my blog planner

 

As soon as I started to collect ideas for blog posts I knew I also need a blog planner. In the past I've mostly made my own planners because there wasn't the exact same one out there that I needed. That was the case with the blog planner as well. I couldn't find one I liked so I made my own one. I use this moleskine as a base.

 

On the first page I created an index. This way I can easily find what I'm looking for. I also added monthly tabs to quickly open the overview of the month.

This is how the basic month looks like. On the left I have a monthly calendar and on the right I'll write down all the dates and posts I have to make. The days I'm planning to blog something are highlighted in yellow on the left page. I usually have four posts per week. On Monday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday. Thursdays are for get messy posts and Fridays either for behind the scenes posts or project life posts. Mondays and Tuesdays aren't fix and sometimes I put in another post on Friday when I don't have to share anything from behind the scenes. This basic structure helps me when I plan the following month.

I have a list in my notebook where I keep all my ideas for future blog posts. Some will never make it on the blog others will definitely be a blog post someday. Lately I started to write down my ideas onto post-its. This way I can move them easily from the idea page to the actual month where I want to use them.

This is how October looked like at the beginning of September. There are already some blog posts planned for October. I put them on the page randomly. Around mid to late September I start(ed) to plan October and add the posts to the corresponding day. My goal is it to always know what to post in the following month at the latest in the last week of the previous month.

This is August. Everything done, everything blogged. For every blog post I have the same structure.

date: At first comes the date. (The European style has the day first and the month second)
title: Then I add the title of the blog posts. The final title gets changed sometimes. 
P for photos: When I've made the photos the P gets highlighted*.
E for edited: When I've edited the photos, the E gets highlighted*.
W for words: After the post is written and scheduled, the W gets highlighted*.
A for archive: I have a visual archive. This means I need to create small thumbnails for each post I want to archive that way and have to upload it to my archive after the post was published. As soon as it got archived the A gets highlighted*.

When the post is done and I scheduled it, I highlight* the whole line (except the A) which means I'm done with this blog post.

*Yes, I highlight the things I've completed. I think I saw this method in Elise Blaha Cripe's Planner a few years ago at first and copied that idea. I like it so much more than to cross things out.

After the actual planner part I have plenty of room to sketch out my ideas about blog posts and write down what I want to write. Sometimes I write the whole post with my pen first, sometimes just some basic ideas. As you can see, my pages are all numbered. This is important to creat the index at the front of my planner.

This is how I organize and plan my blog posts. Feel free to ask any questions in the comments if something isn't clear.