Best Content Planning Tools for Blogs: Essentials for Bloggers

Creating a valuable blog post starts with strategizing and not writing. Every writer will struggle with managing deadlines, writing repetitive and similar blog posts, and publishing posts sporadically. An audience will then lose interest, and the blog will reach a standstill.

There is great news for everyone in need of tools for planning content. Solo bloggers, marketers, and editors running high-volume schedules can better structure their client posts, content calendars, and publications with the right tools. Integrating planning tools with solid time tracking software, Controlio, will help you with time-constrained, content-focused work. More on this below.

Why Content Planning Can’t Be an Afterthought Publishing on a whim might work for a personal diary. For a business blog or a content-driven brand, it’s a recipe for stagnation.

Here are the advantages that planning out your content is superior to simply taking guesses: planning allows for consistent publishing schedules, allows for editorial alignment to audience and business goals, and finally allows for team accountability.

Consider content calendars as the central nervous system of your blog. If things are functioning properly, all the different pieces fit together, all of the different posts support your campaign, and your readers trust the blog and narrative story over a long period of time. If things are not functioning properly, the system and the blog will suffer from a ton of different things, including off-topic posts and a loss of momentum that will be extremely difficult to recover from.

Collaboration is necessary for all of the content that will be produced. Every blog will succeed or fail based on the collaboration and planning that it is built on. Some of the things that are necessary for these blogs to be successful are provided lists, themes, and goals and consistent and reliable editors, designers, and writers. If these things are lacking, the blog will most likely fail.

You must plan for a high level of collaboration and planning, along with a system of support for everything that is going to need done. Having these systems in place will be necessary to avoid creating chaos. These systems will prevent the team from becoming unclear about individual responsibilities and will allow for fluid communication and collaboration to occur without creating any confusion. All of these systems will allow time to be used effectively and will ensure that goals and plans are all achievable.

You will also need to ensure that your expectations and goals are realistic. Having a level of collaboration, support, planning, and systems will allow you to work at a high level and avoid the chaos. These would be necessary to allow your expectations to be achievable and to have goals to avoid chaos.

The Controlio software integrates into a content team’s workflow by tracking time against particular tasks, allowing the team to estimate future tasks accurately, manage client billing with detail, and most importantly, prevent burnout.

Controlio allows you to log your time and billable hours, which helps manage productivity and your remote and in-office teams to ensure an accurate balance of time and tasks.

Controlio, a time tracking piece; Notion; Trello; and Airtable combine to create a slick system to manage a blog content workflow.

1. Controlio (Time Tracking) is perfect for content teams managing billable hours, task times, and productivity for remote vs. in-office team balance and time vs. task accuracy.
2. Notion is good for teams needing a single space to create custom content calendars, editorial wikis, task managers, and team wikis.
3. Trello is good for very small teams needing a simple visual tool to manage the content lifecycle from ideation through publication.
4. Airtable is best for managers of content inventory who want to assign work and configure editorial structures based on custom views, filtering, and color coding.
5. CoSchedule is designed for content marketing and integrates your blog calendar with social media so your team can see all of the content published across all channels.
6. Google Workspace Docs, Sheets, and Calendar integrate to create a robust and economical content planning system, especially for teams that already utilize Google Workspace.
7. Asana: Excellent project management software. Timeline and board views are effective for tracking content production workflows, approvals, and publishing deadlines across large teams.
8. ContentCal is designed specifically for the creation and publication of content, with a centralized content hub to keep briefs, media, and campaign materials organized.

How Time Tracking Enhances Your Content Strategy

Many content teams overlook the time that individual tasks demand. A blog post that takes 2 hours on average may take upwards of 4 hours once you consider research, editing, and formatting time. Budgeting blind is the same as not tracking time.

Time tracking that is part of your content workflow provides you with data about time consumption without micromanaging your team. It allows you to better plan in the future and creates a library of real data over time. It informs you about how long authors take to do keyword research and the average rounds of revisions needed by an author, as well as the publishing capacity of each author on a weekly basis.

Data turns reactive scheduling into confident, proactive planning.

Q: Is a content planning tool going to be beneficial, or will a spreadsheet be fine?

When publishing solo or very infrequently, a spreadsheet works fine. However, once you have more than one contributor on a steady publishing cadence, or multiple content formats to manage, dedicated tools save endless time and reduce the risk of things slipping through the cracks. It’s a shared source of truth that is up-to-date and that your entire team trusts. That source of truth increases productivity.

Q: What’s the first thing you do to get a content planning tool set up for your blog?

Start by mapping your actual workflow. If your main pain point is keeping a consistent publishing calendar across your team, a tool like CoSchedule or Notion will work best. If collab and task assignment are your biggest pain points, go for Asana or Airtable. If you do client work and manage billable hours, make sure you set up a time tracking tool from the get-go. Most tools have a free tier, so test a few before choosing.

Q: What’s the biggest reason content teams need to track time?

Content work is notoriously difficult to estimate. There are many factors that will impact your deadline that are not obvious until you start to fall behind, such as research, writing, editing, SEO, client revisions, and so on. While it will not prevent you from falling behind, timing out each stage of the process will allow you to identify where your process is leaking hours and therefore price your services, set deadlines, and protect your team from overload more realistically. This is an impact it is possible to quantify, and it is one of the best improvements that can be made to a workflow. You will almost certainly see an immediate, positive impact on the quality of the work and also the quality of life for the team.

Final Note

Try to find out what will suit your team best. Regarding content planning, the best thing you can do is keep it simple to start. You can implement a content calendar and a task system for your team as well as find a reliable tool to support your time tracking, and from there build a more complex system. After you have built the basic habit, you should start with that. Once this type of planning is second nature, you will see an increase in the quality and consistency in your content. This consistency will be the thing that truly separates the blogs that build a devoted audience from the ones that gain initial traction for a short period and then disappear.