The Benefits of an Editorial Calendar

Legal professionals who keep blogs and engage their social media followers are ahead of the competition with regard to online marketing, but those who stick to an editorial calendar for content creation and publishing are sure to be more successful over time. Easy to use and simple to create, editorial calendars help authors avoid writer’s block and keep readers coming back for more.

Attorneys and law firms can derive a wide range of benefits from editorial calendars:

• When it comes to content publishing, planning ahead saves time and promotes efficiency. It is also a lot easier for law firms that create their own content to assign authorship duties to different partners and associates following the calendar.
• Editorial calendars can be synchronized with seasonal search trends and forecasts reported by Google Trends. For example, the best time for a Los Angeles car accident lawyer to increase their publishing is right after the holidays when there is usually a significant spike in search volume.
• Constant engagement is easier to accomplish with an editorial calendar.

Basic editorial calendars have main topics running down one column followed by the scheduled publication dates for proposed articles. An auto accident law firm that chooses to publish eight posts a month could schedule one topic ahead of time per week to rotate through the types of cases they handle.

Editorial calendars have the added advantage of providing legal professionals with an overview of what their blog is saying about their practices. If the proposed articles for an entire month seem to be heavy on the technical side of the law, it may be a good idea to change some of them or space them out. Other ideas include setting aside certain days to scanning a specific online news site and making a commitment to pick out a topic, write an opinion and link to the original source.