My Blogging Routine

Hi everyone.  When I first started properly getting into blogging 18 months ago now (wow that's gone so fast), I got into a routine quite quickly with how I write and upload my posts.  I've tweaked it a bit here and there, and I've found many various tools and apps along the way that I now find very helpful, so this week I thought I'd tell you all about it :-)

The first thing I do as soon as I get an idea in my head for a new post, is jot it in my little note book.  I love this one, it's so cute and pretty and was given to me for my birthday last year by one of my best friends.

The next thing I do, is work out the main details of the post and write it down properly in my main blog planner.  I also have a couple of pages that I use as a calendar and I write down the titles of all the posts I plan to do over the coming months, usually about 2-3 months in advance.  It sometimes gets altered around, I might decide to leave one post till a later date or I may suddenly come up with a new one that I want to write sooner, so I have to fit it in.

If I'm doing a baking post, I write out all the full details in this book too, like the ingredients list and how to make the goodies.

I also make a note of what photos I need to take to go with each post, I find that really helpful too.

I have several pages full of ideas, ones that I've thought of myself or ones that I've seen suggested by other bloggers, general ideas as well as various tag posts (as you know I love doing them every-so-often), and then I tick them off my list once I've written and uploaded them.  Funnily enough, I always seem to come up with the best ideas when I'm in the shower!  But I find inspiration anywhere and everywhere, from Pinterest, to magazines, youtube, new products or just life in general!

When I come to type up my posts, I don't have a particular schedule, I just work on it a little at a time over the week and always try and upload midweek (yes I try, doesn't always happen I grant you!)  One thing I enjoy doing is listening to music while I write, sometimes it helps, sometimes it doesn't.  But when I do have it on, I always play very chilled out or dance-type instrumental music, I love things like this and this, it relaxes me and helps me to concentrate.

I always really enjoy taking my photos.  I don't claim to be an expert at the technical side of things, but I have a lovely DSLR camera which I treated myself to last Christmas and still have no idea what half the settings do! But I do enjoy setting up the items (bluetack is a must!) and I'm usually quite happy with how my photos turn out.  Good lighting is everything!!

I was lucky to find my 'photographing style' quite early on and I've stuck with it.  I always photograph most of my items on top of my little wooden drawer unit from Ikea which I painted white.  I really like the texture of this and I think a white background always looks very clean and makes the products and colours stand out more.  If the items I need to photograph are too big for the drawer unit, then I'll usually display them on my bed sheet or rose blanket as that can look nice too.

For props, I always use my little pink paper roses, I think they're so cute and add a touch of prettyness to the photos.  I've been looking for some bigger roses for so long but can never seem to find any!  I also like to use my lovely Ikea flower pot and one of my beautiful handmade fabric flowers, that I got a while back from Stitched Blossoms on Etsy, both of these look so pretty with certain items in the background.

If I need to use photos that I haven't taken myself, Google images usually helps (but of course, always use copyright free images!)  Sometimes I find myself searching for the perfect photo for HOURS, yes that's definitely been known to happen, especially when I'm looking for the best GIF images!!

Whenever I take photos on my phone, the first thing I always do is upload it to Dropbox, I love this app it's so useful and I'd be lost without it.  Within minutes the photo is then on my pc and ready to edit.

When it comes to editing my photos, I love using Photoshop, just to tweak things like the brightness, shadows, saturation and cropping, I usually have to resize my photos as well, especially for Twitter as my camera makes them ridiculously humongous and so they need to be a lot smaller to upload.

I find PicMonkey is a really great site for collaging images too and adding things like a transparent circle and text, I love using this look for main header images, I think it just gives a really nice first impression of a post.

Of course when it comes to promoting my posts, social media is pretty vital.  Several months ago, I heard about a great app called Buffer and I used it every time I post now.  With a couple of clicks, it will post your post (lol) to various social media sites (i.e. Twitter, facebook, google+ etc), in one go and you can schedule it to do the same throughout the week or several hours during the day.  Because let's face it, once you've tweeted about a new post, 5 minutes later it'll be halfway down everyone's feed and forgotten about!  So in all it's pretty good.

Another great site is IFTTT, where you can connect all your various accounts.  Then if you wanted to posted a pic on Instagram for instance, it will automatically upload it to Twitter without you having to do it all separately.  And, you can choose between absolutely loads of various social media parings!  I only found this site about a month ago and it's already been invaluable :-)

I'm also hugely obsessed with Instagram, I love looking through it when I have a few minutes free but I've also found that if I share a photo and a link of my post a few days after my post is up, that usually gains even more views, which of course is great.  Bloglovin is another great site of course which displays all your posts and suggests your blog to any members who might be on the look-out for a new one to follow!  I've been trying to get more into using Pinterest and Tumbler lately too.

And course you can follow me through any of these various links (shameless self promo there :-)

I hope you like this post and find some of the apps useful.  Let me know in the comments which apps you use to help with your posts, I'd love to know as I'm always on the look-out for new ones to try :-)
Until Next Time Stay Happy ♥

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