Easy Steps to Follow to Create an Editorial Process That Works

Many times the reason your blog doesn’t work is because you don’t know what steps to follow to succeed. Well, this is going to end because today I’ll explain you the steps that we followed and that have been useful to increase the number of visits to our website.

Our process is very easy to follow, so you have no excuse for not applying it on your own website. I encourage you to try it and tell us which parts have been most useful to you and which have not. I am sure if you follow my lead you’ll see results in a relatively short time. Let’s get started!

Create And Fill Out Your Editorial Calendar

Before we start writing like crazy, let’s think a little bit about the whole editorial process. If you have not yet established your editorial calendar, here are the steps to follow:

Find the tool that best suits you to plan your contents in a calendar. A simple spreadsheet or even Google Calendar are valid options, but if you want to get the most out of your website in WordPress, install Nelio Content as your editorial calendar. All the features included will help you move to the next level.
Once you have your calendar, fill it with scheduled content. To do this, study the resources you have and propose an affordable publication pace. In our case, we publish two posts per week (Tuesdays and Thursdays).
Think about the content you would like to have on your website. Make a list of the topics you think are missing. Search the web for similar content and get inspired by the best. We write down topics every time we read an article we like.
Once a month, meet with the rest of the team (or with yourself, if you work alone) and select the topics from the list you’re planning for the next month. Now you just have to include them in the editorial calendar on a date and assign them to an author (or to yourself). This way, everyone knows at every moment when to have their posts ready and what to write about.

Editorial Calendar in Nelio Content — **Editorial Calendar.** The Editorial Calendar shows all your published and scheduled posts, as well as other elements related to your marketing strategy like social messages.

The editorial calendar is the cornerstone of your editorial process. It can be easily maintained and useful for everyone involved in your website. Try it and tell me if it has helped you to become much more consistent. I’m sure it will.

Write Quality Content

Now that you have your posts scheduled, it’s time to write them in order to meet the goals set out in your editorial calendar. These are the steps we follow when we have to write a post:

Look for related content on the web about what you are going to explain. Take the ones you like best and keep their references. Later you can include them in your content to make it more complete. Linking to both external sources and your own website is a very good thing. I keep the links in the References metabox of Nelio Content, to keep them handy.

Reference meta box by Nelio Content — Nelio Content adds a meta box in your editor that contains all the links included in your post and automatically completes them with several meta data like the title of the referenced content, its author and the author’s twitter handler.

Search for a featured image related to your content. Thinking about what this image should look like can help you to get inspiration for your content. It works for me and that’s why I always start with the featured image in my posts.
Add categories and tags to the post. I also do this before writing the content because it also helps me to be inspired.
Define the titles of the different sections of the content you are going to write. This allows you to have a skeleton of what will be your post and so you will have the feeling that you are already advancing. If you write like crazy, you’ll probably leave things behind. That’s why I always like to start by defining the titles and subtitles of my posts. In addition, this helps to make the post clearer afterwards (you focus more when you have the structure defined).
Write an introduction that excites your readers. Try to put yourself in the role of your reader and write for that kind of person. If the first few lines get their attention, they’ll continue reading.
Use simple sentences for your content. Try not to make them too long and avoid using too many subordinate sentences. Simple is always better.
After writing, dress your content with multimedia elements that will help you to read it. Nowadays it’s very easy to add images (with Nelio Content you can include them from Unsplash, Pixabay and Giphy), videos, code snippets and much more. Make use of all this.

Select an Unsplash image — Search and select the Unsplash image you want to insert in your post directly using Nelio Content.

Once you have the content finished, complete the additional information for the post. I mean the excerpt, the SEO information (we use Yoast, so we fill in the necessary information in the metabox of this plugin) and any other information that is needed on your website. With Nelio Content you have it covered, as it warns you of the status of your post and whether you have left anything to fill in.

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

Now reread your content. It will help you fix small spelling and semantic mistakes. This will increase the final quality.
Highlight the most interesting sentences to share them on your social networks. We do it directly with Nelio Content when we are re-reading the content. This makes it easier to create messages. And if you don’t believe it, wait until you read the following section where I explain the reason for all this.

Auto-sharing in Social Automations — With the new Social Automations button, you can select any fragment of the text and mark it for autosharing. The image shows the selection of the phrase “Nelio Content was born with the aim of simplifying the work for our blog” to mark it to share. You can also see other fragments highlighted in yellow that had previously been selected.

Assign a reviewer to the post and change its status to”Pending”. That way the reviewer will know they got a job to do. We also do this using Nelio Content. We have the Notifications metabox activated and this sends an email to the selected reviewer just at the moment of changing the status of the post.

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

When the reviewer considers the post as a good one, schedule it (the reviewer can do it himself) and go for the next one.

Promote Content Actively

The most important step here is to generate the messages to be published on social networks for your post. To do this, you can choose to pick up the sentences marked in step 9 above, open each social profile you have in a new tab of your browser, and create promotional messages there. Luckily for you, if you use Nelio Content you only have to click on one button and the entire promotion will be automatically created directly from the edit page of the post itself.

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.

You can see in the following screenshot some of the messages that have been created automatically in all the profiles that we have connected to Nelio Content to promote this post during the next few weeks. All this just by clicking a single button. When they tell you that social media promotion is very complicated, now you know that thanks to Nelio Content it doesn’t have to be that way.

Here you can see some of the messages created automatically by Nelio Content from the content of this post.

This helps you save time and be able to do other things. If you don’t do this, you’ll have to go back and forth to your profiles and share messages manually every now and then. A single message on social networks is not enough to promote your post. In fact, if you’re just going to send one message to promote your post, it’s better not to do it, because the life span of your message can be so short that it won’t have any impact.

Nelio Content

I’m so happy about Nelio Content that I will sound like a payed advocate… but here’s why you’ll love it: it works as promised, its auto-scheduling feature is top-notch, Nelio’s value for money is unmatched, and the support team feels like your own.

Panozk

WordPress.org

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Analyze, Think And Start Again.

It is important in the editorial process to analyze how well (or badly) your content is working. This is very easy thanks to Google Analytics, which I’m sure you have enabled in your WordPress. But if you connect your Google Analytics with Nelio Content it will be even easier.

Nelio Content Analytics — Screenshot of a fragment of the Analytics offered by Nelio Content.

At a glance you can see which posts are the best in your blog and you will know which content your audience likes the most. In this way, you will be able to promote this type of content and increase your audience even more.

Analyze, think, and repeat. These are the steps to follow to achieve success on your website. Schedule content in your calendar, write it down following the steps described above to achieve quality in a simple way, promote them in your social networks, study their impact, learn from it, and start over. The magic circle of content marketing is at your fingertips. What are you waiting for to apply it on your website?

Featured image by The Climate Reality Project on Unsplash.