Online Content Calendar Templates

You’re ready to plan your company marketing for the year and want to use a content calendar template online. Paper is great but using an app for planning your content creation, approvals, publishing and tracking is sooooo much easier. Let’s take a look at the best content calendar templates that you can download and/or use today.

Notion Content Calendar Template

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About: Use this content calendar to schedule and track all the content you’re putting out — from blog posts to podcasts to tweets. Every item on the calendar is a project, where you can designate the author (or who’s assigned), the type of content (article, event, etc.), and its status (scheduled, in progress, complete). Each one is also its own Notion page, where you can stash all related notes, research, multimedia, and do all your writing in one place.

Asana Content Calendar Template

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About: Producing and publishing high-quality content that audiences want to consume is challenging enough. Add multiple formats and channels to the mix, and it gets even tougher to keep production on track and deliver great content on time. This is where an editorial calendar can help. An editorial calendar (also known as a content calendar) is a schedule of all the blog posts, articles, or videos you’re producing and it lays out each step of the process, from idea to publication.

To create your own editorial calendar with our template, follow these tips:

• Manage content in one place. Add every piece of content you’re producing to your editorial calendar project so you won’t have to dig through emails, spreadsheets, or docs to know what’s going out when and on what channel.
• Break down your publication process. Assign tasks for all the steps needed to produce a piece of content—draft, edit, approve, publish—and set deadlines for each to create a workback schedule that you can visualize on a calendar.
• Make it easy to see content status. When you’re creating a high volume of content, it’s hard to know the status of every single piece. Track content through every production stage so you can see where everything stands.
• Keep communications and content together. Needs and timing can shift as you’re creating content. Make sure your team has clarity on the latest changes by sharing feedback where work is being done.

ClickUp Content Calendar Template

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About: This template includes four highly visual views that can be customized for any need, from scheduling on a Calendar view to building a database for your content on a List view.

• Calendar view: Manage and schedule your content on a flexible calendar
• List view: Organize your content asset on a List, with Custom Fields for URL links, reports, categories, and more
• Board view: Visualize your content workflows on a Kanban board
• Timeline view: Schedule entire content campaigns across a horizontal timeline

Trello Content Calendar Template

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About: Seamlessly coordinate content creation, editing, and production with internal and external authors, while keeping an eye on the publishing calendar and distribution strategy. There are a lot of moving parts when managing a blog editorial calendar—due dates, author communication, SEO strategy, asset design, and more. So it’s of the utmost importance to develop a clear strategy and workflow to safeguard your editorial calendar from fire drills and chaos.

At a glance:

• See the status of every blog post from fresh idea to published post.
• Manage drafts, illustrations, and assets for each blog post by attaching content to its respective Trello card.
• Make sure nothing falls through the cracks, like social media posts, by creating a publishing process with checklists.
• Keep everyone in the loop by adding editors, designers, and social media managers to cards.
• Get perspective on your publishing pipeline with filterable card labels and a calendar view.

Dropbox Paper Content Calendar Template

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About: See campaign plans, progress, and reporting in one place. Draft content, collect edits and feedback, and share campaign results with embedded social posts.

Monday Content Calendar Template

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About: From digital publications to social media–manage your publishing schedules and coordinate all types of content initiatives in one visual calendar.

Slite Content Calendar Template

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About: Schedule and keep tabs of all the content your team is producing from articles, to social posts.

About Content Calendars

Content calendars (often called editorial calendars) are essential for production teams of all sizes and disciplines. The best content calendars don’t just help everyone keep track of their deadlines; they streamline the entire content creation process. And that happens by ensuring every channel is considered, every title is reviewed, and yes, everybody’s aware of their deadlines.

Highly effective content teams will also use content calendars to manage the production lifecycle of each content asset. This helps create clear workflows for production while also helping your team identify bottlenecks and areas to optimize the content creation process.

You can use the digital templates above to create a content calendar but let’s look at how you can build your own content calendar from scratch.

Have you ever wondered how some people build and schedule content for their social media channels on a regular basis without any struggle?

Do they have a secret formula to scheduling which we don’t know about, or do they simply plan ahead more than anyone else?

Well, I’m here to tell you that the secret is out. And it’s not a secret anymore.

All it takes is a little bit of planning and a few simple tools to make life much easier when it comes to managing your social media content.

In this article, we look at how to build your own social media content calendar template. You can add your blog post topics or any other form of content, add the timing, and then simply schedule your posts.

Let’s get started.

First things first, you need to make sure that you have already drafted out all of your blog post topics for the week (you do this at the end of every week). If not, do it now. And don’t worry about writing an entire blog post; just the topic and a short outline will do.

Next, in the same document where you drafted out your blog post topics (ideally this would be in some sort of content management system or word processing document), create an empty table with Monday through Sunday as the top row headers. This is not to be confused with Microsoft Excel, so don’t get intimidated. If you are using Microsoft Excel, that is fine too.

Just go to ‘insert’ at the top of your document and choose ‘table.’ A new header row will be created automatically.

You are going to want each column to represent a day of the week. So in cell A1, write ‘Monday,’ then drag it down to cell A8. Then in cell B1, write ‘Tuesday,’ and drag it down to cell B8. And so on until you reach Sunday in cell A7. When completed, your document should look similar to this:

Now that the template is set up, it’s time for some content!

Next up, you will need to schedule your blog post topics. This is where it gets a little bit tricky, but I promise you that it’s not impossible.

To make things easier, grab your Google Calendar App for your smartphone or computer calendar app (I’m giving you permission to use Outlook if that is the only one available in your office).

If you are using Microsoft Outlook, I have good news for you! The calendar is already set up with categories. All you need to do is make sure that you are using the right category before hitting ‘schedule.’

Go to ‘Home’ in the top left corner of your calendar view, then click on ‘Categories.’ Once there, select ‘Content Planning’ from the list of categories. If this category doesn’t exist, create it. Then make sure to add it to your calendar by dragging and dropping it on top of Monday in the monthly view.

Now that you have your Content Planning category selected, all you need to do is right click on a time slot or day where you want a new blog post to be scheduled. Once there, you can click on ‘Create event.’ From here, you are given the option to choose a title for your blog post topic and enter in the body of the blog post.

Now that this is done, all you need to do is sit back and let your social media content calendar do the rest!

One thing to keep in mind is that you really only need the categories ‘Content Planning,’ ‘Blogging,’ and ‘Social Media’ set up on your Google calendar. This makes it easy for you to find all of the blog posts you have scheduled throughout your calendar visually.

Of course, feel free to add more categories if needed, but this makes it easy to see your blog posts grouped together.

If, for whatever reason, you do not have the ‘Content Planning’ category available in Microsoft Outlook, here is a quick and dirty way for you to create your own content planning calendar:

First, go back to your Google calendar and click on ‘Other calendars.’ Then, click on ‘Create new calendar.’ Name the first category ‘Blogging,’ and name the second category ‘Social Media.’ Once you are back at your calendar view, you will now see that you have two new categories—’Blogging’ and ‘Social Media.’

Now all you need to do is right-click on a day or time slot where you want to schedule something, then click on ‘Create event.’ When the box pops up, select ‘Blogging’ or ‘Social Media’ as your category. Now you’re all set!

If you are using Gmail, go ahead and download the Google calendar app for your phone or computer; it’s free.