How To Schedule Your WordPress Blogging Workflow

How To Schedule Your WordPress Blogging Workflow When you decide you want to take your blog seriously, youll begin to consider your WordPress blogging workflow. Whats a WordPress blogging workflow? Its the process that takes you from start to finish for each of your blog posts, the way you make it happen.  Perhaps things have changed from when you started to blog, and its not enough to dash off a post when inspiration strikes. Now youre considering other things, such as readers and traffic and page rank and building a platform. Understanding The WordPress Blogging Workflow Any blog, no matter if it is a solo blog, team blog, or agency blog for a client, has a similar WordPress  blogging workflow foundation. Each step leads on to the next as you build your post up from bare idea to completed content. With great ideas comes great responsibility. Make sure you have a place to save them. #BloggingTips1. Organize Your Blogging Ideas With great ideas comes great responsibility.  Idea generation, storage, and access are the foundation of your blog posts, but it is also the step most bloggers struggle with. Its not that they have a shortage of ideas, necessarily, but they need a way to manage them. Your system for organizing your ideas must account for: Jotting your ideas down. Will you use a mobile app that syncs with a service you can access back on your laptop? Or, will you rely on a blogging notebook, perhaps? Catalog your ideas. You will need to find a way to organize your ideas so you can find them again should you need them or want to add new research to them. Even the best search function cant always account for everything, and it certainly doesnt beat out how you already think about the categories of content on your blog. Churning ideas up. Create a system where you regularly dive into old ideas to find those you want to use, and delete those that are no longer applicable or that you dont want to cover. Without this kind of system, your ideas quickly bloat and overwhelm and its hard to know where to start or even know what you have to work with. A key to great idea management is to use a tool youre already using and familiar with, thats already part of other workflows or your daily life, perhaps–anything you dont have to rely on forming a new habit around. Because we work heavily in WordPress, we make apt use of s organizational abilities that connect directly with WordPress. We make selections based on category, and, because it is on a calendar, we get a birds-eye-view of whats coming so that ideas dont drop to the bottom and are forgotten. Do you have a system that churns your ideas up? Or are your best blog ideas forgotten in the pile?2. Schedule Your Ideas On The Calendar People schedule at different points in the blogging workflow process. Some prefer to not put mere work-in-progress ideas on the calendar, but instead wait until they are completed posts. We put the ideas on the calendar before we move forward for this blog, and I do the same for my own blogs. When you put the scheduling of posts into place at this point in the process, the date becomes the determining factor. All the rest of the following activities are centered around the date the post will be published. Scheduling now means you are choosing the best time for the post based on the idea and how it fits into the editorial calendar content. This is the method we use here when we schedule blog posts. We simply drag our ideas around on the calendar, automatically syncing the changes in WordPress as we do so. 3. Collaboration And Communication Solo bloggers are probably not used to this step as they perfect their WordPress blogging workflow, since they are writing completely on their own.  But a team?  For the want of collaboration, the blog was lost. Some of the ever-important things youll want to communicate and collaborate on in your WordPress blogging workflow is: Who is writing the post? When is the post due? Is someone creating the graphics or finding an image? What do the rest of you think about my post? Should I make changes? Are these the most recent updates to the post? (Especially important when writers arent working in WordPress) Who is finalizing the post? Unless your team of writers is functioning as a collection of solo bloggers with no style guides, no oversight, no uniform message, and as a general free-for-all, you will need a way to collaborate.  has collaboration built-in for each synced blog post that combines back-and-forth conversation with assigned and dated tasks; this is the system I use for all of my blogs, both at work and personal. 4. Review And Edit Your Post The reviewing and editing process is what takes the raw material and polishes it up. Your WordPress blogging workflow will want to include this in the timeline. It includes review and critique within the team, and client review if youre an agency. For our team, the process looks like this: Content planning meeting for the next two weeks of content. Write the posts youre supposed to write. Assign a team member the task of reviewing it. The team member reviews the post based on topic and content (not typos and grammar), and offers suggestions. The writer reworks the post as needed. The editor then proofs the post for typos and grammar before publishing. We rely heavily on peer review here, and use to do it. Each blog posts gets a running commentary on headline suggestions, keyword ideas, changes to the content of the post, and image suggestions.