Content Calendar Template
What is publishing, where, when, and whether it is written yet.
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Draw it with a finger, a mouse or a trackpad, and it goes on the page like a picture.
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Red highlights mark what is still blank. Click anything on the page to change it. Your draft is kept on this device as you work.
[date] to [date].
| Date | Channel | Topic | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| [add one item per line] |
What is a Content Calendar?
A content calendar is the dated list of what is publishing, on which channel, who is making it, and whether it is written yet. It matters because content work fails on scheduling far more often than on quality. Without one, two posts go out on a Tuesday and nothing for the next fortnight, a seasonal piece is remembered a week late, and two people research the same article without either knowing.
Small marketing teams live in it week to week; agencies use it as the shared view a client can check without asking; solo creators use it to stop the feed going quiet. Schools, charities and membership bodies plan term dates, appeals and events in one. Retailers build the year around peaks. It is also the document that makes handover survivable: when someone leaves or goes on holiday, the calendar is what tells the next person what was already promised.
The dates you plan around are local. Public holidays and school terms differ by country and often by state; financial year ends fall on 31 March in India, 5 April for UK personal tax, 30 June in Australia and 31 December for most US filers. Commercial peaks vary too — Black Friday, Diwali, Boxing Day, end-of-financial-year sales. Disclosure of paid or gifted content is regulated differently as well: the CAP Code and ASA in the UK, FTC endorsement guidance in the US, ASCI in India, ACCC guidance in Australia. Record the required label beside the post.
The calendar is not a content strategy. It says what and when, never why, which is how a calendar full of items nobody can justify still manages to look productive. It is not a performance report either; keep results in a separate view so the plan does not quietly turn into a scoreboard. And it is not a brief: a row reading 'blog post about onboarding' is not enough for a writer to start from.
What to put in a Content Calendar
These are the details this template asks for. Anything left blank is marked in red on the preview so you can see what is still missing.
| Field | What goes in it |
|---|---|
| Business name | For example: Barton Supply Co. |
| Your address | For example: Unit 7, Barton Road, Columbus, OH 43212 |
| Period from | Free text |
| Period to | Free text |
| Content plan | One per line: Date | Channel | Topic | Status |
How to write a Content Calendar
Decide what counts as one row
Pick a unit and hold to it. Either one row per published item, so a blog post and its four social posts are five rows, or one row per campaign with child items underneath. Mixing the two is what makes a shared calendar unreadable by month three. Write the rule at the top of the sheet so a new contributor follows it without asking.
Separate the draft date from the live date
Every row needs the date it goes live and the date the draft must exist, with review time between them. Work backwards: if a post publishes Thursday and needs a day for review and a day for design, the writer's deadline is Monday. Without the earlier date, writing starts on the publish date and quality is whatever fits before five o'clock.
Anchor the immovable dates first
Put the fixed points in before the ideas: product releases, event dates, results announcements, holidays, term starts, regulatory deadlines. Those cannot move, and everything else fits around them. Filling a calendar with good ideas first and then discovering that three of them land during the week of your own conference is the usual way a quarter gets rearranged.
Record status and a single named owner
Use a short fixed list of statuses — idea, briefed, drafting, in review, scheduled, live — so a glance shows where the bottleneck sits. Give every row one person's name. An item owned by marketing or by the team has no owner at all, and it will still be sitting at idea status in the week it was meant to publish.
Review weekly and move what slipped
Hold a short weekly pass: mark what published, move what did not, and delete what nobody will ever write. Recording the slip matters more than hiding it, because the same channel slipping every week is telling you the plan exceeds your capacity. A calendar that is never edited stops describing reality and starts being ignored.
Common mistakes
- Recording only the publish date and not the draft deadline means writing starts on the day the piece is due, and the review step disappears entirely.
- Assigning items to a team rather than a person leaves every row technically covered and practically unowned, so nothing ships.
- Planning daily posts across five channels with the capacity to make two means the calendar collapses in the third week and is abandoned rather than reduced.
- Failing to flag paid, gifted or affiliate items with the disclosure their market requires exposes both the organisation and the creator to a complaint that was entirely avoidable.
- Keeping the calendar in a file only one person can edit means freelancers and stakeholders work from an out-of-date copy and duplicate each other's work.
Frequently asked questions
How far ahead should I plan content?
Detailed for four to six weeks, outlined for the quarter, and a rough list of anchors for the year. Beyond six weeks the specifics change anyway; beyond a quarter you are guessing. The useful long-range entries are the fixed ones — launches, events, seasonal peaks — because those are what everything else has to be arranged around.
What is the difference between a content calendar and an editorial calendar?
In practice they overlap. Editorial calendar usually refers to longer-form owned publishing — articles, newsletters, video series — with commissioning and editing stages. Content calendar is often used more broadly, covering social posts and campaign assets too. Whichever term you use, the columns that matter are the same: item, channel, owner, draft date, live date and status.
What columns does a content calendar need?
Live date, item, channel, format, owner, draft deadline and status will carry most teams. Add a campaign or theme column if items belong to larger programmes, a link column for the finished piece, and a notes column for the disclosure label or approval needed. Resist adding metrics columns; results belong in a separate view.
How often should we publish?
At the rate you can sustain for six months without the quality dropping, which is usually lower than the rate a planning meeting produces. Two considered posts a week that keep going beat daily posting that stops in March. Set the frequency from the hours actually available, then raise it only after a full quarter at the lower rate.
Should the calendar hold the actual content?
No — hold links to it. Drafts live in your document tool, images in your asset store, scheduled posts in the publishing tool. The calendar's job is to show state and dates in one glance, and pasting full copy into cells destroys that. One link column per row keeps everything findable without turning the sheet into a filing cabinet.
This page explains general practice and is not legal advice. Requirements differ between countries and, in some cases, between states — check what applies where the document will be used.