How to Create an Editorial Calendar in Google Calendar

If you’re handling many blog entries or just a handful of articles, you’ll know that it’s essential to keep an editorial calendar in order to keep on top of it all.

The good thing is that there are plenty of amazing calendar tools to choose from. For those that are HubSpot customers there’s a marketing calendar that is built into HubSpot’s software.

However, one of the top alternatives for editorial calendars are Google Calendar. It offers features like sync, repeat scheduling, and adjustable visibility, so you are able to effectively communicate together with the team. It’s also absolutely free to utilize.

Are you interested? Here’s how you can set up your editorial calendar with Google Calendar.

Follow Along With These Free Editorial Calendar Templates

Download the Template for Free

Step 1. Download HubSpot’s free editorial calendar templates.

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First , download the calendar templates listed above (they’re absolutely free.) After that you’ll have three editable calendar templates that you can utilize at your own leisure One template that’s for Google Calendar, one for Excel and the third one that works with Google Sheets. In this blog article, we’ll go through the process of importing Excel templates into Google Calendar. Excel Template to Google Calendar.

Step 2. Customize your template and prepare for import into Google Calendar.

The date of publication on the templates that you can download are stamped to indicate the previous year.

Feel free to alter these dates to the present calendar year in the spreadsheet itselfyou are also able to change them to dates you want after you upload the file to Google Calendar.

Google Calendar makes it simple to upload a calendar you may have created in a different program to Google. That includes Microsoft Excel. The next step will guide you through the process of importing your Excel calendar template that you downloaded earlier to Google Calendar.

Step 3. Open Google Calendar.

After you’ve downloaded (or developed) an Excel calendar that is open within Microsoft Excel, it’s time to open Google Calendar. Be sure to be connected to the Gmail account that you’d like this calendar to grant access to.

Step 4. Use the left hand dropdown menu to create a new calendar.

After that, you must make sure you have set up the Google Calendar to accommodate the data that you’ve entered in Excel. Excel spreadsheet. In order to do that, log to the Google Calendar and click the plus symbol to the left below “Other Calendars,” as illustrated in the image below. After that, in the dropdown menu choose “Create new calendar.”

Step 5. Fill out the details of your new calendar.

Complete the fields shown in the following screen. This will give a brief overview of your calendar as illustrated below. This will give users an understanding of what you mean when inviting them to this calendar. Once you’re finished with the form you can select “Create calendar.”

Step 6. Import your XLS or CSV file from the same dropdown menu.

Utilizing this drop-down menu that you created to make your editorial calendar, you’ll then upload the Excel file in Google Calendar. Click the plus sign and choose “Import.”

Click on the upload button that is labelled “Select file from your computer,” and then locate the file called “Blog Editorial Calendar – Excel” which was in the ZIP file that you downloaded in Step 1 above.

Step 7. Select which calendar to add this file to.

Select the option to “Add to calendar” from the dropdown menu in the second box below your imported file. Make sure you select the same calendar name as shown below from the dropdown menu. Then, click “Import.”

Step 8. Click Import.

You can now change the dates of your first seven assignments in this original Excel document, if you haven’t already done so. Navigate to where it says “Start Date/time” on top left corner by clicking onto that line and making any necessary adjustments there before saving all changes with an orange pencil icon next time around!

Instead of publishing blog posts at random times throughout the day, you can set them to go live every morning from 10am-11 am. This will give your latest and greatest content more visibility with readers who are looking for fresh material before they head off into their workday!

Step 9. Determine your publishing schedule.

You can choose to post every Monday, Wednesday and Friday or just Thursdays. The key is quality over quantity when it comes time for blogging!

For some businesses, blogging is an important part of their marketing strategy. If you’re looking to increase your brand awareness and generate leads through social media platforms like Facebook or Twitter – creating content on a regular basis will be crucial for success!

But don’t over commit if the quality isn’t there because it could backfire in many ways (e). A great way around this problem? Increase diversity by scheduling posts less frequently but still making sure they are high value enough so people won

Finally, we need to make some minor adjustments. Currently the Blog TBD events are scheduled for 10 a.m.? Feel free to move these dates and times accordingly so they happen at your desired time!

Step 10. Set up recurring events.

Now that you’ve set the publish dates and times for your content, it’s time to make those events recurring on your calendar.

If you have a regular publishing schedule, say every Monday through Friday at 10:00 a.m., then put that time on your calendar as an available slot for content creation or completion! It’s okay if there isn’t anything finished yet—it just reminds us of what we want to publish that day so our followers know when they can expect fresh material from them in the future.

Click on the pencil icon to edit event details. Create custom recurring schedules for each assignment!

You can set the post up as a recurring post, so it automatically appears every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at 10:00 a.m. (or whatever days and times you want).

Once you’ve selected the recurring days, hit “Done” and “Save,” and you’ll have an editorial calendar framework to work with.

For now, keep the event’s title as “Blog TBD,” but feel free to customize the description with any extra details you want to be sure you include for each post. Wait to invite any guest, as we’ll use this to assign posts to an author once you begin filling in your topics. With everything complete, click “Save.”

If you don’t have a recurring schedule like this, you might not need an editorial calendar just yet — but it is an excellent way to set goals for yourself. For example, if you know you want to publish a certain number of posts each week, even if you don’t hit every single slot, it’s a good reminder for yourself and your team that this is something you should all be striving for.

Step 11. Fill in your publishing slots.

Now that you know all of the slots you want to fill, you’ve got to actually fill them. (If you don’t have topic ideas yet, check out this free topic idea generator. It’ll give you some good ideas for content to put in the calendar.)

Let’s say one of the posts you want to write is “10 Surprising Facts About Tapirs,” and one of the posts you’ve already written and want to publish later is “Think You’re Cut Out to Own a Tapir? Read This First.” Just add them both to the calendar by clicking on “Post – TBD” on the correct date, choosing “Edit Event,” and then changing the “Post – TBD” text to the actual title of the post.

Now, let’s say you don’t want to write “10 Surprising Facts About Tapirs,” and you want your colleague to write it instead. To assign the post an author, you’ll invite them to the event as a guest. To do this, click on the event, hit “Edit Event,” then invite that colleague to the post by typing their name or email address into the “Add guests” box, selecting “Add” when their name pops up and hitting “Save” on the event once you’re done.

Now, anyone can see who is responsible for writing the post that’s going up in that time slot.

You can take it a step further by adding details to the “Description” box of the event, as shown in the large box in the screenshot above. You might include a quick synopsis, the keywords you plan to target the post for, the target audience you’re trying to reach, and the offer or CTA you will direct the reader to at the end of the post. Don’t forget to add the draft’s due date.

Before Google Calendar lets you save the event, you’ll see a dialog box asking if you would like to change just this event or all of the events in the series. Select “Only this event.”

Repeat these steps to assign each blog topic today and in the future.

Step 12. Share your editorial calendar with others.

Now that you have your calendar set up, you can invite people to see it. I’d recommend you start with your immediate team and regular contributors — as well as anyone who regularly asks you about publishing content on your company blog.

To share this editorial calendar with people, simply find your editorial calendar under “My Calendars,” as shown below. Click the three dots next to the calendar name and select “Settings and sharing” when it appears in the dropdown menu. You’ll be taken to the same screen when you first filled out the details of your editorial calendar in Step 2.

Then, you can add in the names of people with whom you’d like to share the calendar and set the right permission levels for each invitee.

It’s wise to keep those with the permission settings to manage changes and sharing to a minimum so there aren’t too many cooks in the kitchen — but I recommend you let everyone see all event details, so it’s clear exactly what content is going up in each slot.

Under the “Share with specific people” heading, enter the email addresses of those on your content team and decide if they have viewing, editing, or admin privileges. Save your updated settings.

Why Using Google Calendar as an Editorial Calendar Works

Google Calendar has amazing features that will help you manage your editorial calendar. For starters, if you use Gmail for your corporate email, everyone that you work with will already be in Gmail (and their calendar, specifically) all day.

As a result, it won’t be hard for people to form a habit of checking the editorial calendar because it won’t be difficult for them to find it.

Google Calendar also makes things really easy to move around and schedule because, well, it’s already a calendar. It has all the functionality you need to schedule stuff out and let the people who need to know about it know.

Along those lines, allowing people to view your calendar is simple, making it easy for multiple teams to collaborate, see what’s being published, and figure out when they might launch content and campaigns.

Finally, this sets a precedent for other teams to coordinate with your team in a straightforward way. You can have a calendar for upcoming campaigns, offers, social media pushes, product launches — you name it. And you can all share those calendars for a single-screen view of everything that’s going on so you can coordinate more easily.

Are there other solutions for maintaining an editorial calendar? Of course. But if you’re looking for a free, not-too-shabby, minimum viable product, then Google Calendar is for you.

This post was originally published in January 2019 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.