SEO.

Set aside an hour or two (a Sunday afternoon, a quiet weekday morning, whatever works for you) and brainstorm post ideas until you’ve got enough to fill the next [time person here … whatever it is you’re working towards].

Pull from your pillars, think about what’s coming up seasonally, or what evergreen content ideas you have, look at what questions your readers have been asking, and whatever you’ve jotted down in your notes app recently.

Then assign those ideas to rough dates. You don’t need an exact date – “Week 2 of March” is fine. You just need enough structure to know what’s coming when.

Keep your ideas somewhere easy to find

A content calendar is only useful if you’re actually adding to it and referring back to it. Something I need to remember myself .Oops.

Which means it needs to live somewhere you’ll actually open.

Some people love a spreadsheet – Google Sheets works brilliantly for this because you can access it anywhere. Some people prefer a dedicated tool like Notion or Trello. Some people literally keep a document on their desktop with a list of post ideas and rough dates. Some people use a physical planner.

None of these is wrong. The best tool is the one you’ll actually use.

What I’d gently suggest not doing is using a system that’s so complicated you spend more time maintaining the system than you do writing blog posts. If you find yourself spending 45 minutes every week updating your content calendar, the calendar is working too hard and you’re not.

Build in flex

Difference flex. 💪🏻

Life happens. You get sick. Something comes up. A trending topic appears out of nowhere, and you want to write about it while it’s relevant. Or maybe you’ve got a post you planned that just isn’t coming together and needs more time to simmer away in your brain or ‘on paper’.

A good content calendar has a little bit of flex built in.

Maybe that’s one “placeholder” slot per month where you can slot in whatever feels right at the time. Maybe it’s just the understanding that dates are targets, not deadlines, and moving something by a week is not a failure.

The goal of a content calendar is to make your blogging life easier, not harder. So if it suddenly starts feeling like your content planner is taking over your life … time to re-think it.

What a simple content calendar can actually look like

Here’s an example. No colour coding required … although if you’re anything like me then you’ll wanna colour code it. 🤣

June, as a blogger who writes about blogging:

Week 1: What is a content pillar and how does it make blogging easier? (evergreen)
Week 2: The difference between evergreen and trending content (evergreen)
Week 3: [Flex slot … trending or seasonal if something comes up]
Week 4: How to write a blog post introduction that hooks people in (evergreen)

That’s it!

Four posts, loosely dated (you can get more specific about it if you like), a mix of types, drawn from your content pillars in this exmaple. That is a content calendar. It doesn’t need to be more complicated than that – especially when you’re starting out.

As you get more comfortable with the process, you can layer in more detail if you want it. But you never have to. Plenty of very successful bloggers plan their content with nothing more than a simple list and a rough schedule.

What a more complex content calendar might look like

So maybe you need a little more than just a rough idea. Fair. So do I.

In my own content planner, I like to have the following columns in my Google Sheet planner:

Date
Day of the week
Content pillar or category
Main title or topic I’m writing about
The keywords I’m using for that blog post
Then I have a few columns of tick boxes
1. Drafted
2. Images sourced or taken
3. Scheduled
4. Posted
Insights (this is something I forget to update, but it’s there if I need it!)

But again, at the heart of it … it’s quite simple.

You can actually see my own Google Sheets planner here and grab it for yourself if you like. Remember, you can change whatever you’d like to make it for you and your blog.

The main thing to remember

A content calendar isn’t just about figuring out when you’re posting your content. It’s to help you stay on track, help you put out blog posts consistently, help you see where the gaps in your content are.

It means you spend less time panicking about what to write, more time actually writing it, and a lot less time feeling like you’re behind on something. Which is, frankly, a lovely way to blog. 👏🏻

And if you’re working out how often to fill those slots, how often should you blog? My honest thoughts will help you figure that out.