5 Top Tips For A Successful Blog Schedule

Allo polish Pals!

Today's post is a little different and I hope you wont mind. I often receive comments about how I schedule my blog, how I am able to post on my blog days and never miss one.

I'm not an expert, I'm not hugely successful but these tips certainly make my blogging life easier.

I'll be honest, I wasn't always great at it and I'd be trying to create nails, edit and create a post all the night before I was due to post which left me often incredibly stressed out and rushed. Because of this I was often posting things I wasn't really satisfied with. I'll also say since I have not been in work since I started blogging I dedicated and treat blogging almost like a job because it added structure into my every day life. It's probably the last year and a half that I really got my post scheduling under control and while I put a lot of work in – like we all do – I now find myself with much more free time for other things.

If you have any questions at all don't hesitate to ask and hit the notify box in the comments section so you can see my replies.

1. Getting Yourself Into A Routine.

Depending on how serious you feel about blogging it's great to have a deep discussion with yourself, You'll need to figure out what works best for you. Sure, wouldn't it be great to delight your readers with new juicy posts every single day? You'd think, but so many begin blogging with this intention and more than likely they will burn out trying to come up with decent content before they run out of posts. Questions to help you decide when to post could be.. How long does it take you to create a post from start to finish? When do your readers tend to come visiting? Make a realistic choice of how many days a week you'd like to post. You can still be blog active in the days you are not posting, which I'll explain later on.

2. Have A Visual Calendar

I personally can not schedule my blog without having a solid visual in front of me. Seeing all my upcoming posts in a neat order makes it easy to decide when it would be to post each of my blog posts. I also find this eases any stress I have about how many posts I have planned for the future. Originally I used a notebook and that worked great for a while but due to my obsessive nature everytime I had to cross something out I felt compelled to rewrite the whole list out which 1. is not great for paper wastage and trees but also really time consuming. I now use my Samsung tablet where I have a huge spreadsheet of all my previous and upcoming posts. I use colours to indicate which stage the post is at, example: nail art complete, pictured edited, post written and scheduling done. It offers great ease as I can copy and paste blog post titles as and when I need to change them.

This may not be the method that works for you but I urge you to find a way that will make laying all your posts out easy to see at hand.

3. Plan How You Spend Your Non Posting Days

Have you ever heard of Buffer? If not then say hello to your new best friend. Buffer is a great tool to schedule social media posting. It works with Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Pinterest (although you must pay if you want to schedule on Pinterest) While I still manually post on other social media sites such as Instagram this does take a huge chunk of that away and if I know I am having a busy day, scheduling the night before saves a whole bunch of time. It also features a way to track how well your posts are performing, for example you can see which tweets got the most likes and retweets and allows you to 'rebuff' the post and share it again.

4. Take Time To Implement Your Schedule.

So what do you do on the days you are not posting? My blog days are Monday, Wednesday and Saturday. In the remaining days I focus on writing posts in advance for nail art I've already created. I'll also do my second round of social media, posting on sites I did not on the day the post went live, I'll post to Flickr, Nailpolis and Amino to name a few – Of course if you plan on doing this you need to post in places that will reach your niche market.

5. Don't Expect To Be Schedule Pro Over Night.

What does that even mean? Everyone is their own pro of how they decide to schedule their blogs :) Getting into a routine takes time and you'll learn a lot on the way. What works for one does not always work for another. My schedule currently is running about two months worth of posts ahead of itself. When I receive review items I prioritise those posts (I think its good practice to try and give your end of the deal in a timely fashion.) I then get to push back three or four of the posts I already had which then extends my blog schedule even further – basically, that's another weeks worth of posts – Yippie!! With all this extra free time not rushing to make posts on demand I am able to spend more time enjoying life!

To get yourself ahead I suggest building up a pile of post able content because while your blogging and waiting for posts to go live you'll also have time to create more things for upcoming posts – this way you'll always have something in your archive to post at a later date.

6. BONUS.

The most important part of all of this is... love what you do. Blogging shouldn't be stressful or unenjoyable and if it makes you feel this way you'll either have to find ways around it or consider that maybe it isn't for you. This is a beautiful world and we only live once – you must do what makes YOU happy.

I hope you found this post useful, I don't know if I've said anything that will really help anyone but I thought I'd try. I welcome your questions and I'd love to hear your methods of staying up to date with your blog schedules!

Have a fantastic day, ya beauties! Thank you for stopping by. I 'll catch you again on Monday!

Love,

Ithi