How To Create A Blogging Workflow
It’s easy to feel overwhelmed when it comes to writing blog posts.
With so many other things to focus on, the act of writing the posts always gets pushed to the bottom of your list and ends up being something you rush through right before your deadline to publish.
Having a blogging workflow is a much better way to ensure that you always have something ready to publish when your blogging schedule comes around.
Trust me when I say that, there’s way more to blogging than just sitting down and typing!
I’m a self-proclaimed blogging addict. I’ve been blogging since 2011 and have learned some valuable lessons along the way.
My goal with this post is to share my blog writing workflow to help you create amazing content on a consistent basis.
The blogging workflow I follow keeps me on top of my blogging game, which leads to more traffic and better content for readers.
Let’s be honest- a good blogging workflow is only part of what you need to create a successful and professional-looking blog. I already have a ton of resources on my blog covering topics such as:
- How to start a blog– everything you need to know before starting your blog
- A guide to SEO for bloggers
- How To Write Faster Blog Posts
- How To Create Content People Want To Read
With that said, let’s talk about WHY it’s important to have a solid blogging workflow.
The Importance Of A Blogging Workflow
Whether you are a newbie blogger looking to create a professional-looking blog or an established blogger, a solid blogging workflow can help.
There’s a lot of behind-the-scenes work that needs to happen before you start to create content.
It’s not good enough to just sit and type.
You may need to do research into the content that you’ll be covering, take pictures, find relevant links for reference or affiliates, reach out to potential partners or collaborators.
If you try to do these steps out of order, or in a different way each time you write a post, it is easy to get overwhelmed.
Having a blogging workflow is like having a plan. A set of steps that you have to take to help you reach your desired end goal of creating content that people want to read.
A blogging workflow helps to keep you on track, stay focused, and be consistent with your writing so you can create amazing content for your readers!
The Components Of My Blogging Workflow (Overview)
Creating a workflow for your blog can be quite a unique and complicated process. Let’s start by going through the steps of how to create your blogging workflow:
- Collect Your Ideas In An Idea Bank
- Create A Content Calendar
- Create A Blog Post Template
- Research
- Outline The Blog Post
- Write The Blog Post
- Review and Edit
- Publish & Promote The Post
Step 1- Collect Your Ideas In An Idea Bank
As a blogger and content creator, I’m constantly looking for and collecting content ideas. It’s a great idea to have an ideas bank where you can just throw pieces of inspiration that you find.
Where do these ideas come from?
- Other pieces of content I’ve seen online.
- Questions that my audience asks.
- Conversation or experiences that I have in my day-to-day life.
- Books and articles I’m reading
Whenever inspiration hits, write it down.
When it’s time to start planning my content for the quarter, I’ll go into my content back and pull out a few pieces that are more relevant to the season that I am in.
This is where blogging consistency comes in! Having your amazing ideas in one place ensures that when it’s blogging day, you’re not sitting there thinking about what you are going to write about. You should already have a TON of ideas just by collecting inspiration as you go along with your day-to-day life.
Step 2- Create A Content Calendar
The next step is to create a content calendar. This is where you plan out blogging posts for each week of the month.
A blogging workflow isn’t complete without a content calendar! With your blogging ideas bank in one place, it’s easier to create a blog writing schedule and stick with it.
I like to make my content calendar on ASANA, which is easily accessible on my laptop as well as on my phone. I do this on a quarterly basis.
Reviewing my content calendar on a quarterly basis allows me to have a birds-eye view of the content that I intend to publish. I can also group similar posts and plan for holidays and special events in this way.
Step 3- Create A Blog Post Template
A rule in writing copy or any kind of content is to always start with the end in mind.
You can do this by using templates or prompts to guide you.
The worst thing that you can do is to start writing from scratch without giving thought to how the blog post will fit into your overall content strategy.
Some questions that you can ask yourself before you get started:
- Main Takeaway- What is the main thing that I want people to understand after they read this post?
- Call To Action- What action do I want people to take after reading this post?
- SEO Keyword- What SEO keywords will I target for this post?
This step really requires you to think about the blog post as part of your overall content strategy.
Step 4- Research
Once I have a good idea of what I am going to be writing about and I understand the role of that piece of content in my content strategy, then I start to do my research.
The research will look different for you depending on the type of content that you create.
Content Research
You may choose to do research on the topic in general by reading or interviewing experts on the topic. This will help you to familiarize yourself with the topic that you will discuss in the blog post.
Competitor Research
You can also look to see what content is already available online on the topic. This is known as competitor research.
The goal when doing research is to come up with points that you can use to beef up your content and substantiate some of the points that you are discussing.
SEO Research
SEO research is also part of this phase. SEO is essential to your blogging success because it helps you reach an audience of people who are already looking for the content that you have on offer.
There are plenty of SEO tools available for research. I like to use Keysearch. Keysearch is really the most affordable and easy-to-use tool that I’ve tried.
Like most of the other SEO research tools on the market, Keysearch allows you to find the search volumes and difficulty scores for keywords that you would like to rank for.
You can also use keysearch to analyze your competitor’s keywords so you can plan a post worthy of ranking well on the SERP.
The started plan (which is what I use) costs $169 per year gives you 200 daily searches which is plenty for the two blogs that I currently manage. If you are doing SEO for business, you may want to upgrade to the Pro plan which gives you 500 daily searches. The Pro Plan costs $279 per year.
Step 5- Outline The Blog Post
It’s good to have a solid idea of what you are going to write about before getting started.
Take some of the points from your research phase and use that to plan an outline for the blog post.
The outline doesn’t have to be super complicated, but trust me when I tell you that having an outline will save you time during the actual writing process.
In general, all blog posts will have the basic outline:
- Introduction- introduce your main point and highlight why it’s important for your reader to care… ie why should they keep reading?
- Body- This section should include your main points.
- Conclusion- A summary of the main points and why it’s important for your reader.
- Call To Action- How can your reader implement what you’ve just discussed in your blog post?
Step 6- Write The Blog Post
If you’ve completed the previous step of creating an outline, writing a blog post should actually be pretty easy.
Depending on how detailed your outline was, all you may have to do is fill in the blanks and flesh out the ideas that you’ve already written out.
A recent favorite of mine when it comes to writing blog posts is the tool Jarvis.ai.
Jarvis is an AI tool that helps you write blog posts. You can simply pop in your outline and some keywords, and it spits out content for you so that you don’t have to sit there thinking of words to string together to form a sentence.
If you are someone who is looking for ways to save time when writing blog posts, you’ll love using Jarvis.
Step 7- Review and Edit
This is probably the step where I spend the most time. This step will look different for you depending on your niche and the type of content that you create.
It’s also the step that you will feel most tempted to skip, but I would argue that it is one of the most important parts of making your post feel more polished and professional.
When I write my first draft, I like to come back the next day (with fresh eyes) to re-read and edit the blog post to fix grammar errors and make it sound better.
It’s not easy to catch your own mistakes, that’s why I like to use the free tool Grammarly to help me when it comes to spelling and grammar.
I also make sure that the post sounds good, evokes the right type of emotion in the reader, and also has a good sprinkling of relevant keywords so that it has the potential to rank well in search engines.
I also use this opportunity to format the post, add images, affiliate links, and create graphics that can be used for interest and other social media channels.
This is also a good time to write your meta descriptions and other brief snippets that can be used for social media captions and descriptions.
Step 8- Publish & Promote The Post
Once you are happy with the way everything looks on your blog post, you can go ahead and hit publish to share it with the world.
Hitting publish doesn’t mean that readers are going to automatically come flocking in. You need to market your content to get more eyes on it.
A content marketing strategy is vital to getting your content to the right readers. The last step in the blogging workflow is to promote your post on your various social media channels.
Blogging is hard and takes a lot of time. But, if you have the right tools and workflow in place, you’ll find the process much easier and quicker.
I hope that you’ve found this blogging workflow helpful. If you have any questions or comments, please leave them below! I’d love to hear from you.
Are you ready to create your perfect blogging workflow?
You can start by downloading my blog post templates. This will help you cut down the time you spend drafting each blog post.
