This post is from FinCon Local leader Andrea Travillian.
On December 18th, we held our 3rd DFW FinCon Local meetup. It has been a great way to find out what other bloggers in the area are doing on their blogs. This meeting was sponsored by PowerWallet, so a big Thank You to them!
In case you’re not familiar with their product, PowerWallet is an online personal finance tool that helps you to keep track of all your accounts in one place, setup a family budget, and save money through coupons and deals.
At the gathering was (winter flu season hit us this month so we missed a few people):
- Philip from PT Money
- Andrea from Take A Smart Step
- Jose from Figueroa Financial Counseling
- Jason from Hull Financial Planning
Each meeting we pick a topic and hold a discussion on it. What I have already learned from past meetings has saved me tons of time in managing my blog. This month the topic was editorial calendars. Here were a few of the highlights:
- An editorial calendar is the listing of planned themes, features and needs for upcoming issues of a magazine, paper or blog. Here you can manage ideas and integrate them into your blogging schedule, promotions schedule and upcoming events. You can even use this to manage staff and guest writers.
- You can manage an editorial calendar in excel, word, or anywhere that you are actively managing your blog. (After the meeting Jose found this on blog planner Tackling our Debt, very detailed and helpful if you do want to use excel).
- Not many of us use a calendar and those that do don’t utilize it to its fullest potential. We will have to get working on this!
- There are plug-ins to help manage in the process in WordPress, but since none of us fully utilize a calendar no one knew what was good. Those of us using a calendar use excel. (If you know of great plug-ins please add them in the comments section).
- Ideas on how to plan topics for the month:
- Get ideas from other writers about what they want to contribute,
- Utilize commemorative months such as January is National Financial Wellness month
- Use the time of year to help your readers stay on target, such as knowing new tax rules, investing limits and not going over budget on the holidays.
If you are in the DFW area, join us! You can get updates by joining our Facebook group: http://www.facebook.com/groups/353420821416905/
