How the Food Thinkers Content Calendar Works

Rule #1 for a successful content strategy — you have to update your content on a regular basis, preferably every day. Most organizations think that adding frequently updated content to their website is next to impossible with their existing staff. It might be hard, but it’s not impossible. The keys to success are creating a regular editorial calendar, devising simple feature formats, and recruiting outside help. We took this approach when we launched Food Thinkers by Breville.

The Editorial Calendar

Our goal is simple: each day of the week we release one new piece of content geared towards one of Breville’s targeted audiences. We limit our content creation to five weekdays, so we’ve targeted five corresponding online identities. Here’s how it breaks down.

• Mondays — The Healthy Gourmet
• Tuesdays — Newlyweds and the Female Gourmet
• Wednesdays — The Male Gourmet
• Thursdays — The Mom Gourmet
• Fridays — The Metro Male Gourmet

With the audiences clearly defined for each day of the week, we create features for each day of the month. These feature help establish our audience’s expectations for the content on Food Thinkers. So for example, on the second Friday of the month, the Metro Male can expect a feature on mixology, while on the last Tuesday of every month, the Female Gourmet can expect a feature about appetizers and wine pairing.

From the beginning, we knew that our features were just a starting point for the content we would create. In reality, some morphed into something else, while some were canceled and replaced. The concepts started out flexible and changed as we got to know our audience and what worked.

By the second week of each month, our feature editors pitch stories and recipes for the next month. We have to pitch this early because selected recipes have to be sent to our food photographer for the great images he creates. The goal is to always have the final draft of each piece of content in place on WordPress one week before it is released.

Here’s a look at our content calendar for January 2010.

January 2010 Content Calendar for Food Thinkers

Creating Feature Formats

When we first created the features, our next step was to make formats for each of them. Essentially, a format is a formulaic approach to creating the actual content within any feature. The format becomes the general guideline and structure for creating the post, and it ensures that the contributor will have an immediate direction when he or she sits down to write.

So a format might include an introductory paragraph that sets the scene, a sidebar about finding the freshest ingredients, a recipe, and a photograph of the final, plated dish. The more specific the format are, the more useful they will be to the contributors when they sit down to write.

Here’s an example of a format for “Entertaining Apps,” a feature on Food Thinkers that pairs an appetizer with an appropriate wine.

The initial show format for "Entertaining Apps"

Enlisting Contributors

The spirit behind Food Thinkers is to create a blog where like-minded “foodies” (food writers, bloggers, chefs, and food lovers of all kinds) contribute recipes and share ideas and insight about all things food and beverage.

When the site launched, the staff at Tippingpoint Labs was busy creating formats, filling in the content calendar, sending recipes to our food photographer, and writing content. Tippingpoint is full of great writers and producers, and some even might consider themselves minor-league foodies, but sometimes the writing came across as a little forced. The solution: recruit digital influencers who are already writing for their own food blogs — invite them to come aboard as contributors for our features. This would help augment our content creation team and support our strategy of developing relationships with digital influencers in our clients’ space.

Our ideal contributors are good writers, good food photographers, active in social media through Facebook or Twitter, and have an existing foodie blog. Food Thinkers’ Twitter stream was one of the more successful ways we found contributors.

We also reached out to culinary schools, knowing they had talented students and alumni who might be anxious to build their online identities. For them, Food Thinkers is an opportunity to expand their existing reach and strengthen their portfolios. All of our contributors get a byline, photo, short bio, and an outgoing link to their own sites.

Formats as road maps

Before Food Thinkers even launched we were on the lookout for potential contributors. Enlisting help got easier after Food Thinkers was up and running for two months, and our contributors could see the quality of the content being produced. When we got serious interest, the feature formats we had drafted were key in getting the kind of content we wanted from our contributors.

The formats give our contributors the road map to follow; they just have to fill in the blanks and provide the recipes. Meanwhile our staff, which had been very busy writing every article for the first two months of the site’s existence, now became editors, and our overall productivity increased.

Some of the contributors are turning out to be great writers in their own right, making it easy for our editors to polish the drafts. Because all our contributors are passionate about cooking, the overall quality of the articles has increased too. Each story is now written with a flare of expertise and enthusiasm that we could not replicate during the site’s initial launch.

Next, writer Josh Cole talks about working with our contributors to create high-quality, engaging content.

About the author

Jim Cosco -

Jim Cosco founded Tippingpoint Labs in 2002 in an effort to pursue the creation and distribution of high-quality content for the purposes of marketing and advertising. Jim’s experience as an executive producer, producer, director, and writer for television programming ranging from local public affairs and national news to reality television, enables him to create compelling stories designed to trigger powerful, emotional responses from his audience. No matter the medium, Jim’s passion for story-telling remains the common thread in all of his projects and is always the founding principle in driving his team to deliver high-quality, relevant content at every turn.

Jim relies heavily on his journalistic routes to create transparent, honest, and open content that helps build trust and nurtures meaningful brand relationships over the long term.

Since the early nineties Jim has devised and executed projects for clients like MTV, Fox News Channel, ABC, Putnam Investments, and Tufts University.  He has directed television shows and independent features, written screenplays and television treatments, and created content for marketing campaigns and product launches.