Blog Organisation: The Blog Planner Vs. the Spreadsheet!

Hey Sweeties,

Across most of last year, every other post I saw being pushed in my Twitter feed was advice on how people record ideas and plan blog posts. Notebooks and planners specific to blogging were huge in 2016 and it seems this trend will continue long into 2017 too; blog planners, bullet journals and the like have seen a boom in sales as people fall over themselves to purchase notebooks in hope this will revolutionise blog organisation. For many, this will work but for others, once they’ve posted a shot on Instagram a couple of times, I think keeping up the use of the planner will cease. I don’t mean this to come across negatively, but I’m kinda’ telling it like it is (the way we do things around here); instead I think you can’t go wrong with a good old Excel spreadsheet.

Blog planner

Here’s how the blog planner will fail –

  • The novelty will run out;
  • It’ll get buried underneath other desk paperwork;
  • It can’t hold links so beyond writing down what post you plan to write and post on a set day, and writing yourself a reminder to schedule tweets etc. it can’t help you actually promote that post easily.

However, the one positive I guess which firmly trumps the spreadsheet is how visually appealing a good blog planner can be; and creatives LOVE the appeal of pretty stationery.

Here’s how an (Excel) spreadsheet will help you better-

  • You’ll never run out of space;
  • You can have a tab for ideas which can be categorised, and a tab for each month of the year to plan what content you want/need to post and when;
  • Once a post has been published, you can save both the long and shortened URL links associated to it, which makes pasting into tweets etc. super quick and easy;
  • The spreadsheet is accessible on your laptop/PC/tablet etc. whenever you need it, wherever you are;

…And so on!

blog organisation

Here’s how I organise my spreedsheet; I have a tab for each month, and each week is broken down for easy scheduling.

This isn’t to say that I don’t still record ideas in a notebook if I have one to hand, and I’m beginning to use my iPhone more for recording notes, and also for planning my diary -this is the first year I haven’t repurchased diary inserts for my filo fax. For me, I am just trying to not carry around and own more stuff than I actually need.

Recently I have had a massive clear out of my house of excess stuff and paperwork I have been collating for years unnecessarily (I’m doing a post on this soon); I’m just at an age now where I don’t need things for the sake of it. But I think it is worth mentioning despite doing my blog planning on a spreadsheet, my daily/weekly to-do list at work is still written in a notebook so I can tick tasks off as I complete them… because, you know, ticking things off as done is still too satisfying to do it digitally.

How do you organise and plan your blog content?

Until next time x

 

2 Comments

  1. Jess 23rd January 2017 / 4:09 pm

    I’ve been using scraps of paper to draw a calender on but I think I’m definitely going to start using spreadsheets to organis my blogging schedule!

    • Claire
      Author
      23rd January 2017 / 4:53 pm

      Honestly it’s just so easy, not to mention convenient, using a spreadsheet to blog plan. I still use notepads and things for ideas sometimes, but particularly for recording the URL, I have my published posts available to share at all times on my spreadsheet -helpful when you see something you can respond to quickly on social media 🙂

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