How to Organize, Plan, Prioritize, Calendarize Blogging Blues Away

This guest post is by Sophie Bujold of Sophie Bujold

A simple way to avoid the blogging blues

If you’ve been writing blog posts for a while, you’ll know what I’m talking about. Those weeks or days where you know you need to post, but don’t have a clue what to talk about. We all get those and they can get you in a real rut.

The best way I’ve found to help avoid the blues altogether is to plan ahead. This not only gives you direction, but also makes sure your blog is aligned with whatever other marketing activities or seasonal topics you have coming up.  I do this by sitting down once per month and laying out a post calendar.

Here’s how I do it:

1. Depending on your work style, open an editable calendar on your computer or grab a blank calendar page.
2. Think about the month ahead and identify any key marketing timeframes and activities that might be happening.  Look at your sales cycles (Major holidays? Upcoming sale? Important news announcement?), any events you are attending as well as your own campaign calendar and mark them down on your planner.
3. Think about the travel schedule in the office. Are you or your staff going on any trips worth talking about? If so, mark those down too.
4. Next, based on how often you want to be blogging per week (once per week minimum please), trace a red box on the days when you want your posts to go out.

This gives you your scheduling framework.  You now know what events are going on through the month and when you’ll have spots to talk about them.

Photo Courtesy http://www.flickr.com/photos/stargardener/4610115463/

Here’s what you do next:

1. Decide which events/marketing campaigns are worth talking about and ask yourself what consumers need to know about them. For instance, if you are a travel advisor and Wave Season is starting, you might want to write an article about the top cruises consumers need to consider. Or if someone is going on a trip, you know you will need a blog post report from them within a week from their return.
2. Identify topics and write them down in each red box on your calendar.
3. Continue until you run out of red boxes…if you still have more topics you feel you’d like to cover, By all means, add red boxes in your calendar!
4. Your calendar is now complete!

You’ve successfully integrated your blogging with your other marketing milestones AND you know what you will be writing about each week. If you want to be Mr. or Mrs. fancy-pants, you can also apply this concept to Facebook posts and Twitter updates to build a complete social media calendar for yourself.

Sophie Bujold is a social media coach, blogger and speaker focused on the travel industry who has worked for large travel agency organizations where she developed online initiatives and helped travel professionals understand how to use online tools to market themselves. Sophie strongly believes in the power of social media and wants to help travel professionals embrace it to create business success.

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Eileen Lud­wig of Social Media School brings to the world decades of com­puter expe­ri­ence with a desire to learn and share cur­rent tech­nol­ogy mul­ti­me­dia tools for com­mu­ni­ca­tion. She is owner of four sites: Free­lance­Tourist , Dig­i­tal Pho­tog­ra­phy, Web Design School, and Social Media School Each are in dif­fer­ent stages of devel­op­ment and evolution.

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