A Smart Editorial Calendar Hack (steal this idea!)

When I was a health coach, the number one linchpin to my clients’ success long term was menu planning. When you have someone to hold you accountable, living healthy is easy.It’s when you have to leave the nest on your own wings that maintaining the momentum you’ve been building becomes tricky. So I taught them how to plan a weekly menu.My strategy for menu planning was simple enough to grasp but powerful enough to make sure they weren’t eating the same chicken-and-broccoli combo and resenting the heck outta their life, night after night.Look, variety is the spice of life, right? Each week, my clients would sit down with a few recipe books for inspiration, and make a menu based on a few meal categories:

• Soup
• Rice
• Pasta
• Salad/vegetable
• Beans

Having these categories made it really easy for them to find recipes and plan. But it also made sure that they enjoyed what they ate and looked forward to actually cooking it in the work-week.This way, they were never stressing about eating the same thing 5 days in a row or wondering what’s for dinner.The added benefit is that they ate a balanced diet. Because they had other categories to fill in the gaps and mix it up, they weren’t unconsciously resorting to eating rice every single day. They were able to balance it out with “Cincinnati Chili” or “vegetable pasta.”Talk about nutritious!To spice up your newsletter content and create an editorial calendar that’s equally as hearty and “nutritious,” you can do the same thing.Choose a few “menu” topics and use them as a guide for creating newsletters that your readers will look forward to digesting! Some common “categories” include:

• Personal stories of lessons learned
• Client testimonials
• How-tos
• Case studies
• Book reviews
• Epic posts that include case studies and how-tos

Using these topic categories to plan your editorial calendar will help you feel organized and it will give your readers a good variety of information to tuck in to.The truth is, no matter how much you love nachos and cheese, if you had to eat it every day, you’d kill yourself.It’s the same deal for your newsletters: if you’re only sending your readers one type of topic, you’re almost guaranteeing they’ll rebel at the dinner table.Smart editorial planning, like smart meal prep, means you’ve got to change it up and anticipate what your readers are hungry for next (pssst, I’ve got some more hacks for you, simmering on the backburner).Planning an editorial calendar is just plain smart.But have you ever been to a restaurant where you ordered something off the menu and it was exactly what you were hoping for? I mean, seriously, it was not only exactly what you were craving, it hit all the right spots?I bet you were thinking, “How did they read my mind? This is sooo good!”You can totally get this reaction from your readers with my Editorial Calendar mini-course. If you loved this menu planning hack and you’re ready to stuff your newsletters full of content that makes your readers go, “Yes! This is what I was looking for!”, this mini-course is for you.Together, we plan and create 6 months worth of newsletter content.Your time investment? 40 minutes.Yep, you read that right: you’re 40 minutes away from a strategy that will work for planning your blog posts, newsletters, videos, social media posts, and anything else your subscribers are craving.So sign up here, set aside 40 minutes, grab a pen and paper, your warm beverage of choice and favorite pet. We’re about to prep your plate full of content!