Organizing Blog Ideas: Why It’s Important
Organization of ideas is very important. In fact, “good organization of ideas is 90% of the battle of creating a blog post.” Yet, many bloggers find putting ideas together very difficult and this becomes what they call the writer’s block – when we freeze and can’t write for the day. Melyssa, blogger of The Nectar Collective, even said she asked her readers to ask her questions about blogging and the one question that came up the most was how she plans blog posts.
I found many resources all over the Internet on how to better organize blog ideas, but I felt none really gave a full easy step-by-step guide. Here I put together ideas from many bloggers and websites that you may find very useful:
1. Take Down Blog Ideas On-the-Go
I heard that writers love to take walks, because ideas start to come to them. Maybe we find inspiration while talking to a long-time friend at a coffee shop or walking our dogs at the park. Maybe we’re eating a dish at a restaurant and it evokes memories or life events (deep, but sometimes true.)
Well, we need to quickly take down these ideas before they are gone. Here are some tools you can use:
- Google Keep: This was mentioned in CoSchedule by Julie Neidlinger. You can do voice recordings while you’re driving or can’t access a pen and notepad. The recording stops as soon as you stop talking though, so depending on how you work, this may or may not be for you.
- Evernote: This was mentioned in many blog posts as a tool bloggers like to use. You can do voice recordings here just like Google Keep, but you would have to physically push the stop button to stop recording.
Watch the video below to learn how to manage your new ideas using Evernote:
- Wordpress “Ideas” Plug-in: This was mentioned in Skinny WordPress. Instead of saving drafts on wordpress and accidentally publishing them, you can write out ideas in this plug-in and hit “publish.” This does create a URL, but chances are, people won’t stumble upon these pages. Even if they do, they cannot see the content besides the title.
- Carry a camera and a notepad. Melyssa from The Nectar Collective said this is a MUST. Whenever you don’t have access to a phone or electronic device to access Evernote or Google Keep, you can quickly scribble down your idea using a pen and notepad. Carrying a camera is important for taking pictures of things that inspire you that you just can’t describe in words at the moment. These are probably also images you can use in your blog post!
2. Sort Blog Ideas Into Categories
Okay. Now you have all these ideas from brainstorming. You now need to sort them using an objective eye. According to Rashelle Isip, blogger of The Order Expert, you should take the following steps:
- Take a break after you brainstormed your most recent ideas to look at all with an objective eye.
- Label the ideas with short words to simplify them to be sorted later
- Make 3 categories: Love, Like, and So-So. There are ideas you like more than others, so sort them under those three categories.
- Evaluate the ideas based on your blog’s criteria. Maybe your blog has a specific focus or tone and manner. Ask yourself: Do these ideas fit your blog?
- Now, look at your ideas again. Maybe you can merge some of the so-so ideas into a great idea.
3. Store Blog Ideas into Folders
Now that your ideas are filtered, you need to organize them into folders for retrieval. We may have a bunch of images related to a single idea all over the place and we need to put them all in one place. According to Shauna of Nubby Twiglet, each idea should have a single text document that drafts it out and its corresponding images in one folder.
According to Shauna, the folder hierarchy should be:
4. Allocate Blog Ideas on the Calendar
Great. We have the ideas all organized, but now we need to allocate these ideas on the calendar so we can take action and write blog posts on them. We don’t want them to be sitting in the folders on our desktops.
According to Melyssa, blogger of The Nectar Collective, the Wordpress editorial calendar plugin works very well to allocate ideas to specific dates.
How should we allocate the ideas? Here are some tips:
- You may have general themes for your blog: Maybe your blog is all about food or travel. You may also have subtopics like “restaurant reviews,” “healthy snacks,” or “comfort food” under the main topics of food. Melyssa from The Nectar Collective suggests to switch up the subtopics every week so it doesn’t get boring.
- When does your site get the most traffic? One way is to use Google Analytics to find out. We would want to post on the days we get the most traffic on our blogs. Melyssa makes sure she posts on Tuesdays.
- Consistency is very important. “Publishing consistently makes you reliable, and that makes you someone that your readers will trust.” For example, try to post on a certain topics every Monday. “Manicure Mondays” became very popular among the beauty blogging community. Every Monday, certain beauty bloggers would show a manicure look with a new favorite nail polish. People will be more familiar with your editorial calendar faster and will more likely to trust you and subscribe to you knowing you will post about something they’re interested in every week.
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This post is part of Inbound Marketing Clinic, a research project at NYU SPS
