What Day Is It?
What are editorial calendars and how can they be used in a public relations campaign?
Have you ever picked up a magazine or visited a blog and wondered how on earth the publisher knew what to publish when? Most publications use an editorial calendar to schedule out what to cover when. As an entrepreneur you can use this information to your advantage.
Editorial calendars indicate the sequence of topics to be presented. Many bloggers and ezine publishers use them to help stay organized so that they don’t repeat their content. You can use this tool to help with your marketing and publicity efforts. For example, a publisher may publish articles about social media on a certain day, features about blogging on another day, and interviews about marketing the next day.
If you know what the calendar schedule is for a particular media venue, you can use it to better time your pitches. Knowing what topics the editor plans to cover can help you suggest a related article that you have written. If you see that articles about video marketing are going to be published on a certain day, you can purchase advertising about video marketing related resources to be published when the video marketing articles are being posted. In this way you can time your ads and article pitches more precisely. You will be able to send articles right when the editor needs them. You will seem more like a hero than an annoyance.
You can also use editorial calendars to figure out what to pitch to what publication and when to pitch it. For example if you see that a magazine is geared towards women and is publishing articles about breast cancer prevention in October, you could check submissiong guidelines to find out when to support your article about breast cancer screening so that it meets their October publication needs.
Do you know where to get information about editorial calendars? Sometimes editorial calendars are posted right on the publication website. If you are reading an ezine or an e-newsletter, email the editor and ask if an editorial calendar is available. There are editors who use these schedules but for one reason or another has decided not to publish it.
Editorial calendars can be very useful. Learn how to use them so that you get the maximum opportunity for visibility. As in all areas of media, timing truly is everything!
To get you started, here are a few editorial calendars to check out:
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