Maintaining an editorial calendar involves a careful balance of planning ahead without neglecting important changes as they come up. Use these guidelines to help ease this process.

There are no excuses for repeating the same types of content over and over. Read through these 31 ideas to create fresh content for every day on your calendar.

As you prepare your organic content strategy, you’ll need to Generate a blog and social media accounts, Restructure your site to optimize it, Educate and Engage your audience, and Network with thought leaders in your space to build momentum.

No matter how small your target audience, you undoubtedly have different segments of people coming to your site. You want to talk to each group in their language about what appeals to them most. Using personas will help you achieve this customized form of communication.

Establishing a strong, unique brand identity is critical to your success. When you find just the right voice and tone for your content, you show readers the personality that you want to convey and create a positive perception for your brand.

You can’t become the leading site in your space if you haven’t first looked at the brands you’re up against. By assessing competitors on three levels — SEO, Social, and content — you’ll have the best idea of the strategy you’ll need to implement to put your team on top.

Before you can get started on the creation of new content, you’ll have to assess what you already have. Perform a content audit to determine how worthy your current content is of being enjoyed, understood, and shared.

Content should always tell a story. By sticking to one of the seven archetypes of storytelling, you will have a winning structure that has proven effective for centuries. Check out how current successful campaigns match up with the story types of NY Times bestsellers for proof.