Without a way to track the development of content, chaos is bound to take over. Think missed deadlines, lost revenue streams, poor displays of teamwork, or just bad, repetitive content! What you need is a smart content calendar (like this free one!) to enforce deadlines and delegate work more effectively.
This content calendar template is not only a strategic document or planning-stage tool, but also a practical tool for managing teams actively working on content tasks. Inside this template, you’ll find an elaborate task list and calendar view of your content plans, Gantt timelines to plan & track workflow, live, interactive charts/graphs to interpret past analytics, and data slicers/drop-downs to personalize. For ease, knowledge is synced across four worksheets to create an efficient, industry-standard framework so you don’t need to duplicate data entries. This free, 100% editable content calendar template is pro-level gear for anyone who wants to plan, schedule, supervise, track, or share content across multiple platforms.
What Is an Editorial Content Calendar?
A content calendar is a monthly, day-by-day view to organize your content ideas, key deadlines, and tasks in one place to streamline the process of creating and publishing content across multiple platforms—usually towards a specific goal.
Why you need one: Whether you’re a giant corporation or an independent TikToker, a solid content game sets you apart from your rivals. Companies rely on content to sell, market & advertise their products & services; think upcoming blogs, planned promotional activity, partnerships, updates to existing content, and more. A content calendar helps you plan what content to publish and when!
Popular content forms today!
- Blog posts
- Videos
- Podcasts or webinars
- Emails & e-newsletters
- Interviews
- Surveys & case studies
- Infographics
- Live streams
- User-generated content (reviews, testimonials, etc.)
- Carousels
Why You Need a Calendar…
As a strategic planning tool, content calendars offer a range of individual benefits. From higher efficiency and increased productivity to better coordination across teams, this is the kind of visual roadmap you need to get the ball rolling!
- Decide when & where to publish new content
- Track what content is already planned or scheduled to publish
- Manage individual deadlines & assign tasks
- Balance workload across teams & individuals
- Measure content performance against specific goals/KPIs
- Build a positive content return on investment (ROI)
- Identify gaps in existing content strategies
What We Offer
At WordLayouts, our goal is to make life simpler for our users. Our researchers stumbled upon major overlaps in how content developers understand their ‘publishing workflow’ or ‘content planning process’ across companies & industries. We turned those commonalities into a user-friendly system for creating and managing content.
Schedule with a monthly calendar view without the need to back-end-code or preprogram anything at all. From what the content is about to how often you post or what platforms you use, a smart calendar helps you meet your high-level strategic goals and daily operational targets. When it comes to content, organizing is key. By digitizing your plans & particulars in a neat & systematic way, a template saves you the trouble of formatting & automating blank sheets from scratch… phew, right?!
What’s In the File!
Once open via Excel or Google Sheets, it’s important to get familiar with each worksheet (four in total, all dynamically linked). Start by opening the back-end Configuration sheet to personalize settings (like content types and holiday schedules); this is also where you reset or clear dummy data.
Now, off to the Data Entry Sheet for adding new content entries in each individual row. For day-to-day running of business, view the Calendar Sheet to access a month-by-month or weekly view of content development. For fast analytics, hop on to the dashboard to look at key trends & stats based on content type, month, team member, etc.
Core Template Features
A quick run-down of basic features and functionalities used in the making of this calendar…
- Live, interactive graphics (like bars, charts, and data widgets) to facilitate data analytics
- Data slicers to filter information by content type, status & month
- Editable drop-down menus & checkbox features
- A built-in, easily navigable Gantt-style calendar (up to year 2045)
- Color codes to mark different content types, holidays, weekends, current status, task priority, etc.
- Industry-standard columns used to understand the processes of ‘Content Planning’ and ‘Publishing ’Workflow’—such as important dates, Keywords, CTAs, and URLs
- Option to manage multiple content calendars or RESET data to start from scratch
New to Excel?
Simply follow our step-by-step instructions on how to tailor this premade framework to your needs. Don’t forget to turn on macros to benefit from all the functionalities & formulae we built into it.
Here’s how you can do that:
Step 1: Right-click on the file icon.
Step 2: Go to ‘Properties’
Step 3: Select the option ‘Unblock’ under ‘Security’
A Detailed Step-by-Step Guide to Using Our Premade, Smart Content Calendar!
Not everyone has a knack for Excel. And even if you did, sometimes you’re too crunched for time to get into all the formula-writing & programming side of things. Whatever your excuse, we forgive you. And if that’s not enough, we offer a detailed step-by-step on how to make the best of this template—perfect for Excel beginners & first-time content managers.
But before you start entering data, here’s what you should handle first:
- Identify your content goals
- Research your audience
- Brainstorm content topics
- Choose your distribution channels
Once you know your content goals, audience, and platforms, here’s what you need to do:
Step 1: Open the Data Entry Sheet to kick off the calendar by marking a Start Date: This is when you or your team start planning or making content. As you can see, this date is instantly reflected in where the Gantt timeline (on the right) begins.
Reconfigure the Sheet to Match Your Content Needs
Step 2: Open the Config Sheet and click on ‘Reset All Data’. This will clear the sample data we’ve provided for testing, giving you a clean slate to begin entering your own data. But before you start entering new data entries, you need to reconfigure our default settings for your individual or company-specific use.
Step 3: Enlist all the forms of content you’re dealing with: Are you writing blogs, making podcasts, or running surveys? This is the first & most fundamental step of the way. Go to the Config sheet (on the top right) to select the appropriate content type for each editorial item you plan to work on.
Pro Tip
The right format helps you gain traction for your content by hitting the right ears the right way. Run a thorough market analysis to see what kinds or forms of content are working for your competitors. You can always use our Basic Competitive Matrix or Competitive Product Feature Analysis templates to compare your content strategy against your competitors!
Step 4: Use the configuration sheet to categorize your content by listing down the different topics or themes you plan to cover: From general categories like tech, health, culture, and finance to more specialized content streams, such as brand reviews by a beauty influencer that targets older women or a football blog about the English Premier League. This is when you create an overall moodboard for your upcoming content
Step 5: Decide on a weekend policy: While most U.S. companies give their employees two days off work, in some industries or jobs, you are lucky to even get that one random day off in the week.
Use this part of the Config sheet to determine your weekend (or non-working) days, as per your company policy. Mark 1 for weekends and 0 for weekdays according to your team’s operational schedule. This step ensures realistic deadlines & prevents tasks from being assigned on non-working days, improving scheduling accuracy.
User Note
For better visibility, weekend days are color-coded ‘Yellow’ in the Gantt timeline in the Data Entry Sheet. By default, Saturday and Sunday are non-working days.
Step 6: Create a holiday schedule for content creation: Holidays work best when they’re planned ahead, especially in an editorial setting where timing is everything.
From festive Christmas merchandise to spooky Halloween treats, holidays are a brilliant opportunity for a company to bolster audience engagement and generate new marketing ideas. Our built-in holiday schedule helps you stay on top of your next big holiday season, so you can cash in on each seasonal wave with content that lands exactly when your audience is paying attention.
In the template, you’ll find a simple way to map out key dates, organize ideas, and keep track of what needs to be created.
What’s recognized or observed as a public holiday depends on two things: where you live and whether you’re a government agency or a private company. These may be fixed dates, such as New Year’s Day (it’s always going to be the 1st of Jan!) or a changing one, like Labor Day, which falls on the first Monday of every September. Both dating methods are built into the Config Sheet (bottom left).
Note that all public holidays you list in here show up in the Calendar sheet and the Gantt timeline Data Entry Sheet. Colored yellow so you can spot them instantly.
We follow this schedule for public holidays:
| Holiday | Date |
|---|---|
| New Year’s Day | January 1st |
| ML King Day | Third Monday of January |
| President’s Day | Third Monday of February |
| Memorial Day | Last Monday in May |
| Independence Day | July 4th |
| Labour Day | First Monday of September |
| Columbus Day | Second Monday of October |
| Veteran’s Day | November 11th |
| Thanksgiving Day | Fourth Thursday in November |
| Christmas Day | December 25th |
Set Priorities and Follow Up
Step 7: Have a good think about how you plan to track and prioritize your content inventory: Though we use industry-standard categories, you can customize our built-in drop-down menus for the current ‘Status’ and level of ‘Priority’ assigned to each content piece or item at any given point in time.
Status
This information tells you where you stand with each content piece. From the idea stage to ‘still-needs-a-few-tweaks’ all the way to publication, you need a systematic way to track things. To avoid confusion later, you need to nail down the categories most suited to your operational workflow.
Priority
Not all content pieces are equally important. Some may be trending or seasonal; others may be better off on the back burner, say, minor additions or updates in content that’s already out there!
Editable menus organize your workflow in a quicker & more responsive way. Assign priority levels in light of your content strategy and overall performance goals. Our color-coded drop-downs give you three options:
- ‘High’ (Red)
- ‘Medium’ (Yellow)
- ‘Low’ (Blue)
Step 8: Enough preparing for battle; it’s time to get real. Open the Data Entry sheet to start fleshing out details of your roadmap for each content piece: You can add as many rows as you have content pieces to make. Thanks to the use of pre-standardized column headings, this is your go-to sheet for whenever you want to plan new content pieces or make changes in past ones, such as:
- Extend a deadline
- Update task status in real-time
- Respond to shifting priorities
- Add new or additional keywords
- Add links to published work
What Each Column in Your Content Sheet Really Means
Let’s be honest—for all practical purposes, the Data Entry Sheet is where you’ll end up spending the most time. Knowing your way around it and observing how updates here feed into your dashboards and summaries will save you time and keep your content planning on track.
Here’s a closer look at what each column means.
- Start and due date: Set a realistic timeline for each content piece, and make sure everyone involved sticks to it!
- Type of content: Decide what format you want to use, depending on audience taste, available resources & the content itself.
- Author: Name the person (usually a team lead) responsible for developing the content
- Length of content: Specify how long the content will be: a short reel or a long-form video, a small press statement or a detailed product guide?
- Title: Choose a short & catchy title for each content piece.
- Topic description: Jot down a brief synopsis of each piece, giving stakeholders and team members a quick snapshot of what the content is about!
- Priority: Use embedded drop-downs to decide which future content to put first. You can always use a simple Prioritization Matrix to determine priority based on factors like Impact and Effort.
- Status: Be sure to regularly update the status of each content piece, preferably at the end of each working day.
- Keywords: You need keywords to make your content more SEO-friendly. The right keywords & social media hashtags help you improve the visibility of content in search engines like Google or Bing.
- Calls to Action (CTAs): Direct the audience to what they need to do after watching, listening, or reading your content. CTAs should be quick, action-oriented, and designed to prop up levels of content engagement.
- Platforms: Decide which platforms you’ll use to share content. This will be different for each category or piece, depending on the content and audience. For example, informative carousels perform really well on LinkedIn, but customer-centric content fares better on Instagram.
- Link to Published Content: Add URLs directing to published content or internal working pages (like Google Doc links); this ensures proper documentation & access. It could also be links you want to share from your website (or another website if you are curating content) on your social media.
- Notes: Use this column to list down any additional instructions, links to resources, or any other comments or information that could benefit the people working on the content.
Step 9: Once you have planned new content on the Data Entry Sheet, it’s time to start managing what’s already on your plate—the daily workload.
When managing content for a media house, your first order of business after walking into work is opening the Calendar Sheet, not the Data Entry Sheet. Why? A calendar view allows you to quickly see what you need to work on any given day of the week. By making it easy to track start & due dates for individual pieces, you can start your day knowing what needs to be done or what’s high on priority.
Our default settings show up to five content pieces per day. However, when you add new content pieces in the Data Entry sheet, a new row is automatically inserted for those days in the Calendar Sheet.
There’s more? Yes! Visualize the status of each task in the Calendar sheet too, based on the same color codes we defined earlier. Pretty cool, huh?
Welcome to the Dashboard!
Welcome to a live, interactive Dashboard to get a high-level view of your content process in one single location. All bars and charts are dynamically filtered & synced using prebuilt data slicers (positioned on the right). So the boxes you check in here will apply to all graphs & charts at once.
For example, if you select only one type of content (say, blog posts) in Slicer 1 (Content Type), the built-in visual aids only show you information for that content form.
Find out:
- The total number of blogs you are working on, or will in the future
- The total number of blogs under each status type, say, those being planned, on hold, ready, or published
- The number of blogs produced each month
Do this for individual content types, all content types together, or for a select set—it’s your call. Deeply analyze your own performance so you can zero in on the channels that matter most to you.
Key Dashboard Features
Interactive visual tools are a great way to say more in less. Right at the top, you can see the sum of all content pieces as per current status: Total, In Progress, Pending, Published. These numbers give you a quick overview of how far you’ve come with respect to your content goals and how far you still have to go.
Here’s what each graph or chart in the Dashboard shows:
Content type distribution
This doughnut chart shows how many content pieces of each content type you’re working on: say, a batch of 5 blogs, a 2-part podcast series, or a dozen Insta reels. This instantly tells you how diversified you are and helps you realize if you’re leaning too heavily on one format, pushing you to adjust your strategy for better balance and reach.
Content status overview
This horizontal bar chart shows content pieces by status, or in other words, how many content pieces (of one, multiple, or all kinds) you have at each stage of the content development process (pending, ready, published, etc.). This can help you quickly understand how much content is in the planning, production, or completed stages.
Category vs status
This vertical bar chart is my favorite because it tells you everything at once: Find content types (on the x-axis) and the number of pieces by status (on the y-axis). See and analyze how many content pieces of each format (blogs or reels, etc.) were completed, are in the pipeline, or are on hold—depending on what categories you choose to divide your content planning & publishing process in the Config sheet.
Prospective Template Users
This free, pre-programmed template is a quick & handy resource for…
- Content managers
- Digital marketers
- Social media managers
- Bloggers & influencers
- SEO specialists
- Marketing teams
Key Features of Our Template
A pre-designed template can save you hours in research, design, and formatting work. Here are some of the most useful features of our template:
Customizable
This document can be customized to the content planning needs of companies or individuals operating in any market or industry. Replace the default categories with other criteria more suited to your context.
Scalable
Our template can be scaled or expanded to analyze as many content pieces as needed.
In-depth
We tried to cover the most common components of a Content Calendar so you have a good place to start your research & analysis. Our choices are based on an analysis of hundreds of templates.
Is a Content Calendar the Same Thing as a Content Strategy?
This is a common misconception. A content calendar is NOT a replacement for your content strategy. Instead, think of it as the tool that brings it to life. A content strategy is the broader, long-term vision of how you approach content; the calendar turns that plan into action. Laying out your ideas in weekly or monthly blocks gives you and your team a clear roadmap and a better chance of driving real results.
To Sum Up
An editorial content calendar is a reliable way to streamline the entire production process—covering blogs, social media, emails, videos, and events—while keeping you and your team on track and in sync. It serves as a visual roadmap that boosts productivity, ensures timely publishing and supports mindful scalability, especially when multiple stakeholders are involved. Making progress visible and organized helps managers track performance, provide feedback, and ensure nothing slips through the cracks.
Download our free Editorial Content Calendar NOW to get started!
