Yesterday I wrote about the benefits of using an editorial calendar to plan out your blog posts and help you come up with ideas for posts that you want to write. Although there are many different ways of keeping an editorial calendar, I chose to use a plugin for WordPress called, coincidentally enough, Editorial Calendar.

What is WordPress?

WordPress is an open source platform for creating websites and blogs. Auttomatic, the parent company, runs WordPress.com where anyone can sign up for a site for free. Unfortunately, if you use WordPress.com you can only use plugins that have been installed. However, WordPress can be installed and ran on a server of your own, allowing you to customize the themes and plugins. Unless you are running your own copy of WordPress, you will not be able to use the Editorial Calendar plugin.

Installing Editorial Calendar

Depending on how WordPress is installed, you’ll use the Dashboard -> Plugins -> Add New or you’ll upload the plugin to a specific folder. Hopefully, you can use the Dashboard! Navigate to Plugins -> Add New, and search for Editorial Calendar.

Click the Install Now, follow the prompts, and you should be good to go!

Using

Under the Posts menu will be a new option, Calendar. Clicking it will take you to a monthly view of your calendar posts.

You can drag and drop articles onto different days to schedule the post for that day. When you hover over a post, there is a mini menu where you can edit the post with the full WordPress editor or you can use the Quick Edit to change the posting time or other details about the post.

I usually create a new post for each article idea, saving them as drafts. On the right side is a button to toggle showing unscheduled drafts. By clicking on it, I can then drag and drop unscheduled drafts onto the calendar onto the dates I want to schedule the drafts.

Unfortunately, I still have to write the posts, the calendar can organize but can’t do the work for you!