Month Calendar with a Yellow Marker

It’s Monday morning, you sit in front of your computer and you know you have to write a post for your blog. The coffee you’ve just had still needs time to make the desired effect…. what post do I have to write? ?

If you had to choose a single tool to successfully maintain your blog, there’s no doubt it should be an editorial calendar. An editorial calendar helps you plan your upcoming work, gives you an overview of the content you’re creating, and shows you at a glance what you’re posting and when you’re posting it. In other words, you know what to write when the time comes ?.

But which editorial calendar is best for my WordPress blog? In a previous post, I compared Edit Flow with Nelio Content and today I wanted to do the same with the Editorial Calendar plugin.

#1 WordPress Plugins

Editorial Calendar and Nelio Content are two native WordPress plugins. Not being external tools integrated via iframes, they use the same WordPress permissions you’re used to. You don’t need to create new user accounts to access the information they offer you. And the managing of the editorial tasks is fully integrated into the same WordPress environment you’re already familiar with.

Editorial Calendar, in addition to English, is completely translated into Spanish and Japanese, but according to the documentation of the plugin itself is available in 16 more languages.

Nelio Content is available in English, Spanish, Catalan, Italian, French, Korean, Turkish, Malay, Romanian, Galician, and Basque.

#2 Drag-and-drop Calendar

Both plugins include a calendar in which you can create, edit, move, and delete the posts you are going to publish on your blog. With Editorial Calendar you can only view blog posts, it does not allow you to view other post types. With Nelio Content, you have compatibility with pages and any other custom post type.

In Editorial Calendar‘s calendar, for each planned post it shows you the title of the post and you can indicate whether you want to see the author, the status of the post5 and its scheduled time.

Editorial Calendar
Screenshot of the calendar of Editorial Calendar

The Nelio Content editorial calendar also shows you the planned posts and for each of them, the title of the post, its author, and its scheduled time. The status of the post is indicated by a color (red, yellow or green) to indicate whether it’s a draft, has a pending review, or is already scheduled/published.

Nelio Content drag-and-drop editorial calendar
Nelio Content drag-and-drop editorial calendar

Nelio Content is a tool where, in addition to blog posts, you can schedule all the social messages you want to be published on social networks. And, to help you with all the content generation work, it also allows you to assign tasks to any member of your team.

For this reason, Nelio Content’s editorial calendar shows not only the scheduled posts but also the messages to be published on social networks and the tasks that should be completed before the specified date.

Nelio Content calendar
Nelio Content calendar filtering by social network.

Nelio Content also includes several filtering options, so that you can indicate whether you want all posts, messages, and tasks to be displayed on the calendar or just some of these items. You can filter posts by category. You can also filter social messages by network or social profile. And you can filter tasks by the person in charge.

What’s very convenient with Nelio Content is that when you reschedule a post, all messages or scheduled tasks that depend on that post are automatically rescheduled according to the new date as well. That is, if a post is postponed by one week, all messages from that post are also postponed.

And let’s not forget you can export the Nelio Content calendar to Google Calendar and other tools.

#3 Ideas that will Become Posts

A situation that often happens to all of us is that you come up with an idea that you want to write about and you want to write it down somewhere to turn it into a post of your blog in the future. You can write this idea down in any tool or in WordPress itself as a draft post. And by the time you’re planning your calendar posts, you’ll need to have it on hand. How are these ideas displayed on the calendar?

Posts in Editorial Calendar
Screenshot of scheduled posts and those that have not yet been scheduled in Editorial Calendar.

Editorial Calendar and Nelio Content are two plugins that allow you to have “unscheduled” ideas, and these are always available for you to schedule them in the calendar when it suits you best. The list of ideas or unscheduled drafts is always available on the right side of the calendar. And if you’re not planning new posts, you have the option of hiding the display of unscheduled drafts.

Unscheduled Posts Section in the Editorial Calendar
Nelio Content calendar includes a section of unscheduled posts to keep your ideas.

As you can see, this very useful feature is similarly available in both plugins.

Additional Features

So far I’ve compared the features that in one way or another are common to both tools. As you can see, if you’re just looking to view the published or scheduled posts in a calendar built into your WordPress, either of the two plugins can work for you. But if you want to be much more efficient in the whole editorial process, Nelio Content includes many other features. Here are the ones you’ll find in the free version of the plugin.

Coordinate the Editorial Process with Your Team

If you are a team of authors who write your blog, there is a set of features that Nelio Content offers you that will help you to be much more efficient in the whole process of content creation.

On the one hand, Nelio Content allows you to create editorial comments on the posts. This can be very useful when you need to share some information with those involved with a certain post or you simply want to keep some information handy.

Editorial Comments
Editorial Comments. Discuss anything about a post with your authors and editors without leaving the edit page.

In addition, you have the option to assign tasks to your teammates and see at all times how good you’re doing and if there are any tasks that are past their due date:

Editorial Tasks
Editorial Tasks. With Nelio Content, you’ll be able to assign tasks to people in your team and set their due date. Keep track of all the important work and never again miss anything!

Finally, if you’ve finished writing a post and want a colleague of yours to review it. You have the option to send them an email or, much easier, change the status of the post to Pending review. If you use the latter, you’ll be happy to know that both tools can automatically notify the users you have previously indicated about the status change.

Nelio Content notification metabox, where you can add users interested in receiving notifications about a specific post.
Nelio Content notification metabox, where you can add users interested in receiving notifications about a specific post.

Be More Efficient with Quality Assurance

Writing a post is not just writing. To make it attractive and have all the information you need to position it in search engines, you’ll want to include images and gifs, add tags and categories to your post, make sure it has a featured image, a minimum length, etc. No tool can do all this work for you, but ours makes it definitely way easier.

Nelio Content allows you to insert images and Gifs from Unsplash, Giphy, and Pixabay directly from the WordPress image selector with a beautifully-integrated interface:

Select a giphy
Search and select the giphy you want to add to your post and that’s it.

And to make sure you don’t forget anything and better control if a post is ready to publish, Nelio Content also informs you at all times of its quality:

Post Quality Analysis
Post Quality Analysis. Nelio Content analyzes the quality of your post in a non-disruptive manner.

And the Icing on the Cake…

And if you want to be much more efficient, the next step in your entire publishing process should be to automatically promote your blog‘s content on social networks. To do this, you can subscribe to the Premium version of Nelio Content and after writing a post, just click Create Social Messages Automatically.

Create Social Messages Automatically
Nelio Content with Social Automations automatically creates all the social messages you need to promote a post. Click on the button and let it do the hard work for you.

and Nelio Content will automatically generate a timeline of social messages to promote your new post on all your social media accounts.

Scheduled social messages with Nelio Content
Automatically generated messages to promote an entry on Nelio Content

In addition, the promotion of new content is complemented by the sharing of old content from your blog. Thus, the editorial calendar is automatically filled with social messages that will give a second life to your best old posts.

Editorial Calendar with Automatic Messages
Nelio Content with Social Automations will fill all your social profiles for you with older content if there’s nothing new to share. This way, you’ll maximize your chances of driving traffic to your website.

Conclusion

Having a plugin that includes a built-in calendar on your WordPress dashboard is necessary if you want to of order in the creation of posts on your blog. But if you are looking to be much more efficient in your process of creating and promoting your blog content, Nelio Content is the tool you were looking for.

Featured image by Estée Janssens in Unsplash.

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