Blogging 101: Staying Organized

So, you want to start a book blog and you don't know where to start. This is completely normal. Starting a blog is an overwhelming feeling, there is so much you need to know that you don't. We are hoping with this new series that we will be able to help new bloggers navigate the blogging world!

Previous Posts: Platforms | Websites Essential for Running a Blog

I think one of the hardest parts of blogging is staying organized. What days is what post is going up, what e-mails you still have to reply to, what posts do you have to write? It never seems to end and you will drive yourself crazy if you don't write everything down. Having talked to a lot of bloggers how they organize their to-do lists is a different then how we organize ours, but at the end of the day what works for us isn't going to work for you. 

Personally I (Amber) am the most unorganized person there is but blogging has helped a lot with my organization skills. Jessica on the other hand, with out her amazing scheduling skills and keeping ontop of everything The Book Bratz would honestly be one big giant mess. (Fun fact, Jessica carries around a planner to write all her stuff in! I honestly admire her for it.) 

PLANNING BLOG POSTS

*This was August 2018's schedule*

We use Google Calendar to keep track of what posts are going up on which day. One perk of having co-bloggers is that between the three of us we do get a lot of reading done and a lot of posts written so more often then not we have posts scheduled for a few weeks in advanced. I know this isn't possible for everyone but an average of 3-5 posts a week is what you should AIM to have! (More on this to come in a later post though!)

All three of us have access to the calendar so as we write posts we just go to the calendar and write in what day our post is going to go up. We use our Calendar for:

• Seeing which of us is doing the TTT or WoW that week 
• How many reviews are being posted that week
• What discussion/guest posts/ect. kind of posts are going up in the next couple weeks
• Any blitz/blogtours that are coming up

Basically, it gives use a general lay out of what content is going to be on the blog before it is actually published on the blog! 

ORGANIZING TBR LISTS/ARCS

*These are galleys from 2015 but it serves my purpose*

So, for the bloggers like me who request every book under the sun and then gets approved and has to review everything on time, this is for you. As a new blogger I was request crazy and requested so many galleys off of Edelweiss and NetGalley that I easily lost track. I reviewed some, didn't review others and pretty much never had reviews up on time. 

That's when I made this spreadsheet. I organized it by month so I was able to see books that I still needed to read and review, after I finished them I removed them from this list and if I was approved for another I just added it on to its corresponding month. I broke it down by title, author, publisher, release date and the source I received it from. Reviews for ARCs went up before their actual release dates and I wasn't as overwhelmed anymore. 

I don't request many physical galleys but when I do have a few to read for review I put them in release date order on my shelf. 

TWEETING IN A TIMELY AND ORDERLY MATTER

This one is going to seem a little weird but just hear me out, alright? In Websites Essential for Running a Blog I talked about how Twitter is super important to your blogging career and how when you post on your blog you should share the link to twitter. TweetDeck is a program that lets you schedule tweets in advance. 

When we tweet links to twitter we like to do it at: 

12:01 a.m.

8:00 a.m.

12:00 p.m. 

4:00 p.m.

11:15 p.m.

But sometimes we are in class, work or sleeping at this times and it is a pain in the butt to manually have to tweet every single link every time you want it to pop up on yours and others timelines. So, after we write our posts, schedule it, add it to the calendar we head over to TweetDeck write the tweets and schedule them for the day the post goes live. 

So these are the three websites that keep us girls at The Book Bratz super organized. Believe me, it took us five years to get to this point. It's something that happen overnight. There was a lot of trial and error before we found the system that worked best for us. 

Talk to me! How do you stay organized? Was this post helpful in anyway? Leave any questions below so I can help you out!!!