This post is expanding on my earlier post, Got a Blog, What’s Your Plan?, which more or less discussed the importance of having a plan. Here, you’ll see some tips on how to form that plan.

Let’s talk about how to form a basic blogging plan.

While it’s perfectly okay to write posts whenever you want and about whatever you want, having some sort of consistency is what leads to more readers. While people like a surprise every now and again, they also value consistency. There’s something nice about knowing what to expect from your favorite blogs from time to time.

I’m sure you have a few favorite blogs that you follow. Do you pretty much know when they are going to post? Do you look forward to a certain post every week? Perhaps they take part in a link-up that you like? One of my wife’s () favorite link-ups is What I Wore Wednesday from the Pleated Poppy. She has readers who look forward to her outfit posts each week. Participating in the link-up helps her have at least one post in a week where the theme of that post falls on the same day. So her readers know that if it’s Tuesday, they can expect to come back to her site Wednesday to see a new outfit post. An added bonus of doing a link-up is the additional traffic that comes with it. Just make sure to play nice and follow the rules of whatever link-up you are participating in.

A good place to start your planning is with a weekly posting plan. Make a rough outline of ideas that you have for posts for the next week. It’s okay to not have a new post every day, but having a rough outline of posts ideas will allow you to space your posts as best you can. You don’t want to put posts out on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday only to realize you have nothing to post about for the rest of the week. Had you written out a weekly plan, you may have seen that coming and could have posted Monday, Wednesday and Friday or something like that. If you go more than a few days without a post, you’ll start to lose followers. A plan can help you avoid that.

You may find that when planning out your posts for the week, you have more ideas than you have room for. This is a great thing! Set aside the extra (non time-sensitive) post ideas for a week where you are running thin on ideas. Having them written down will ensure that good ideas don’t fall through the cracks.

After you’re got a weekly post planner written out, it’s time to start planning each day. When will you post? How much time are you allowing yourself to “blog browse” and leave comments on other blogs? How much social media promotion will you do? Do you have side projects like a new header design? Fit those into your daily worksheet so they don’t get missed! I have found that when I write down my weekly and daily goals, there does in fact seem to be enough time in the day to get everything done!

For a daily blogging to-do printable, see:
Blogging Tools ~ Daily Checklist Printable

It’s good to have longer-term plans in place as well. Make a monthly plan that you take into consideration when preparing your weekly plan. Your monthly plan should have some numerical goals on it like Twitter followers or blog followers in addition to other things like maybe post counts or traffic numbers. If you’re coming up to the last week of the month and your goal for Twitter followers is going to be short, you’ll want to address that. Here are 5 quick ways to increase you Twitter followers.

The real key here is to form a plan that is right for you. Make it attainable, yet challenging. Make it full of things that you want to do! After all, it is your blog, so you are the one calling the shots. You’ll have to take your goals and your plan seriously if you want any of this to be worthwhile. I would hope that you set your goals the way you did because you wanted to achieve them. So why let the week, month or year end without giving it your all to achieve those goals?

For help on setting realistic goals, take a look at my blog consulting page and contact me with any questions!