How to Develop an Affiliate Marketing Social Media Content Calendar Template
If you have a social media strategy, an affiliate marketing social media content calendar template is an essential tool to implement. Once you understand how to use it, your content calendar will become your best friend.
A good content calendar should help you consistently share valuable affiliate marketing content your audience cares about. In time, both consistency and valuable content will help you grow your social media.
Before we discuss what makes a good affiliate marketing social media content calendar, let’s define it.
What Is an Affiliate Marketing Social Media Content Calendar Template?
An affiliate marketing social media content calendar template is a calendar for scheduling your social media content. In other words, it’s a schedule detailing what content you will post on social media and when you will post it.
This schedule can take many forms:
1) Pen and paper: You can simply write down your plan. This works if you’re the only person producing and publishing content.
2) Excel Sheets/Google Sheets: You can generate a spreadsheet either in Microsoft Excel on your computer or in its online equivalent, Google Sheets. This is a good option if you want to collaborate with others on your team.
3) Content calendar software: Software systems have been developed to help content creators and affiliate marketers collaborate and produce content faster. They have a blog editorial calendar where you can pitch, assign, approve, and publish content all in one place. The calendar is a powerful collaboration tool with the content editor, allowing different team members to work together on content production.
Why Do I Need an Affiliate Marketing Social Media Content Calendar?
It’s possible to operate without a social media content calendar, theoretically. But once you learn to use one, you won’t want to return to a life without it.
For a content creator or an affiliate marketer, a content calendar has many benefits:
1) Helps You Save Time in the Future
Imagine having time to find fresh, exciting content to share daily. What happens if you have to go for an unforeseen meeting during the time you had allocated to finding content? Or if a client calls with something that needs to be worked on urgently?
With a social media content calendar template, you won’t have to worry about emergencies like these forcing you to abandon your quest for good content halfway. You can simply sit down and line up all your content for a week, then move on to other tasks that need to be done.
2) Helps You Streamline Your Collaboration
Working together efficiently is essential to team success. With a content calendar, you can say goodbye to those “What’s the status of this video?” messages and “Is the editing for this blog post done?” phone calls. With a good content calendar, everyone on your team should be able to see the status of each piece of content.
When done well, your content calendar saves time because everyone can pitch in on the same project in one place. This saves time regarding emails, word processors, and project management tools.
3) Gives You an Overview of Your Entire Social Media Strategy
A social media content calendar template also gives you a bird’s eye view of your social media content strategy. You can see how all the elements work together to achieve the goals you’ve set out.
Since your social media strategy complements your marketing strategy, a good content calendar will also give you an overview of your marketing strategy.
4) Helps You Analyze and Evaluate Your Strategy
When you have all your social media content in one place, you can evaluate the success of your social media strategy more quickly in the future. Seeing how all the pieces fit together can help you determine which pieces contribute to your goals and which aren’t.
This is a good starting point for helping you tweak your strategy to fit your goals better.
Okay, How Do I Develop an Affiliate Marketing Social Media Content Calendar?
Now that you understand how an affiliate marketing content calendar can help you let’s discuss how to develop one that will work well for you.
1) Perform a Social Media Audit
The first step of developing a social media content calendar for your affiliate marketing website is evaluating what’s already working and what isn’t. To do this, you need to log into all your social media accounts and do the following:
- Ensure each profile includes contact information, a physical address (if necessary), and links to your affiliate marketing website.
- Identify the demographic that makes up the majority of your audience.
- Identify your best-performing posts and hashtags.
- Identify the account with the highest engagement and those still needing work.
Once you know how each social media account performs, we can move on to the next step.
2) Identify Your Target Audience
Since you already performed your social media audit in Step 1, you already know who your audience is. Are the people you’re reaching the same as your target audience? Do you need to do something different to get the people you want to achieve?
Profiling your target audience will help you understand what needs tweaking in your current social media strategy. Once you know who the people you’re interested in are and what matters to them, you will be in a better position to produce content that matters to them.
A good target audience profile should also include where these people hang out. If you can get this information, you will also know which social media networks to use to find this target audience.
3) Identify the Most Effective Platforms
We started by identifying the social media accounts where you’re already shining (Step 1). Then, we talked about where your target audience hangs out (Step 2). Both of these pieces of information will help you identify which platforms you should prioritize in your social media strategy.
Once you’ve identified the most effective platforms, you must also determine which media works best on each platform and the optimal times for posting.
4) Develop Your Editorial Pieces
Your editorial pieces list all the content you will produce: blog posts, videos, tutorials, podcast episodes, etc. All your core content counts as editorial content.
5) Break Everything Down Into Steps
It’s not enough to simply list everything that needs to be done and leave it at that. Instead, break everything down into stages which are easy to implement. For example, instead of just listing a blog post, break it down into brainstorming, writing a first draft, and editing.
This way, you won’t be overwhelmed looking at a single piece of content. Additionally, breaking things down into stages makes it easy to assign different tasks to people.
6) Colour Code Different Categories of Content
Colors can help you stay organized and differentiate between different categories of content. If you color code your content calendar, it’ll be easy to distinguish between different things that need to be done at a glance.
Here’s how our social media team uses color coding in their content calendar:
7) Identify Your Promotional Content
Once you’ve decided on your editorial content, you should also find ways to repackage it in forms your social media audience will enjoy consuming. For example, you could turn your blog post into an infographic, a graph, or a video. People want visual content, so it pays to use all the different options.
8) Create a Space for Brainstorming
Did you think a content calendar was only meant for content ready to go out? As it turns out, a content calendar can also be handy for brainstorming.
Since everyone on your team has access to this calendar, creating a space where people can brainstorm, and pool ideas for the future is a good idea. This is especially handy when you need content but are running low on ideas.
9) Leave Room for Last-Minute Inspiration
Just as a good content calendar should have a brainstorming space, you should also have spaces saved for content inspired at the last minute.
An excellent example of last-minute inspiration is newsjacking.
You can plan to produce content related to the news a specific number of times every week. However, you can’t plan exactly what kind of content this will be since the news changes so often and so quickly.
10) Ensure Your Calendar Is Accessible to Your Team
What good is an organized content calendar if no one but you can see it? As soon as you set up your content calendar, you must ensure all your team members can see it.
11) Evaluate and Adjust
As previously stated, your affiliate marketing social media content calendar template is also a tool for evaluating your social media strategy. First, run your social media campaign, then look at the analytics. Once you know what content is performing well or poorly, you can return to your calendar and restrategise.
As you can see, a social media content calendar should help you implement your social media strategy and collaborate successfully with your team. Ultimately, a good content calendar should make social media management much smoother.
