Friday, September 16, 2016

Thoughts from a Blogger Girl-- How I Blog!


So. I was trying to come up with a topic for this weekend and figured I'd chat about how I blog. With Blog Ahead coming up in just a couple weeks I thought I'd dive in and show yall the inner workings of herding cats & burning soup. Bwahahahaha. And how I manage to...mostly...keep my sanity while blogging. Heh So here goes...

BabyG would say my first step was making sure I always have help. Mmhm. She would. lol

 

But really my big thing is having a blog planner and using it religiously. Every time I commit to a review, event, author feature it goes on the planner which is color coded. <grins>
Pink--review requests
Green--author guest posts or interviews
Yellow--books I read/review just for fun
Orange--blog features (discussions, food, book deals)
Blue-- events others can join
Of course, SierraCat thinks help is needed here as well *winks*. Anyways. I plan for one post per day. On very rare occasion up to 3 but that's usually when I have event sign ups happening that are relevant to only a small portion of followers. But one main post (feature/review/author post). Doing this was important to me and is how I manage to Blog Ahead and keep the blog going steadily and consistently over the months.




I'm a huge advocate of blogging in advance and scheduling posts. For my first couple years I blogged last minute. Usually posts went up seconds before they needed to. And it stressed me the fuck out. Then I decided to do a bloggers version of NaNo and get an extra month of posts scheduled and ready to go. Holy cow. Yall. This changed everything! I blog a couple weeks ahead now instead of last minute and gah...so much better.
Blog Ahead starts in 2 weeks and all of yall are welcome to join. It's a hard month of blogging but there's lots of support from other bloggers and totally worth it.

On the non scheduly side I totally blog in bed. And am a messy blogger. lol I tend to open everything and surround myself with supplies, cats, cross stitches, more supplies. Sometimes cake. And tv in the background.



Goodreads plays a big part, too!


I also hardcore use my Goodreads. When a review comes in it's added to a 2016 monthly folder so I know exactly how many I have left to review for each upcoming month.


I get a ton of pre-approved NG widgets coming from publishers and I used to accept the ones I wanted right away so I could clear out my inbox. But sometimes I'd get in a jam and either lose interest by time to review (since they're sent a couple months ahead of time) or I just run out of time and then I was stuck with them active in NG and scrambling.


So now I do a tentative acceptance. I make a note in Goodreads that I have the widget in my email then I archive the email so it's out of the way. As I finish a read I'll accept the next but not before that. And holy cow. HUGE DIFFERENCE! My NG ratio has rallied and so much less stress because if I change my mind about a title I can just delete it from my list and not feel bad I'm letting anyone down since I've not really taken it on yet. Woo!


Each Sunday I archive the blog. Cross posting, linking things up, updating my Monthly Herd Recap post. It's so much easier to do that a week at a time instead of waiting until the end of the month and having 30+ days of posts to work on.


Hmm. So I guess that's how I blog and get it all done. I have a little blogger ADD and hop around between types of posts. I usually have like 10 I'm working on at a time and will do a little here or a little there until they're done. :D



Oh duh! Totally adding this WAY late after posting but I also have a blog review journal that has helped a lot. The plan has been to sell them as well but I suck and haven't gotten those designed yet. This one has space for my monthly requests then each book has a page with it's info like my rating, heat level, if it's been cross posted, who I owe the review to (publisher, author, etc), notes on the characters and then on the book. The title is highlighted once I finish the review and a little tag marks the un-reviewed ones. I need to do the 2017 ones soon and hopefully get my act together and make ones for others. It's about the size of a trade paperback book just hardback. I lurves it. 





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