Being organised with your blog, especially if you’ve got a weekday job, is so important especially as your blog grows. It’s good to get into the habit of being structured with everything early, so you don’t have to reorganise your blog life (as I did!) later on. So, in today’s post, I’m sharing all of my top tips for organising, working out your schedule and keeping on top of things!
Keep Up With Your Emails | Easier said than done, but once you start getting a few emails rolling in every day you need to keep ontop of them. I always set aside an hour or two every week to thoroughly go through my emails to make sure I haven’t missed any, but on a day to day basis I reply to urgent ones on my morning commute or when I’m still in bed (instead of needlessly browsing Twitter!). I do fall behind sometimes and that’s ok, but it’s good to keep it up!
Organise Your Inbox | My inbox is ridiculously organised and that’s the way I like it, as it helps me keep up with everything I have to do.
Basically, I separate it into several sections and sub-sections (by category):
Currently working on: Beauty, Fashion, Christmas, Sponsored, Giveaway and Other.
Blog things: Advertising (then divided by month), Blog Sale and Collabs.
PR: Beauty, Fashion, Sponsored, Giveaway, Other, Invoices, Important PR People (which is then split again into the same sub-categories, just for main contacts for brands)
This way, once I’m finished with something in the ‘currently working on’ section, I can move it to ‘PR’ and I know I’ve emailed the right person and that particular project is finished. Obviously you might not need something as thorough as this, but it helps to have some sort of organisation from early on.
Write A Schedule | I’ve talked about this in a previous post, but I’ve got post ideas down from now until Christmas. I haven’t stuck to them religiously, but it’s nice to have something to refer to if I get stuck! It’s really easy to do this too, so I’ll run through how I organise it.
Basically, my blog has roughly 2-3 outfit posts a week, 2-3 beauty posts per week, 1 tips post and 1 ‘other’ (wishlist or another type of post). So, if we’re talking beauty, I go by time of the year, any products I need to showcase and including a variety of topics.
So for November I know I have to have ideas for 3 posts a week for 4 weeks, which is 12 posts. If I’m going off time of year, I’ll be including more hydrating products and winter themed tones, then going into Christmas gift guides. So roughly for one week I would do something like: Favourite hydrating masks, hair saviours and then a winter makeup look, then for the next I would do cool nail polish picks, pampering body products and favourite lipsticks for winter. And so on and so forth. Once you get your categories down, the time of year and what products you need to include, it’s easy to go from there as you can get your photos done in bulk in advance.
Create A Spreadsheet | I’m a huge spreadsheet fan. It’s sad I know, but it’s very handy! I have one for my post ideas (as explained above), then one for gifted items and sponsored content.
For gifted items, for example, I break it down into the following:
Date Received, Brand, Item, Price, Cost to Me, Contact (the PR), Photos?, Written?, Date Published, Link to Post
It makes it easier for me to keep track of all items and reminds me to send the link to the PR (and include the brand in social media) when I’ve put the post live. It honestly saves me so much time, especially when it comes to testing products and photographing them – plus I weirdly love updating it, is that sad? I think that’s sad.
Oh and if spreadsheets ain’t yo thang, you can always print off a calendar for the month and write everything in. Plus you can always schedule things like sponsored content, blogger chats and events in as and when they comes up!
Do Everything In Advance | Talked about it before and will talk about it many times in future, no doubt. Getting your photos done in bulk on good lighting days is great for keeping ontop of things, and helps when you’re limited for blog time during the week. Same with setting aside an hour or two to write up your posts for the week, or even 20mins when you’re watching TV on a night. Oh and doing your social media on something like Buffer saves you having to remember to tweet throughout the day!
Hope everything helps and let me know your organising tips!
Oh and enter my £85 Fossil watch giveaway too!
Helen x
Check out these blogs: A Dash of Ginger, Gyudy’s Notes of Beauty, Plaid and Tartan and Jordan Alice.
