Editorial Calendar

Before we dive into the basics of air table in the next section I wanted to start by showing you two examples of what you'll be able to build with air table by the end of the course. The first is an editorial calendar an editorial calendar is a place to manage the creation of content whether that be blog posts video or anything else. Managing content requires quite a few stakeholders and quite a few steps before anything is published making air table the perfect tool to manage. So let's jump right into it. The sample editorial calendar you see now is one I've been using to manage the blog post to promote this course with a few edits. However organize the calendar is that every row is a piece of content. So let's expand this row and see what it's all about. So you'll see all the hallmarks of a blog post you'll see the title where it is in my pipeline whether t's an idea researching phase writing editing published or rejected. I have a link to the draft or the final text. I've got tags to know which audience this blog post is for the type of content. This blog post but could also be video email or anything else. Once it's published I add the URL so I can quickly find it the date at which it was published or expected to be published the authors so whenever I have a piece that's ready to be written I assign it to one of the authors in my list and then the amount of time it took for that writer to complete the piece.

So far pretty standard stuff.

The hardest part of creating content is consistency. Making sure you're posting all the time.Making sure you're posting all the time. So instead of reviewing all of the pieces I have in the sheet. Let's look at them through a calendar. So we're December 16th. I've got three pieces that I'm supposed to publish this week and I can explore each of them by expanding the record. So this piece due Monday is currently in editing phase. I can see that it's been assigned to Malcolm Gladwell. If I look at the one published I'm supposed to be published on Tuesday. It's currently being written by Jeff. So the calendar review is a great way to visualize my upcoming deadlines and make sure I'm on top of things.

So another way I may want to visualize my pieces is not by when they're due but where they are in the writing pipeline so we can do that with the kanban view which orders all of my content pieces left to right by where they are in the pipeline so I can see that I have currently three articles in the ideation phase one article that's being researched. Two that are being written. One that's currently being edited and two that are published. If I want more information about any one of the pieces I can click on it and that will give me the record you can have all the information just like I do in my sheet.

The kanban view and the calendar view ensure I stay on top of my publishing schedule but that's really only one of the challenges that I have. The other is making sure that my authors or the people I contract with are efficient. So if I go into the author's view you'll see that I have three writers that I work with and Airtable summarizes their efficiency by showing me the average writing time it takes for them to publish a piece, the total amount of time they've been contracted for, and how much they've cost me. What's interesting is I can see that Jeff is probably my most efficient writer and also the one that cost me the least per hour so I can quickly deduce that maybe I should be sending more pieces Jeff's way and I can also see which pieces each author has written. All of this from the same view.

That's all I wanted to show you for this quick primer on using Airtable for editorial calendar.

We're gonna jump in to a second example of what you're gonna be able to build by the end of this course with Airtable before we jump into the basics of working with Airtable.