Happy Monday, and welcome back to Read. Sleep. Repeat.’s Tips & Tricks: Organization! Last week I had the pleasure of unveiling The Official Book Blogger Planner and telling you the vital (to me) supplies I use for keeping my blog organized. This week we’re going to jump into the fun, messy and time-consuming stuff!
Schedules & Formatting
This week you’re going to focus on getting your reviews, meme’s, discussions and etc, prepared for you blog.
If you have self hosted WordPress, now is the time for you to run over to Ashley of Nose Graze, Creative Whim site and purchase The Ultimate Book Blogger Plugin. I can not stress how vital this plugin is for us book bloggers. It literally cut 20 minutes off of the time it use to take me to compile book info for my reviews. Not only that but it has some amazing widgets that can help you stay on track when it comes to organizing your blog.
Ok so now that I’ve promoted the THE BEST PLUGIN EVER let’s get to business. Look at your calendar. Now, realistically, how often are you able to post each week? What meme’s do you want to participate in? Are you thinking about adding a discussion feature? How often can you promote those post? Do you have a lot of email subscribers? All of these questions should play a major part in your schedule. For example, my schedule is as follows:
Sunday’s~ ARC reviews
Monday’s~ Organization (Month of December only)
Tuesday’s~ Top Ten Tuesday (sometimes)
Wednesday’s~ Waiting on Wednesday
Thursday’s~ Guest post/reviews
Friday’s~ Reading After Dark Reviews
Saturday’s~ Stop & Chat
Since I have so many post going up, my email subscribers get one email at the end of the week. This way I don’t feel like I’m spamming them, and they don’t miss anything.
You should know that even though I “plan” to have something everyday that is not always the case. I don’t always do a TTT post or have someone to do a guest review. That’s why your schedule should always be looked at as a GUIDE! It’s not set in stone because life happens, and if you “make” yourself do something you typically have a higher chance of giving up.
So look at that calendar and don’t kid yourself. It’s fun to dream that you’ll have 6 reviews a week and all the meme’s but not only is that a huge load on you, it can be overwhelming to your followers.
Once you have a schedule thought up, you have to do the hard part. Formatting. It took me 9 months to come up with a post format that I was happy with. Luckily I have the UBB plugin so formatting is done automatically for me but for those of you that don’t have it, I suggest you get to work. If you have self hosted WordPress and would like a free plugin that can help with formatting I suggest Simple Post Template. You create a post, review, meme, whatever, the take the HTML and paste it within that plugin and then save it as “blah blah blah” template. The drawback is that even though the bones are here you have to go in and adjust quite a bit. You have to continually update the cover image to the book, the info and all that other tedious stuff that makes you not want to schedule in advance. If you use blogger or wordpress.com then I’m sorry sweets but you’re going to have to bite the bullet and go through the motions each time. You can save the HTML for some of it and input the info each time like the plugin I described above but it can and will be pretty time-consuming. But it will always be worth it.
The only thing I can say to keep you going is, there is no better feeling than going to your post calendar and seeing that EVERYTHING is already done for the upcoming week/month. All that time and energy you spend getting your blog ahead of the curve will come back as reading time, or T.V. time, or “I just want to sit on my ass and drink wine” time. Whatever you put into your blog is what you’ll get back.
You have a whole week to start dreaming up that schedule and working on your format before we jump into the next barrel of scorpions. So get to work guys and I’ll see you next week!
