Content marketing – honestly the first time I heard this phrase I wondered what the heck it meant. When I found out more I got a little scared – would I ever be able to master it well enough to have some success? I got hold of a great book, Content Marketing Ideas, by Brian Rotsztein, which helped me to understand what it is all about, and even start to implement some of the ideas laid out in it. (You should get a copy – it really is excellent.)

But I was still having trouble. I tried all sorts of stuff; recording ideas as I went about my day, bookmarking interesting blog posts to get inspiration from, talking to friends, family, even strangers and garnering ideas from those conversations. Those tactics got me lots of topics. But I had no particular schedule for writing – I just squeezed it in between my other work. That led to random posts on random topics at random times – not really what content marketing is all about.

So I entered a challenge to write 30 posts in 30 days. I thought that would force me to be more coherent and get into the habit of writing more often. If you have read back to the month of December you will see how that went.  🙁 fail 🙁

I really needed to get some sort of s system in place that would help me to stay organized, not only with blogging but with my social media as well. Tall order, but I gamely tried. I setup a spreadsheet with dates and times and topics and lists of where to post what and when. But that was taking me as much time as making the posts themselves! I needed something simpler, something proven, something that would be easy to use, and of course, something free. OK, friend Google, do your stuff.

Enter the editorial calendar.  there are many available – some of them even fit all of my criteria. So now I had to make a choice. I chose this one and I’m going to try it out and see if it really does make my life easier.

So that’s my content marketing process so far. I’ll let you know how it goes.

And tell me, what’s your content marketing process?