Anyone who knows me, knows that I have recently developed a new love. A love that will never end, and that I cherish every day.

This romance is with my day planner. I take it every where I go, and it is always within an arm’s reach – even while I’m sleeping.

I know you are thinking, “Wow! Alicia is so busy and cool! She must have a gazillon fun things going on if she needs her day planner that much!”

Well, that’s simply not true. The real reason I keep my day planner by my side is that I have a few sections in the back that are used for jotting down all my brilliant ideas. Some of these ideas are for my clients, but some are for blog posts. I have pages and pages of wonderful blog posts ideas, yet they rarely make it here….to my blog.

To change that in 2010, I’m going to create an Editorial Calendar for my blog. I have already established the purpose and goal for my blog, but need a map to help guide the way. An editorial calendar is the perfect fit because it will keep me focused, motivated and on topic.

Let’s go through some easy steps on setting up an editorial calendar.

How often do you want to post? Or, better, how often do you have time to post?

The first place to start is by deciding how frequently you can/want to post. Be realistic. We all wish we could post daily. I’ve made that commitment to myself several times, but it doesn’t happen. So, to save me some guilt, I’m going to aim for posting three times a week for this first quarter of 2010.

Identify types of blog posts and possibly weekly themes.

Once you think about it, there are a lot of possibilities for types of blog posts.

• Instructional/How-to
• Q&A
• Product or Book Review
• Podcast
• Video
• Photo
• Opinion
• Guest Blogger

Plus, the sky is the limit for the types of themes you can create, like Favorite Fast Food Friday, where each Friday you write about your favorite fast food meal of the week. One of my themes is called “Interesting Tidbits” and is inspired by all the wonderful articles/posts I read from Twitter.

Identifying types and themes can transform a long, random list of blog post ideas into something that kinda makes sense.

Pull out the glue and crayons! We’re gonna make a calendar!

Or, you can use Word or Excel to create a document for tracking your posts. I easily created an editorial calendar template in Google Documents to show the information I track on my editorial calendar.

After filling in most of the information, I will start to schedule time in my beloved day planner for time to write the posts and do additional research, if necessary.

Let the brilliant blog ideas flow.

Now that you have an editorial calendar for your blog, whenever you get a brilliant idea for a post you can simply fit it into the schedule. This also works well for any holidays or special events or milestones you will want to blog about. For example, I know that I have a special offer that expires at the end of March, so I will be sure to mention it a few times leading up to the expiration date.

If you are using a chart like the one I created, you can also take a few notes about the post so you won’t forget, classify what type of post it will be and note if you need to dig up additional resources or schedule time for creating/editing a video, etc.