Bloggers Gonna Blog: Creating A Content Calendar and Keeping Your Sanity

October 1, 2015

Let me set the scene: You’ve finally decided your going to start to a blog, maybe you’ve even started it and you’re a month in. You’re excited and incredibly ambitious, which is why you haven’t slept 8 plus hours in a few days, maybe even a week (gasp!), you feel like your head is spinning a million miles a minute, with everything you have to do for your day job, your family, friends, now the blog and YOURSELF! You want a weekend back, a day to brunch, to relax, to sleep in, to do anything you want but have no idea how or when to make that happen. “How do they do it and still have a life???” I’ll tell you my talented, ambitious and sleep deprived friend. A CONTENT CALENDAR .

Good morning fellow Bloggers! It’s good to be back writing another Bloggers Gonna Blog series post, not only because I truly love sharing what Melissa and I have learned over this (almost) first year of blogging (WOHOO! We made it!! We survived!!) but I always have a lot of fun hearing back from you ladies and gents on what’s working for you and what you would love for us to cover! Back to this new installment of Bloggers Gonna Blog: Creating a Content Calendar and Keeping Your Sanity.

Ok, lets take a step back for all of you who might not be in the actual real throws of blogging and are at the beginning of this great adventure! A content calendar is a schedule of your posts, to-dos and ideas that helps you organize your life (ie. your blog content lol) in a manageable way! It’ll help keep your sanity basically, which believe it or not is important. Be flexible with yourself as you develop your content calendar, not only is it a living breathing thing as it exists in it’s essence but as you grow and learn your content calendar should be flexible to change and adjust in a means of processes so that it can best fit you and what you need! If it’s not serving you in the way you need, then change it.

When Mel and I first started we thought we were being really thorough and made sure to start planning shoots, and scheduling and ideas capturing and so many things on a physical calendar that we housed at my place. BUT despite all this planning and forethought we believed was enough this first 3 months, heck may even 5, were brutal! We felt frazzled, unorganized and disconnected from our plans when we needed them most at meetings on the go. We knew we had to come up with a better system, thus the birth of the Google Calendar. Yes, we invented post-its first as a precursor to the Google Calendar, and we knocked it out of the park if I do say so myself. Let me break down why this method has worked for us AMAZINGLY and why think it will work for you too, even if you’re just a one woman kind of operation (which I HIGHLY DOUBT! No woman in an island! We all have someone helping us whether it be a husband/boyfriend/best friend/mom photographer or a hired professional!).

Before utilizing the Google Calendar, Mel and I were using the physical calendar at my house with different colored post-its (told you we invented them) color coded for different categories of posts with the name of the posts, who was doing them and what category it was. This was inefficient for many reasons, the most important being that when we were on the go consulting with potential collaborations or meeting during our lunch hours, we didn’t have the content calendar in front of us save an iphoto on one of our phones. So when something changed in the moment or needed to be captured or additional information/notes were provided like hashtag specifications we had to wait until later to try to fit it all on the post-it! As any blogger knows or any future blogger should know, THINGS CHANGE FAST. Flexibility is not an maybe kind of thing, it’s a must have if you’re going to SURVIVE and KEEP YOUR OWN LIFE TOO.

Setting up your Google Content Calendar is simple really, you probably already have your own google calendar (if not, how do you live?) so just create a new one and name it whatever you want. Invite the people that are integral in planning your blog, for us it was obviously each other, but for clients or professionals we’re working with on posts it’s also super easy to create an event and invite them with all the details captured right there in your calendar! Not only does this help to keep you organized but it also helps to set expectations so everyone is on the same page. Start creating events for posts that you have planned, color code them if you want to and if your super organized you can even capture the address of where you want to shoot those posts if they require being on location. If you’re a two woman team like us, this is great because I can add tasks to my calendar that only I see and Melissa can too; for instance I add tasks to create and schedule related social media posts (oops secrets out, more on that to come). We also capture all the idea we have for what we want to shoot and write but haven’t done so yet in a long list of events on Sundays because we don’t post anything on Sundays so we know this area is for ideas. This way we know what’s coming up next, what we want to shoot and write about and when we have done those things we can then schedule them by moving them from that Sunday to the day of the week we want.

Surprisingly enough, actually coming up with a content calendar process that works for you (and we hope you’ll try our system because it truly did save us and make our lives that much easier), is not the most important thing. THE BIG SECRET to KEEPING YOUR SANITY is this: having a realistic work flow that will inhabit your new content calendar. What do I mean by this you might ask? Well Mel and I at the beginning of the blog decided it was really important to post every day, except for Sundays. For a while this was manageable, but the key word here is FOR A WHILE. Eventually, this became draining. Even with two people, posting every day can be incredibly tasking not only on our creative minds but also on our personal and work lives. I mean after all a girls got to get paid to eat ya know! Plus when you neglect that downtime, you neglect opportunities to experience life and new things which is the food for a creative mind! We have changed our work flow several times since starting the blog in terms of how many times we post a week, how consistently we post and after doing this for a while we also know what the realistic turn around is from conception to creation to production to content. SO my ambitious go-getters, be patient with yourself and BUILD IN FLEX TIME AND OFF TIME .

What are these you might ask? Well as an example OFF time is when you get to recharge and have new experiences that feed your creative process, or just plain go to target and run errands or lay in bed with a book lol. I recently had two weeks of OFF time in Italy and Mel just got back from a weekend of OFF time in Key West. This time is SUPER important and you need it in order to keep your sanity and your happiness. FLEX time is the time it takes you to turn around a project, through all the steps. So for us, we know that it’ll take us depending on the size of the project anywhere from a full day or just an hour to shoot images, 1-3 hours to choose and edit photos depending on size, 3-5 hours to write the post and finally about 30 min to an hour to schedule and plan compelling social media content. If we scheduled our content calendar without flex time this would mean, we would need to turn around content anywhere from 2-3 days after we have an idea. Now, I pose the question to you, what happens if you commit to content via a sponsor on that work flow WITHOUT FLEX TIME and it rains, or your photographer cancels, or the photo you had in your mind just isn’t working, or you have a last minute 9-5 work project come up, OR the most beautiful, funny and kind man asks you to a concert????? Remember a woman’s word is her promise! So you can see the potential for disaster if you don’t plan for FLEX time. Plus if you needed anymore convincing you can’t rush greatness, and sometimes all you need to perfect your idea is a little extra time. FLEX time also ensure you deliver on your obligations to clients on time and with the product that you feel most confident with because you know you had enough time to develop your vision. You know your work process and flow best, so build it in as you see fit and adjust as you go! For us, we’ve had to add more FLEX time and OFF time as of late due to an exciting new project that we’re working on that we can’t wait to share with all of you!

We know this was a long post, but we hope it was helpful to all of you. PLEAAAASE share with you all your questions, or thoughts below! We love to hear from all of you! Happy blogging!