How I Manage My Blog – Realising What and When to Post
I’ve wanted to do a new post on how I manage my blog for a while, ever since I outlined my (then) new method in a two part post series called On Being More Organised in Blogging (part one and part two). And I realised it might actually help other people – because for the entire month of February I managed to blog five times a week with barely any stress at all. This little insight in how I manage my blog will be spread out over two posts. For the second instalment, come back next Wednesday!
First of all, I should disclose that I have a lot of free time, and I do spend a lot of my free time blogging. There is no short cut. If you want to blog a lot, you’re going to invest a lot of time. I’ve tried to become more concious of how I’m spending my time, and through that I’ve become more productive and happier than I’ve ever been blogging-wise.
Setting up the bare bones
There are two important elements to organising your blog in the most efficient way. First is realising what you want to post. Honestly, this seems so simple, but this is the thing I’ve struggled with the most in the past (for example, compare this post to this one). I’d been blogging for four years, and I still didn’t know what I really wanted. Did I want to write discussions? Do blog tours, or not, or just in moderation? Were reviews still relevant enough? Did I want to do everything? I tried doing just what I felt like, but I never liked how messy and disorganised that was. I tried all kinds of combinations – memes, no memes, new memes, only discussions and reviews, only reviews, only discussions (really, it’s slightly ridiculous all the combinations I tried).
After my last breakdown in November, I knew a few things:
- I wanted to keep posting reviews
- I also wanted to discuss some kind of bookish topic every week
- There should be some room for interviews and guest post
- I wanted a way to link up my posts of the week to give them extra exposure
- Somehow manage to add a touch of my personal life to the blog without it turning into a lifestyle blog
The second important element in organising your blog is realising when you want to post. Consider how many posts a week you want. Don’t go crazy. Do you just want to post whenever you feel like it? Great! Do you want to get ahead? We can work with that too. I wanted to work on spreading my blog posts better, so I didn’t have these huge gaps in my schedule. For a month or so, I managed to publish three reviews every week. Since that was slightly ridiculous, I brought the number of reviews I post every week down to two. I adapted the Sunday Post meme into the shape I wanted to be, and my post schedule was born.
- Monday: book review
- Wednesday: open slot for discussions, book tours, interviews, giveaways
- Friday: book review
- Sunday: wrap up post
This schedule works for me because one, it’s nicely spread out over the week. No huge gaps. Two, I always know what I need to do for next week (something that makes me much more productive, as I’ll talk about in my next post). Three, it’s flexible. Wednesday is my post-whatever-the-hell-I-want day. If just Wednesday isn’t enough, I can always post an extra post on Tuesday or Thursday or Saturday. If I run out of reviews, I’ll just leave out the Monday post. Perfect.
How do you manage your blog? Do you just wing it? Or do you consider pros and cons of certain posting schedules?
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