The recent creative blog tour made me think about the way I blog and the tools I use. Personally I love to hear about different 'systems' and as I'm looking into streamlining my system even more, I though I'd go ahead and share what I do now. I'm by no means a pro at this, but here are my invaluable blogging tools.
Bullet journal
Every month I dedicate a page in my Bullet Journal to my blogging activities. The layout I tried this month isn't as good as the previous one, so it's obvious that I'm still tweaking this, but overall here are the things the page include:
- Editorial calendar
- To-do list for the blog
- To-do list for designs
The editorial calendar
My (blogging)life would be insane without this one tool. It's probably the most important for me if we overlook the obvious need of a computer.
Having a list of 12-15 open slots that need to be filled with content can seem a little daunting at first, but I quickly came to love it. The editorial calendar provides such a clear and visional progress statement. I can fill in content, move it around and mark when I've finished working on a post. To me this is priceless.
To-do lists
These are pretty self-explanatory, aren't they?! I find that a lot of things on these lists don't get done that month. But it's a safe keeping system and it means that said tasks aren't swimming around in my head.
iPhone
The whole smartphone world is still pretty new to me as I got my first this summer, but it has proved a great tool for blogging. I would say that around 95% of the pictures I shoot for this blog is taken with my iPhone 5s. It's even painless to add them to posts via my phone. What I haven't found useful is writing the actual post on the phone. I prefer to do that on a computer.
MacBook Air
Speaking of computers, my beloved old MacBook was retired this summer. As a result of it's age there was a lot of webpages that I simply couldn't access. Not good when said webpages are needed for a lot of your work. I had know this day would come and saved up for an Air for years. I decided on a 11" as I needed something small and portable and oddly enough, writing long papers on a small machine doesn't bother me.
Canva
The final tool I use all the time is completely free! Canva lets you design graphics like the one I made for this post for free or you can choose to use elements from them, for $1 a piece. I've never bought anything from them yet, since you can do so much with the free elements and I'm on a tight budget.
This is a very interesting read. I am not at all organised! I should probably take up your idea of an editorial calendar eventually. I like it! So far I haven't done that because I tend not to plan my posts too far in advance. If I have an idea for a blog post I write it immediately and schedule it or I make a brief note of the topic somewhere till I get around to writing about it. I noticed that as I blog every five days, that is a lot of posts. Sometimes I don't have anything to write about and need to put my thinking cap on, but then there are times like right now when I have so many posts ready to go that I should consider posting more frequently. Not sure an editorial calendar would make that part easier for me!
ReplyDeletePeople work differently.. I'm quite anal and thrive when everything is organised and planned out. Others work much better in the spur of the moment. One thing isn't better than the other - they are just different approaches.
DeleteI plan on doing a post on how I use my editorial calendar in December. I blog 3 times a week on average, but I don't plan a month out at a time, I just put posts as I think of them and then I can visually see the days that still need to be filled. But more on that later :)