“Sprint006 plan” by Jez Nicholson
Some rights reserved
If you spend any time reading about blogging, on blogs, articles shared on Twitter, chats, etc, you’ll see talk about editorial calendars. You’ll likely find sager advice than I can give, but I thought I’d share what I’ve started to do in case it can help or anyone has any feedback.
For me, here’s the plan. When I get ideas I jot them down on Evernote. Title, a few lines. Most often this is on my phone, but sometimes from a computer. I use a couple of different computers, and my attitude towards computers is to keep as little on a computer as possible so the need to migrate is minimized, so Evernote type things are a good option.
When I have some time, I flesh that out into a blog post. I need to start scheduling that time, not just when I have time, but to keep ahead of the schedule. But for the time being, it seems to be when I don’t have pressing things to do with work or family. I’m truly thankful I can schedule the publishing of posts so I can write a bunch at a time.
What comes next is where it’s now interesting for me. I’ve started a spreadsheet to track where I’ve scheduled or published a blog post (so currently one of two places) and will have columns for promotions to different social networks apart from the ones that come automatically when a post is published. I want to make sure I’m leveraging Google+ and Reddit and LinkedIn communities, not just posting to my connections.
It’s nothing wildly elaborate, but it’s something to keep my content publishing efforts organized and make sure I’m promoting as I should be.
I attempted to get into Evernote to help with blog post creation, but it ended up making the process slightly more complicated for me, so I just went back to what I was doing before — putting ideas directly into blog post drafts. If I’m not at my computer, I’ll just write a pen-and-paper note to myself and start the draft later.
I think keeping as little info as possible on a computer/device is a very wise idea. I don’t worry about it as much as I probably should, though — I only have one computer at a time, and I’ll tend to keep what I’ve got for a bunch of years before replacing it. So I’ve gotten (too) comfortable w/ having all my info in one place.
My issue with putting stuff in a draft on my blog is it doesn’t save as frequently on it’s own as Evernote, and I don’t want to accidentally publish. I’ve also started using IFTTT to save my Favorited Tweets to Evernote, which I hope to use to blog.
You definitely have to be careful with your data. If something happens to your computer, it’s gone. There are a lot of automatic backup solutions you could set to save everything in your Documents folder. Hmmm… that would make for a good blog post.