Why Your Content Calendar Is Working Against You
- Jessica Bush
- Apr 29
- 17 min read
Season 1, Episode 05 | Conversations with Vibe & Logic | April 29, 2026
Most marketing teams use a content calendar, but many aren’t seeing the results they hoped for. The real issue isn’t the calendar. It’s that it turned into just a scheduling tool, not a strategy tool, and no one realized until results dropped.
In this episode, Stephan Bajaio explains why focusing on volume isn’t the right approach, what it really takes to build topical authority, and how to use AI as a thought partner rather than just a content machine. If you manage content, lead a team, or have ever been told to just make more, this episode is for you.
Watch the Episode
What We Cover
01:54 Using All Pieces of the Animal
04:23 Checklist vs. Strategy: Getting More from Every Asset
06:21 What Executives Get Wrong About Volume
11:27 Why AI-Generated Content Backfires
14:35 Empathy as the Only Real Differentiator
21:53 Topical Authority and Search Data
31:17 What to Do With Your Content Calendar Starting Today
Full Transcript
Jessica Bush: Most marketing teams have a content calendar, but they aren't getting the results they hope to get from it. Today, Stephan is going to explain why and what to do instead. Stephan, walk me through what you actually see when you look at how most marketing teams are using their content calendar right now.
Stephan Bajaio: Yeah, for sure. Thanks so much. You know, it's kind of funny, a lot of content teams are looking at their content calendars as a scheduling tool and not necessarily a strategy tool. And so it feels more like it's a checklist and not part of a greater goal. Certain things that get asked to be on a content calendar by other groups like the product department often have a date associated with them, like a product release or something like that. So they're very much focused around a given date. But otherwise, there's a lot of content that gets created by the team that just gets slotted into these spots without necessarily a content marketing strategy created around them. So it's like we're gonna build it, and that's cool. If you build it, they will come... reference to Field of Dreams, for anyone who doesn't know who Kevin Costner is, and probably too many people now. But this concept of we'll build the great content, they'll all show up. I'd love to tell you that's the way the world works, but it's gotten too crowded for that to be the case. You're gonna have to do a little legwork in order to get it out there. Just posting it isn't gonna cut it anymore. So planning out things with a little more rigor and a little more thought process behind why, when, and how... I think that is fundamental to making sure you build content correctly.
Jessica Bush: You have this concept you talk about a lot... using all pieces of the animal. Apply that to content. What does it mean for a content calendar, and how can that make or break it?
Stephan Bajaio: Yeah, I think a lot of times we forget that what we consider content is a little too myopic. We see it as an article or a written piece as content. But in reality, what we're doing right now is content. Content lives in all aspects of any production. And then the question is... and this is not unique to me at all, Gary Vaynerchuk has waxed poetic on this and a lot of marketers have... which is this idea of if you're gonna have an asset. And I think I look at things as assets... a podcast is a transcript. A transcript is full of quotables. Quotables can be social. There are so many things we can pull. If you think about multiple podcasts with multiple guests, ask the same question, and all of a sudden now we have a roundup we can do about a topic with multiple guests' views on that same topic. There are just so many things we can think about in the way that we produce content. If you're only thinking single source or single thread on your content, you're missing the bigger picture. Because are you really just planning on posting something and expecting it to perform, or are you empowering this piece of content with all of the assets and value that are hidden inside of it? That I wouldn't have to read the blog in order to get the value. How could I see the video snip or potentially get the quote and social that would lead me towards it? Or see a roundup or share some aspect of leadership takes on certain topics, where you could turn this into something more valuable than just a single-threaded thing. And I think we do that too often as marketers. It's about checking a box and not about thinking of the full value. I would much rather a team think less about the volume of content they're creating and more about how to create meaningful content that can then get pieced apart, pulled apart, and used in as many places, shapes, and forms as we can. You're not gonna win the volume game with AI out there the way it is right now. It's just not the game you should be playing.
Jessica Bush: Do you still think people need to be intentional about what they're creating and when, out of that one piece of content?
Stephan Bajaio: I don't think there's one correct answer to it. I hate saying it depends because that's an SEO's favorite answer to every question. But I really do think it comes down to... if you've created an audience that expects a certain thing from your brand, like they expect quotes and they expect them at a frequency, then you should be looking for quotes in your content. This is where I think AI comes in. I think AI can be a really good thought partner. Hey, consume this transcript I just had and give me ideas as to where I might want to use this content in a unique or different way. Can you come up with three new ways I might use the content? This is where I try with any kind of LLM to have it thought-challenge me. I can definitely go through a checklist and I think you should probably have a checklist... does this have A, B, C, D, E? Where you get extra credit and you're really starting to think is: how do I use this in a more unique way? Is there something that'll make this stand out? I don't need another 17 blog posts for the sake of blog posts. What I need is something that's gonna connect with my audience. How do I make this more valuable? Those are the questions I want to ask the LLM. This is my audience... what do we think they need that this solves? How does this solve it? How can I make this even more impactful? Those are the kinds of questions I would be deploying AI against versus just creating more. More for the sake of more is not even in the spirit of using all pieces of the animal. You really can make sure that nothing goes to waste, but only if it's worth it. If you're building just to build, that's waste. Waste of time, waste of talent, and waste of treasure.
Jessica Bush: Speaking of building just to build... and on the idea of AI... I have a feeling a lot of our content teams out there are being pushed by their executives. Create more, produce more, you have this AI thing, go do it. So you've talked about a good way to use AI. But I really want to dig in more around when these content teams are feeling the pressure to produce more content. What do you tell them, and what are the executives getting wrong when they push in that way?
Stephan Bajaio: Yeah, it's pretty simple. More isn't better. More that doesn't perform isn't better. Having a hundred people in a marathon that are the slowest doesn't make you win the marathon. It just makes a lot more marathon runners, but it doesn't actually make you accomplish more. A lot of executives... and this predates AI completely... believe that having a writer means X number of blog posts. They can write one a week, so I expect four blog posts every week. It doesn't work that way, and the reason is in the nuance. It's a lack of understanding of what actually is occurring in the process. If you're really thinking through the process, you have to think about SERP difficulty, word count, research depth, whether a subject matter expert needs to be involved, and how many rounds of review it has to go through. That is a very different thing than just saying, can you write a blog post about X? And the problem is that's what executives go... just write it. Everybody can write. Well, everybody can get in front of a camera, but it doesn't mean everyone should. Being given a microphone and an audience doesn't mean you earned it. There are professionals you've hired to write for you. If you're gonna do that, then you better empower them and recognize what you're actually asking. Because in that ask is a whole bunch of below-the-surface reality that you're not even taking into your calculation. Because of this, I created the Vibe Check Calculator on our website. I was frustrated that executives didn't have a mechanism, and more importantly, that writers and SEOs didn't have a mechanism to go back to the executive and say, look, this is what the reality of the situation actually is. A lot of high competitors are out there trying to perform for the same thing. We have to go get some subject matter expert who's busy in our company doing 15 other things. It has to go through three rounds of reviews and forget legal... that's a whole other story. Executives should be focusing more on using AI to cut down production time, not replace production. Can we create a checker based on the most frequent things legal sends back as reasons something can't pass? Could we create an LLM checker that looks for those things in the content before it even gets to legal? That's governance and throughput, not a replacement for content creation. If you replace your humans with AI content, have fun with that. You can call me afterwards. It's gonna take you twice as long to perform because you didn't just underperform... you hurt your performance moving forward because Google doesn't want to have LLM content ranking well. And if it does, it's only for a hot second before the house of cards falls. That's when we usually get a phone call.
Jessica Bush: Yeah. I was going to ask you about that, because my guess is... let's say someone goes and uses the Vibe Check Calculator and takes it back to their executive and says this is how long it's going to take, and the executive says just use AI. What message can they give their executive? Because I know we've had clients who had a false sense of security from using AI-generated content, and then after that lift, they get deindexed. How would you encourage someone on a content team to say what they need to say?
Stephan Bajaio: Yeah, they usually need a cool uncle. Which I hate to be, but love to be. Which is essentially... mom's been telling the kids to do their homework and eat their vegetables, and somehow cool Uncle Stephan has to roll into town and say the same thing, and somehow we're hearing it differently. Because someone you paid to tell you that is telling you that, versus the other people you pay to tell you that... who you're not listening to because they're inside your org. The reality is we are not replacing our writers. The more we move towards AI created content... what I dub synthetic content... there's a difference in the feeling of it. If you've read enough of it, you know there's nothing differentiating between five, six, seven results. It's all the same. There's nothing there. It's an empty suit. If you can feel that, I guarantee you your audience does. They're well attuned to not having connection. You know when something clicks. You know when someone gets it. It's a gut feeling. We all have it. When we consume that content, we also have it. And before you go trading time, money, and effort to a brand, you want to feel it. If you don't feel it, you're not buying it. That's the reality in B2C and B2B alike. Especially when you're part of a buying committee that has to come with an opinion to the table. How's that getting formulated? Because you read the same thing 17 times that you could have gotten out of an LLM anyway? Or because they actually get your stress... they understand what you're up against, they understand the decisions have repercussions for your own wellbeing. People want to know that you get that and that you are supporting them in the process. Spend the time making them feel that instead of spending time trying to get things out the door. The internet is full of it. You don't have to be adding to it.
Jessica Bush: I want to talk about empathy a little longer. In this world of AI slop, we all get those cold emails every day... it just feels like the same tired message from people trying to get your business. One of the things I've always appreciated about the way we approach our work is just this thread of empathy. When I'm reaching out to people I think we can help, I use that empathetic language. And just last week I had someone respond and say, I get emails like this all the time, and this is the first one that caught my attention and made me want to respond. I'd love for you to dig in a little deeper there and talk about empathy and how you see it playing a role in content moving forward.
Stephan Bajaio: I'm so glad you brought that up, Jessica, because I think we're playing this game on easy mode. And if you've ever played a video game on easy mode, it gets boring pretty quick. Same same. We've got same same everywhere. The number of emails that flood my inbox... I've had this opening a thousand times. I've seen you before. Just like the same content. I've seen you before. This is not new. You're not giving me anything of value. You're either adding value or wasting time. Did it help me? Did I get any value out of reading this? Did it teach me anything? Did it make me more likely to trust? Empathy gets thrown around too easily as a word, but it's: do you really get it, or are you just trying to sell me more stuff? Because right now the internet is full of stuff to buy. I don't need more of it. I need stuff that's valuable. I need stuff that actually helps me. There is more content being put out on the internet on a second-to-second basis than there is anyone who will ever consume it. It's just digital waste. And more digital waste means it's harder to find what you're looking for, harder for the engines meant to show you what you're looking for to actually show it. More isn't better. Better is better, and better is when it actually means something, when it does something, when it helps people. You just need to put a little humanity into it. I'll give you a great example. I wrote the Vibe Check Calculator as a blog post first. What are the odds that the head of content at your company was going to consume that article, then convince the executive to consume that article, and then consider having a conversation about it? One in ten, maybe. The reality is AI was a great example of repurposing and reinventing that content into an actual calculator... something interactive. Because there's a lot more chance you can send that calculator over to an executive who can put in some numbers and go... I don't know if I know the answer to this. I don't know how many rounds of reviews we're gonna have to do for this piece of content. These are questions I'm not asking my head of content. I'm just asking for the blog to be created. Bingo. That's all we wanted that to do. Build stuff with a human in mind, knowing that when the human goes through the process, they're either gonna have the answers or not. If they don't, this might be a moment to teach them something. This isn't rocket science. It's just being a human, remembering that there are other people on the other side of that screen. We've anonymized the internet so much that we forget that there are actually humans on the other side of those keyboards, and they have emotions, they have feelings, and they have needs and wants. Use that. That's what marketing is all about... recognizing that and turning it into a message that actually connects.
Jessica Bush: Let's go upstream for a second, because even if someone gets the throughput problem solved, they can still be producing the wrong things. Talk to me about topical authority... Google's assessment of whether a site has deep organized expertise in a specific domain, not just one strong post. How can someone who thinks they've got their throughput problem fixed still be getting it wrong because of this one concept?
Stephan Bajaio: There are actually two points that are really important to make there. The first is your topic needs to match back to an intent. What are you actually trying to solve for and who are you trying to solve it for? You can't just create for the sake of creating. I find a lot of teams don't really look at search data as a mechanism. They look at it as a means to rank. But that's not what I'm talking about here. Imagine your content didn't rank for anything. Is it still valuable? Yeah, if it connects. Search isn't the only mechanism by which this can get seen. You could email this to people in a newsletter. It could be promoted on your homepage. I always say nobody lies to their search bar. People are gonna put into that search bar their intentions, their needs, things they wouldn't share with their spouse. Every single little nuance of what they want. That data is really valuable. It's giving you a sense of the EKG of the user. What do they need? Where is their mind? What are they thinking about? If you just see that as a ranking opportunity, I think you're missing the whole point. I challenge brands all the time. Do you deserve to be the number one ranker for that term? Of the whole world, all the internet...can you tell me with a straight face that you deserve it? The data itself can tell you a lot about what people care about, how they're expressing it, the problems that go along with it. You don't look at one keyword. You look at a host of keywords, a host of prompts, a topical group of prompts in the LLMs. You identify those things, group them together, and recognize what you're trying to solve. The future of marketing, as I see it in the next three to five years... mark my words... you are no longer specialists in particular fields. You're gonna have generalists that are really good at all of these things to some degree, and they're gonna be following a needs-based persona not just to the point of purchase, but beyond. Because we never intended on having someone buy one time. We're in the business of having them tell their friends, and all of that word of mouth comes back up to the top of what isn't a funnel, it's an hourglass. You have to have someone follow the person through their entire lifecycle and say, what does this feel like? Is this right? Does this resonate? The stuff that happens when that customer writes into chat and asks a bunch of questions because they're frustrated... if you don't think that comes into the front conversation of the person who's buying, good luck. Get in front of those things with content that's meaningful. There was a time and place where JC Penney ranked number one for rugs on the internet. Does that sound right to you? That became pretty well known because it ended up in the New York Times, Google did something about it, and JC Penney got hurt. I used to say I'm an SEO, I don't dress mannequins. My job was to get you to the window of the store. Once you walk through the door, if you don't like what's on the mannequin, tough, that's not my problem. But that was wrong. Me putting people in front of the window of the store didn't equal success. A lot of the wrong people could get in front of a window. I better be aware of whether or not they can make their way to the cash register. What's the way to enter a mall? There is no one way... through Macy's, through Nordstrom, through the food court. Same thing with a website. If people are expressing a need and you drop them in the middle of the store and say good luck, that's not a great brand experience. You wouldn't do that in a store. So why are you doing it online? Think about Intuit. They recognize that small businesses were their target audience. They went in and said this isn't about conversion... this is about helping people. If anyone here is a small business, you've been through all the process of what the hell, when do I 1099, what does this tax code mean? Intuit's done a great job of building out content to answer those questions. It doesn't mean you're gonna buy QuickBooks just because Intuit showed that to you. But you're not gonna not think about QuickBooks when it's time to make that decision. If every time your friend asked you to borrow cash you probably don't want to hang out with them. But if they ask you that once in a blue moon, and in the meantime they've helped you 20 times, one time they ask you for money, you're gonna feel very different about giving them cash. That's the key. That's the humanity. That's the way it should work. The trust is now carried over, and now when it's time to do a transaction, I'm either thinking of you when I'm somewhere else, or I'm immediately going... this makes a lot of sense. This is the brand I trust. I'm gonna go with them.
Jessica Bush: Let's bring it full circle to the person we talked about at the beginning... this writer who has their next 12 posts scheduled for the month, ready to check them off the list. What's the first thing they should do after watching this?
Stephan Bajaio: That's a good question. If the 12 posts have been written by AI... hit delete. No, but like the reality is... go back to each one of those posts right now. Bring them to an LLM and challenge it. What else could I write here? And if you're in content right now and you're not doing this, you need to go track every request that came in that wasn't on your content calendar. Because your content calendar gets blown up weekly by executive asteroids that get thrown into your universe. All of a sudden these things that weren't planned end up in your universe and they throw things off. So when the output is supposed to be four posts done in a month, but all of a sudden you had to drop two in order to do something else... one, you want to be able to validate what you spent your time on. But two, it's really important to have that as a metric. Product over the past three months has asked for at least five different articles to be written about product releases. It's great. But you also contextualize it and say, because of that, we're not able to do this. If we want, we should probably consider hiring a product content person to fulfill that. If you just say product asks for a lot of stuff and I need another headcount, good luck. But if you can actually quantify it and show the amount of time and effort that goes into those things, and give the executive the choice... that's what they're there for, to make the hard choices. Go back and look at the things that derail. How much predictability do you have in your content calendar that you actually hit? Do you have promotional plans for that content that you actually fulfill? Do you have repurposing involved in that process? All of those things should be things you're looking at right now. Not to do more of meaningless things, but to do specific things with more meaning.
Jessica Bush: I love that. You have shared so many great ideas for our audience. If you could pick one nugget from everything you shared today that someone walks away with, what would that be?
Stephan Bajaio: Volume doesn't win. Volume doesn't win. I think 51% of the internet right now is AI generated. We crossed the 50% threshold of all content on the internet being produced by machines. Volume's not gonna win this. More of the same isn't winning. Things that stand out, that are meaningful. Memorable content will win. Meaningful content will win. Things that connect will win. Human content will win. More for the sake of more is a lot less than you think it is.
Jessica Bush: Thank you. You kind of made me start to cry there.
Stephan Bajaio: It's an emotional conversation.
Jessica Bush: I've worked with a ton of content people and I imagine they're feeling incredibly overwhelmed right now. So I'm gonna end on that note and just reassure them that the overwhelm problem is fixable, and now you have a lot of great tools and ideas to overcome that. The next question is whether or not the rest of your site is set up to let any of it work. Next episode is a technical SEO deep dive, and we mean deep. The infrastructure decisions that determine whether Google finds you and whether AI cites you, and whether any of this visibility work actually lands. It's the stuff that lives behind the curtain and we're pulling it back. Subscribe so you don't miss it. Have a good day.
Stephan Bajaio: Thanks all.
Conversations with Vibe & Logic is hosted by Jessica Bush. New episodes cover search, AI visibility, content strategy, and what it actually takes to be found where decisions are formed.
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