Blogging 101 is a 10 part series where I share my tips and tricks for creating and growing a blog from scratch. This is the fourth installment in the series, and you can find more information on the topics of this series here.
Blogging 101: Organization Tips for Bloggers
Being a blogger is like having another job. If you already work one full-time, you need to be very organized when it comes to your focus for your blog, your posting schedule and the time you allot to managing and responding to emails, comments and social media outlets. Now, I don’t work off a strict schedule for every hour of my day. Generally, I do what I can when I can, but I have a few organizational tools that help me stay on track, and make it easy for me to maximize my time.
First and foremost, I use an editorial calendar to plan out my posts. Now, what an editorial calendar looks like to me and what it looks like to you can be two very different things. My first editorial calendar was a printed one page monthly calendar where I planned out which blog posts would be scheduled for which days. Now, I use a monthly calendar in my Filofax. You could use a paper calendar, a list in a notebook, or even a digital calendar to map out your posts, but whichever way you choose needs to be convenient for you so that you can plan your posts and refer back to the calendar when you need to write them.
The next thing I use to help plan out my posts is a list for brainstorming blog posts. Whenever I think of a post idea, I write it down in my list that I keep in one of my Filofax’s. When I am on the go or don’t have easy access to my planner, I use an app on my iPhone called Clear. I will periodically move the blog post ideas from my iPhone app to my master list, which I then refer to when planning out my blog posts on my editorial calendar for the next month. I normally plan out a month at a time, but I have planned up to three at a time in the past. You could plan as much or as little as you want, as this system is extremely flexible.
As for managing my social media presence, there are a variety of apps I use to help me connect with my current readers and potential readers! I use a service called Twitter Feed that automatically posts links to my blog posts to my Twitter feed. That way, I don’t have to worry about forgetting to tweet out my posts. But Twitter Feed alone is not the best way to get my blog posts out on Twitter, so I also use a wonderful app called HootSuite that is one of the few apps that I have found that will allow me to schedule Tweets and even Facebook posts from my iPhone! I cannot even explain to you how convenient it is to plan out the Tweets you want to publish and set it to publish on its own without me having to babysit my Twitter! I will normally go ahead and plan out a weeks worth of posts and schedule them so I don’t have to remember to stop and Tweet during my busy day!
The final organizational tip I have for bloggers is not related to apps or planning tools. This has to do with photography and finding images for your blog posts. Now, I will be going into the topic of photography in a later post, but for now I want to talk about photo shoots and talking your own blog photos. If you’ve noticed, for some time now I have been relying on my own photographs to supplement my blog posts. It is very rare for me to use someone else’s images because I don’t own them. When I do use other peoples images, I make sure to source them from creative commons websites. Specifically, I like to use the Flickr Creative Commons Image Database. Like I said, I try to use my own images whenever possible, so to accomplish this, I plan frequent photo shoots where I take a look at my blog post topic list and get ideas for photo’s that I could use to accompany those posts. I set up vignettes, make sure my lighting looks nice and take an hour or two to just shoot as many pictures as I can. I would say I do these sorts of photo shoots once or twice a month and they give me plenty of images to work with that may pertain to specific posts I already have planned out and sometimes even posts that I may write in the future. I organize these photo’s on my computer by the date they were taken and the general theme for the photos so that I can always find what I am looking for in the future! If you are interested in learning more about how to take great pictures for your blog posts and social media, check out this video training on 7 Strategies for Using Photography to Elevate your Brand Online or if you want a more in depth training, sign up for my Digital Styling Lightroom video course today!
So, do you already implement any of these organizational tips in your current blogging process? Do you have any other tips and tricks that help to keep you organized that you can share with us? Drop us a line in the comments below!
xoxo,
This article was first published on Strange & Charmed on March 24th, 2014 and is being reposted as part of my Holiday Prep Hiatus! For the months of November & December I will be recycling some vintage S&C content that you may have missed in order to give myself some extra time to finalize projects and spend time with my family during the holiday season. All reposted content will be marked as such. I hope you enjoy this blast from the past blog post!
