Tips for organizing your blog.

Last Updated on August 23, 2020 by scottkandh

What works for me on my blog is to keep a copious to do list.  In addition, I’ve added things that I want to pin in my monthly calendar on Outlook (30 – 60 days in advance) to start looking for topics to pin before the holiday approaches. 

Your calendar should be displayed in a prominent place.  But personally, I’m going to rely on my Microsoft Outlook reminders. If you need some tips and suggestions to set up a yearly seasonal calendar for your blog, check out this link: How to create a seasonal planning calendar.

Your to do list

As I write blogs about various topics, the topic that I’ve published and/or updated is removed from my Blog to do list.  I don’t like being repetitive about blogs that have already been posted so a Master Blog list or what I call Blog at a Glance comes in very handy.    Making this is easy, copy and paste your information from your blog page and paste it to the new Blog at a Glance or Master Blog list.  Remove any pertinent information like author, date posted, and decide if you want to keep or get rid of the summary information. 

At a minimum, your Master blog list should have month, date (for when blog was created), Blog post title (including a hyperlink to the blog, it will come in handy if you can’t reach your website host but still have access to the website). One other thing that you might want to consider is having a field for the generic SEO description to use that fits all of the pins for that post. That makes it easy to copy and paste the description for a pin into Pinterest.

Use of Categories in WordPress

There’s an extremely helpful feature in WordPress for your posts called categories.  This makes it easy for someone to find something by predefined topics.  Currently my categories are:  Blogging, Pinterest, Humor, and Uncategorized.  The new categories added because a lot of articles are going to be leaning in these directions were:

1) Start a blog
2) Grow your blog
3) E-mail marketing and
4) Monetize your blog.  

To make it easier for people to browse on your website aim for between 5 to 10 categories.  There’s no definite number of categories that you must provide. 

Keep in mind that when someone comes to your website, they know what they’re looking for and probably don’t want to spend a lot of time looking for it.  These categories and a search function should make it easier for them to get their information in a readily fashion. 

Planning tools that you should have:  Go to this link to explode your blog and look at the planning tools.

•      How to Create a Bangin’ Blog Business workbook – Melyssa Griffin
•      Blogging Course Workbook – Allison Lindstrom
•      Ultimate Pinterest Planning Calendar – from Simple Pin Media
•   How to create 52 blog post ideas in less than 2 hours – Productive
  Blogging

Between these four planning tools (listed above) you should have ample ammo to start planning and maintaining your blog.  Good luck!