Recently, I’ve been really into planning and scheduling. It’s probably a good thing because it’s hard to survive in college if you don’t have a plan or course of action. It’s been almost a year since I’ve started blogging and my process and routine have changed drastically. A lot of it is due to the fact that the way we approach our social media strategy has changed and the direction of the blog has shifted too. I like to mix up the posts that I write which requires me to stay on task. If you’re a blogger or someone who might be interested in starting a blog, here are the steps I take for each blog post, it might give you some ideas!

1. Brainstorm ideas or pick from my back up list.

So, I usually start writing when I come up with an idea. I mean… I immediately start writing while I have the drive and brainpower. Yes, I’ve done this at like 2 in the morning before! No judgement. I also keep a back up list of ideas that are either a seasonal post I’ve done before or just fun and quick posts that I post every once and a while! They range anywhere from Grocery Shop With Me to Behind the Scenes of our Instagram account!

2. Write a draft and schedule.

My mom always laughs at me when I write at home because she says my fingers “fly” across the keyboard. It’s kind of true and the faster they move the better the blog post! I have to feel inspired or I just stop writing because it’ll feel forced and I’ll probably end up deleting it later. I like to schedule my blog posts 2 weeks to a month out especially during school! Between classes and blog projects, I have to pre-plan! Pro Tip: Use your blog analytics to see when your blog is most popular! I schedule my Sunday posts for 1:00 pm: the perfect time for brunch reading!

3. Find the perfect title!

Head on over to this extremely exciting headline tool that helps you come up with the best titles for all your posts. It grades your title ideas based on uncommon words, emotional connection, and other characteristics I didn’t even know were important! For example, the score for this post’s title got a score of: 62. I tend to aim for a B+ grade (that’s usually as high as I can get if we’re being honest!)

4. Make tweaks and insert media.

You know that pesky writing process that your high school English teachers always nagged you about?Well, I use it heavily now! Brainstorm, First Draft, and now editing. I don’t like editing because it takes a long time, and usually I catch about 7,000 run on sentences where I got really excited about whatever I was talking about. This step is also the fun part though because I’ll edit and insert images into the post! All of our baking posts will have images of our creations, and we’ve been trying to improve our photography skills, so hopefully that’ll get better too!

5. Create a featured image.

Canva time!! Seriously, if you’re a blogger and need a new graphics software, go to canva.com right now! It’s free and has great stock photos! All of our featured images(aka the photos you see on social media and the header on this page) are all created on Canva. I also use it to make media posts for Twitter! If you haven’t checked out my #BloggerLimeLight series on twitter go ahead and check it out! You’ll find some really awesome bloggers, I promise!

6. Proofread and make more changes.

Edit again. It must be important because I told you I hate doing it and it’s on my list not once, but twice!

7. Schedule social media.

Here’s the jackpot money for how we improved our views! Maybe, one of us will write a whole post on this once we have an even better grip on the best way to handle our specific social media, but using sites like Hootsuite and Tweetdeck we have almost tripled our page views! If you’re a big Pinterest user, you can also check out Boardbooster!

Hannah also made us a handy dandy blog post check list that reminds me to do everything from checking the title score to posting the featured image to our Pinterest boards! Definitely make one of those, it helps!

I hope this helped you out if you’re looking for a stream lined blogging process! It’s taken me about 6 months to get this down and I actually think it’s improved my blogging schedule! Send me your blogging steps on twitter with the hashtag #BloggingwithG ! We love hearing from you 🙂