Build yourself a Blogger Binder

Like most things in life that take more than one sitting to accomplish, blogging benefits from taking an organized approach to it. Julie Bonner from declutter it has written a great post for problogger.net on how to build out a blogging binder to organize and improve your blogging.

Here's a summary of Julie's Blog Binder Contents:

• Work Schedule - These are the subjects - one per day - Julie wants to focus on.
• One section per blog - If you happen to have multiple blogs.
• Article Ideas - Where she writes anything and everything that might one day become a post. That anything and everything is the key: Julie gives herself permission to be totally creative and just get the ideas down on paper, then makes sure there's only one place in her life she has to look for her article ideas.
• A must do list - Tasks that Julie needs to get done in the next few days. I image this could cover things like responding to new comments on her blog, various technical improvements that need to made, etc.
• A Running ToDo List - There's a lot of ways to improve and enhance your blog that might not be something you definitely have to do immediately. For example, few bloggers exploit the full power of either TypePad or WordPress. In this section, Julie says she keeps an ongoing log of potential improvements to make.
• Blogs to Visit - Jule like to keep a paper list but respects that for most people, keeping this in IE or Firefox is just easier and quicker. In either case, the key is keeping this list short! It's all too easy get sucked into a never ending list of sites to visit. I've come up with a process for this using my new favorite RSS reader; I'll post about that tomorrow.
• Great Posts - When Julie finds a really good post someone has written that she's really impressed with and wants to act on she prints those off and they go into her Blogging Binder. I think this is an excellent way to taking something very intangible - a blog post - and making it into something tangible that can be marked up, worked on and actually completed.

Like a lot of posts at problogger.net, Julie's Bloggging Binder is excellent advice if you want to improve your blog, become a more efficient and effective blogger. This is one post you should read today.

Comments

[Mark Thwaite]

Yup -- these are good tips. Thanks for the list.

I think keeping an eye on your stats/comments and revisiting and extending your thoughts on blog posts that your readers themselves have indicated are important to them is another vital activity ...