There's a saying that 80% of success is in just showing up. I argue that it's how you show up that matters—not just your physical presence.

This part of the Playbook will help you show up in the right way: motivated, confident, and clear. We'll help you feel good about your decision to go through this process and show you how to find the time to make it happen.

After this section you'll jump into the prep-work to help streamline the process, and then you'll get started building your calendar.

WHY DO YOU NEED A CONTENT CALENDAR?

You may have purchased the Content Calendar Playbook in a moment of frustration, and now you're asking yourself if that was such a smart move. Who really needs a content calendar, anyway? After all, the powers that be in your company just want content. They don't care about some fancy-schmancy calendar.

I'll answer those questions for you:

1. It was a smart move.
2. You need a content calendar.

Here's why:

1. A CONTENT CALENDAR HELPS YOU GARNER MORE SUPPORT

Another big pain point for the content and marketing pros in our survey was a lack of buy-in on their content. If you want the sales team, customer success team, and other organizations within your business to support your content plan...well, you have to have a plan.

Showing them a calendar of the content you'll be producing—and explaining how it will help them become more successful—is a lot more convincing than asking them to believe in an out-of-date blog and a few half-hearted social posts. Not to mention, once your calendar is up and running and you're starting to see some nice wins, you'll get more support from the decision-makers in your company who hold the purse strings.

2. A CONTENT CALENDAR HELPS YOU DEVELOP BETTER CONTENT

Generating relevant, authoritative, useful content topics is not easy. In the Playbook, you'll come up with a unique theme for each month—informed by research and content audits—that will help guide your brainstorming.

You've probably experienced for yourself how much easier it is to work with constraints: when someone says "Tell me a story," your mind comes up blank. But if they instead say, "Tell me a story about a time in your childhood when you were disappointed," it's much easier to think of a relevant anecdote. Developing monthly themes for your content calendar has the same effect, helping you generate great ideas...which in turn helps you create incredible content.

For example, say you're a field service software company and your theme for March is "inventory management." You'll build your topics around what your prospects and clients are asking about inventory management...what the competition hasn't covered (or hasn't covered well) about inventory management...and the opportunities and challenges for your audience around inventory management.

3. A CONTENT CALENDAR GIVES YOU MORE BANG FOR YOUR CONTENT BUCK

Without a content calendar, you tend to miss out on opportunities to repurpose your content. You pump out content, publish it, and then move on to the next topic without considering how you might spin those assets you worked so hard on into social posts, infographics, e-books, newsletters, and more.

Developing a content calendar is an opportunity to really think about how you might turn one hard-won idea into multiple assets, giving you more reach for less money. (You did say you're on a limited content budget, right?)

4. A CONTENT CALENDAR SAVES YOU TIME

Once you have a plan, all you have to do is follow that plan. You know what content you're publishing when, the resources you'll need to create that content, and a timeline of assets you'll be spinning off the main piece. Compare this to the usual method of starting each day, week, or month from square one.

All this from a plan you can build in just a few key steps? Yes. Soon I'll show you how.

BUT WHO HAS THE TIME?

You may be freaking out at this point, wondering how on earth you'll find any time to create a content calendar. "I don't even have a few hours to spare," you groan.

Here's something to consider: the content marketers who are accomplishing all the things that you wish you were accomplishing aren't some lucky breed of folk who are less busy, enjoy complete support and scads of resources, and magically have more time than everyone else. There are content marketers out there with beautiful, effective content calendars—who are just as busy as you are.

The secret is to not dig around for reasons you can't create a quarterly content calendar. Instead, brainstorm ways you can do it. Below are a couple of my favorites.

1. GET CREATIVE

You don't have to sit down and bang out your content calendar all in one go. Instead, you might try to...

• • Set aside half of one business day per week over the next two weeks.
  • Schedule the tasks into your calendar, spreading them out over the next week or two.
  • Use the time after lunch on Friday. If you work 9-5 Monday through Friday, chances are you're not doing much important work at that time anyway.
  • Dedicate a weekend to blasting out your calendar. A content manager recently told me that she's so busy putting out fires during the week that the weekend is the only time she can get any "real work" done. Definitely not ideal, but it is an option. (Then zone out on Monday. Come on, who doesn't zone out on the occasional Monday?)
  • Delegate or hire out parts of the process. While the Playbook enables you to create an entire calendar on your own, there's no reason you have to.
  • Turn it into a game. Get a few like-minded content marketers on board and offer a token prize to the participant who gets their calendar done first.

These are all creative alternatives that might work better for you than clearing one big chunk of time to get this done.

2. BLOCK OFF THE TIME

A trick that's helped me fit a lot of work into a small amount of time is time blocking.

Here's a screenshot of a recent week from my calendar; I blocked out time for conducting interviews, working on the Playbook, creating and scheduling LinkedIn posts, having a long coffee meeting with a prospect, working on client projects, having lunch with my son (his school schedule is in gray), and completing random tasks (that's "buffer").

As you can see, this is an incredibly useful method to boost your productivity. Explaining how to use time blocking goes beyond the scope of this guide, so I created a rough-and-ready excerpt of a training I presented on this very topic: see the Time Blocking Video in the Extra Resources section.

No matter how you choose to make the time to create your content calendar, the fact remains that if you can just muscle through some up-front discomfort—which I have made as easy as possible for you with scripts, worksheets, and templates—you can reap the benefits over the entire next quarter. Just think: less stress. Less burnout. Easier work. And better content.