How To Create An Effective Blogging Workflow In 7 Steps [Ep. 70]
By Jessie Festa. This episode sharing a workflow for bloggers contains affiliate links to trusted partners I think you’ll love!
- create a workflow for your entire blogging business
- simplify your blogging tasks so that you grow more by doing less
- set up systems that ensure you don’t miss important deadlines
- organize your days, weeks, months, and year for maximum blog growth
- align your blogging content calendar and strategies with your goals
- use your blogging workflow to increase profits
- and more!
How To Create A Blogging Workflow [Podcast Episode Audio]
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Create A Blogging Workflow Easier With These Helpful Tools
Setting up blog business systems and defining a repeatable blog workflow doesn’t have to be difficult, especially if you use these helpful tools:
Travel Blog Prosperity. TBP is an online membership dedicated to helping travel and lifestyle bloggers grow their traffic and income through a mix of education, collaboration, and community support. The membership includes instant access to over $5,000 in courses and bonuses. While doors are technically closed, you can snag your first month for just $9 by emailing me at jessie (at) jessieonajourney (dot) com. New members only and no minimum commitment required.
Asana. This free project management tool can help you organize your blogging schedule, create deadlines, delegate tasks, and more.
Coboll Paper Planner. This is my favorite brand for inexpensive yet high-quality paper planners for staying organized as a blogger.
Keysearch (snag 30% off with code “jessieonajourney30”). Doing keyword research to optimize your blog posts to rank in search results is an important part of any content creation workflow. Keysearch is my absolute favorite tool for this, as it provides all of the information you need to see success.
Canva. This graphic design tool makes it quick and easy to create any visual project: opt-in freebies, workbooks, lead magnets, ebooks, printables, Instagram Reels, and more.
ConvertKit. Email marketing should absolutely be a part of your blogging workflow. ConvertKit is a feature-rich yet user-friendly email marketing platform made by bloggers for bloggers. My affiliate link gets you a 30-day free trial — no credit card required! Alternatively, you can join their free plan here.
7-Step Blog Workflow [Episode Transcript]
One of the most challenging parts of being a blogger is creating a repeatable blogging workflow; one that truly helps you reach your blogging goals and get things done without getting overwhelmed.
If you’re having trouble with this, then this episode is for you. Stick with me, as I’ll be sharing a step-by-step strategy for mapping out a workflow for your blogging business — personal examples and implementation tips included.
Step #1: Pinpoint your blogging goals
It’s important to map out your blogging goals before creating a workflow, because you need your goals and your regular tasks to align.
You want to make sure that you’re clear on what actually needs to get done to reach your goals — instead of simply doing things because you heard you should.
For instance, I know for many people a big goal is becoming a Mediavine publisher. This means a big part of your workflow should be focused on growing your blog traffic and learning the ins and outs of Search Engine Optimization (SEO), even if means spending less time on social media.
Because remember, just because someone else is implementing a strategy doesn’t mean you have to, as well. There are plenty of bloggers starting niche sites that don’t have any connected social media platforms, but instead, focus 100% on writing SEO-friendly blog posts and growing traffic to monetize through display ads (like Mediavine) and affiliate marketing — or even to eventually sell their blog for profit.
Now, as you pinpoint your goals, it’s recommended to break these up into milestones, and also break up these milestones into specific steps you need to take to reach them.
As you reach each milestone, you get closer to reaching your big goal or goals. I discuss this idea more in the episode on How To Map Out & Crush Your Blogging Goals.
Step #2: Asses your current strategies — and add new ones if needed
Take a hard look at what you’re currently doing in your blogging business. Is it working?
This is actually something we do monthly inside of my Travel Blog Prosperity membership, as I think it’s important to constantly be checking in on what is working and what is not – so that we can stop wasting time and instead put our energy into tasks that are truly helping us get to where we want to be.
By the way, if you’d like access to this monthly Goal-Setting Workshop, just send me an email to jessie (at) jessieonajourney (dot) com and I’ll create a coupon for you to get your first month of Travel Blog Prosperity for just $9 to try out. Just note that this offer is for new members only.
Okay, back to business now. So a few other questions to ask as you assess your strategies include:
-What strategies are helping you meet the unique goals you have for your blogging business? Because again, the milestones you need to reach may be different from the other bloggers you follow.
-Which tasks do you love, and which do you absolutely hate? While you’ll need to sometimes do things you don’t find fun, it’s also smart to consider how you can tweak what you’re doing to feel more joy in your everyday life.
-Are there any tasks you can cut completely? For instance, those that no longer help you meet your goals.
-Are there any tasks you can outsource? Tip: It’s smart to understand how to do a task before outsourcing, so that you can still monitor its progress.
-What new strategies do you want to incorporate to help you grow, monetize, and meet your goals? Are there any new skills you need to learn to successfully implement these new strategies? If so, you’ll want to incorporate time into your blogging workflow for education.
I’ll give a personal example:
If you would have asked me last year, one of my big goals was to grow my YouTube channel to both add an additional revenue stream and grow and nurture my community of travel bloggers; however, in the last year my NYC photo tours and shoots have rapidly grown, leaving little time for this.
Additionally, my blog is already monetized with Mediavine ads, and this podcast is already helping me to grow and nurture my community of travel bloggers. A podcast is also a lot easier to put together than a YouTube video, and because I add SEO-optimized show notes to each episode, I’m monetizing it with ads as well as occasional sponsors.
Because of all of this, I’ve put my YouTube channel on the backburner for now and am putting more energy into things that are already leading to traffic, subscribers, and income.
Step #3: Combine where you can
I mentioned previously that you should delete or pause tasks that aren’t helping you reach your goals, but you should also think about ways to combine the remaining tasks.
Here is how I recommend laying this out. Get a piece of paper or use a spreadsheet and create the following headings:
- Yearly
- Quarterly
- Monthly
- Weekly
- Daily
Underneath each, list out all of the associated projects and tasks.
This way, you can visually see everything you’re doing — and I bet it is a lot. You want to think about ways you can combine or overlap tasks to save time.
One personal example that I shared in the episode on how to create a podcast workflow is that I write a script for each of my solo podcast episodes, and then I use that script as the basis for an SEO-optimized blog post that I also use as the shownotes.
Therefore, I’ve combined the step of scripting my podcast episode, creating show notes, and writing a new blog post.
Step #4: Pinpoint your big monthly blog focuses
Personally, I like to choose one main focus for each month. These are often things that are meant to lead to a big boost in traffic or income.
Additionally, going back to Step #1 when we discussed pinpointing goals and breaking them up into milestones, these focuses can be things that help you meet those milestones.
A few personal examples include:
- Doing a launch event for a new or revamped digital product
- Creating a new opt-in freebie to grow my email list
- Reopening the doors to Travel Blog Prosperity, which often includes pre-launch events like hosting a free webinar
- Taking part in a collaborative event like a summit or bundle
- Creating a free challenge meant to grow my email list and income
- Collaborating with another blogger to cross-promote products; for instance, if I host a webinar for another blogger’s audience that ends with a pitch to my product using their affiliate link
- Updating old website content to see a fresh boost in blog traffic
- Updating old freebies, sales funnels, tripwire funnels, and email automation sequences
I personally organize my year on a piece of paper that I keep in my paper planner, but you can use Asana, Trello, or another digital tool if you prefer. I simply write every month of the year, and then underneath I write the big focus.
Be intentional with where you place your monthly focuses, too. For example, January is usually a month where people tend to take action, so you might place your most important online course launch or community event here.
Additionally, you might piggyback one month onto another. For instance, if you’re launching a solo female travel course in early May, you might spend late April doing a free solo female travel challenge to warm up potential students.
And again, talking about milestones for our goals, if you know you want to apply for Mediavine by September, you might spend the months leading up to that honing your SEO skills, building backlinks, doing a content audit, updating old posts to bring in new traffic, and creating new SEO-optimized content.
We’ll be coming back to this idea of monthly focuses in Step #6, but first, let’s discuss…
Step #5: Create your annual blog content calendar
This calendar should align with your blog’s brand, particularly your mission, as well as your blogging goals.
For instance, if your mission is to empower women to travel solo and you know you want to launch a solo travel course, you’ll want to be publishing content that fulfills this mission while also showing off your expertise.
Once you understand this, your next step is doing some keyword research. Find niche keywords you can truly rank for, and map out what posts you want to publish — and when.
Remember that seasonal content should be published a few months before you want people to see it.
This is because you need to give it time to rank in Google search results. If you have a Pinterest strategy for your blog, it’s smart to also publish your pins early so they have time to rank.
The other benefit is you reach early researchers. There are definitely people — like my mom — who start their Christmas shopping in October, so if you can create a gift guide and publish it early to reach those early birds it’ll help you get even more traffic.
Remember, too, that there is power in writing about the same topics consistently because:
- a) Google will see you as an authority on the topic, meaning it’ll be easier to rank for it
- b) It makes it easier to interlink your posts, which is great for SEO
For instance, I have a solo female travel blog, meaning that I’m constantly writing solo female travel guides to different cities. When I cover a destination, I also like to write a few posts on that destination, which I then interlink.
On my blog for my tour company, NYC Photo Journeys, I consistently cover New York City travel, meaning I often outrank sites that are larger than mine because I have that topic authority and I’m consistently interlinking my content.
Going back to also using content to reach goals, by covering NYC travel I attract my ideal audience and show off my expertise as a local New Yorker.
Building on this idea, as you’re creating this calendar, also keep profitable content in mind; as in, blog posts that promote your own products and/or affiliate products. If you publish four blog posts every month, you might make every fourth one optimized specifically for affiliate marketing.
I’ll link a blog post on affiliate marketing for bloggers as well as a free affiliate marketing workbook to help with this.
Step #6: Create repeatable monthly deadlines
Once you’ve got all of your projects and tasks for the year mapped out, you want to create a repeatable blogging workflow — with deadlines.
For instance, I break up my month into four weekly themes:
- Week #1: Content creation & Outreach Days
- Week #2: Promotional planning for the next month
- Week #3: Travel Blog Prosperity preparation
- Week #4: Overflow
Going back to the promotional planning week in my blog workflow, this is when I refer to the piece of paper mentioned in Step #4 where I mapped out my year of big monthly tasks. If it’s the second week of March, meaning it’s my promo planning week, I’ll look at my big focus for April and get all of the content created and scheduled so I’m ready to go.
Now, along with monthly focuses and weekly themes, I also have certain repeating weekly tasks, like scheduling my social media for the week on Mondays and writing up my VIP Opportunities Newsletter on Fridays.
Just keep in mind, your schedule may look very different depending on your unique blogging goals and your unique projects and tasks, and that is totally okay.
Pro tip with this:
Consider how you can work in batches to get into a flow state.
Actually, I have a quick storytime for this:
During a recent coaching call inside of Travel Blog Prosperity, one of my members shared how instead of working on one blog post at a time, she works on numerous drafts at once, then edits them all at once, then publishes them all at once.
For her, this workflow has been a productivity game-changer.
Personally, I feel anxious working on a blog post if I still have another in my drafts. Instead, I like to work sequentially.
Some people have monthly content themes, some don’t.
Some people organize their monthly calendar by day, some by week.
Some people publish a weekly blog post, others have one specific week dedicated to content.
My point?
What works great for someone may not work great for you.
It can be helpful to get inspired and learn from what others do; but, in my opinion, it’s important to not be afriad to test, tweak, and adapt different blogging workflows and strategies to see what works best for you.
Step #7: Schedule out your blogging workflow — including time to check in
It’s one thing to plan out a workflow, and it’s another to actually incorporate it into your blogging business.
Personally, I’m a 100% paper girl — I love Asana for making lists. For instance, I use this free digital tool to map out my content plan and group keywords I want to target by category; however, I use a paper calendar and a paper planner to schedule everything.
Some people hate having to-do lists sitting right there on their desk, while others think this just archaic. I can’t tell you how many people have laughed at me when I said I’d need to get back to them about scheduling something because I needed to consult my paper calendar.
But I don’t care, because it is what works for me, and it’s what I know I will pay attention to.
So, you need to find what works best for you.
Whatever you choose, please also schedule time to check in with your blogging workflow. Don’t be afraid to make changes when something isn’t working, or even if something isn’t enjoyable.
Sometimes simple tweaks can make all of the difference. For instance, if you know you’re more creative in the morning than at night, make sure you’re scheduling yourself to blog in the AM instead of pushing yourself through the PM.
Alright, now I hope you enjoyed this episode. I hope you feel inspired and empowered to create a repeatable blogging workflow that helps you reach your goals.
Don’t forget to grab access to the free travel blogging resource library. There are a ton of resources in there on growing your community and increasing your blogging profits.
And of course, make sure to subscribe so you don’t miss future episodes sharing these bite-sized strategies for bloggers who want to turn their blogs into profitable full-time businesses.
Happy blogging!
Map Out Your Blogging Workflow With These Helpful Past Episodes:
Best Travel Blogging Courses For Taking Your Blog Full Time
How To Validate An Online Course Idea Before Creating It
How To Write Blog Posts Faster: 13 Powerful Tips
How To Create A Blog Content Calendar
7-Step Blog Post Promotion Checklist
12-Step Content Creation Checklist For Bloggers
How To Create A Travel Blog Business Plan
A Streamlined Podcast Workflow Template To Save You Time
How To Reach Your Blogging Goals Faster With Outreach Days
How To Find Niche Keywords that Drive Traffic Through Competitor Research
How To Grow On Instagram As A Blogger
Connect With The Profitable Travel Blogger Podcast
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