Juiced On Writing

I’ve previously discussed my own organisation endevours in writing and project work. As the owner of three blogs (at the moment) providing content for these is an unpaid but longwinded task (done through love, perhaps?) but one that we all must do as professional blog owners.

As part of the Blog Mastermind (and previously the 30 Day Challenge – a challenge which this year used a WordPress blog to try to make $1 during the month), there are exercises to provide content on these blogs.  Yaro Starak, in the Blog Mastermind webcourse sets participants tasks on a weekly basis to provide pillar and authority content – fresh content, in series or standalone.Constantly.

As a writer, writing content for me is part of what I love – it’s the very reason I started off this blog, and my others. But on a regular basis even I baulk at yet another task of coming up with an idea, and getting it down onto e-paper here on this blog, or on my other websites.

So Here’s My Formal System (and What Went Wrong)

A month ago I set about organising this all more successfully, and scheduling in each blog for new content on a daily rotational basis. The Scrapability blog (my long-standing scrapbooking blog) was to get new content on a twice-weekly basis, Juiced on Writing (this one) was going to be the lucky recepient of three new items per week, and Juiced on Ebooks (a trial blog for the 30 Day Challenge) was to get the remaining two items per week. I scheduled myself to write one new item per some blog, every day, including weekends.

As a schedule it wasn’t a bad one, and do-able for at least two weeks. I scheduled these items, plus all my other project tasks into a recurring reminder task program called Taskpilot Pro. Going into this daily I would filter for today’s tasks, see which blog I was due to write for, and off I’d go, working around all those other domestic and work chores, other project tasks and the like.

As I said, it worked for roughly two weeks. Then I realised that such a schedule, no matter how good-willed and sensible it might be, doesn’t hold up to the creative nature of life, or my own writing. On the Thursday where I was scheduled to write a scrapbooking article, I found I was completely berift of any inspiration on scrapbooking -  yet perhaps I could pursue that article I wanted to do on ebooks? But hadn’t I already written two extra writing blog items this week (hey, I was on a roll, okay?) yet I couldn’t keep up the game on the planned target. I was over-extending on areas I was inspired to write for – and not wanting to stop that, but then there were days when I really couldn’t do what I was asking myself to do. I couldn’t write on a topic scheduled.

I also found that I got a second wind in writing – on Friday evenings of all times, and you could often find me sitting up in bed late into the night, my face shining bright with laptop lighting, sweating over two or three new content items for my ebook blog or my writing blog, but finding again no inspiration for the scrapbooking blog which I was meant to be working on.

There are quite a few tools and experts out there espousing the use of a Blogging Editorial Calendar. Several weeks after I had already created my own (failing) calendar, an internet friend of mine sent me a twitter with a link to one. Here’s ChrisG with a post entitled Planning Blog Post Topics, which I’ll get back to shortly.

Two years ago I had downloaded a simple excel spreadsheet from some website (you can see a similar example on the ChrisG blog entry above) which suggested blog posts could be scheduled across days. I’ve still got that spreadsheet template somewhere on one of my hard-drives, and it is the basis I started off with when originally scheduling my own content posts a month ago.

But similarly to ChrisG, I first had to correct what was going wrong. For me, a schedule was a good thing in keeping the posting slightly more consistant, but it also stopped me in my tracks when I didn’t or couldn’t meet the schedule. Unlike a professional blogger who is paid for content, and has enforced schedules to meet, my own life was slightly less regimented but as equally predictable in my losing that initial muse over a topic on the day it was due.

What Changed Slightly

I would not dispute that any writer – whether unpaid blogger, or professional writer – needs to learn to provide content or write on demand, on schedule. But as my own blogs are based on some creative endeavors (and in one case, a hobby) I can not schedule that world into a weekly agenda. Interesting news happens in scrapbooking at any time of the day but sometimes not at all, for gaping periods of time. At those times I need to actually create and experiment to maintain my own muse. The same goes for my own writing.

Here’s a blog entry I posted on my scrapbooking and personal blog exactly one week ago, entitled 4 days on, 3 Days off, where I suddenly reworked the schedule. I needed that Thursday to simply muck around with, scrapbook (create), and write, to catchup with projects, and have a breather from the daily grind of writing content. And I wanted my weekends back also.

That wasn’t suggesting I gave myself carte blanch to wipe the whole editorial calendar. I still left that intact with the expectation of providing at least seven new content items across the week. And you find me here on my supposed day off (a Thursday) and so far I’ve posted one new item on the scrapbooking blog, one onto the ebooks blog today, and then there’s this one. Over the course of this week, with the newly found freedom of relieving myself of the burden of “having” to blog on certain days, I’ve posted nine new items on that scrapbooking blog since taking my 3 Days off.

Pro-Planning for the Quiet Muse Days

Also interestingly, I appear to have already followed the ChrisG post. Even a month ago, as I scheduled the actual writing task for each blog, I realised that my muse (or any news to write about) or life would surely get in the way of my intentions. So I started quietly preplanning blog items – listing ideas into a couple of PC applications, in readiness for a day when I could write them up. I call this preplanning “ProPlanning” with pro standing for both a reminder that this is a professional approach, and also for the word, “Proactive” because if there’s one thing I’ve learnt from being incredibly organised, it’s to plan for those copious creative rainy days.

Now everything (aside from the reminder system, as I don’t own a copy of Microsoft Outlook on this PC), is in the one application – Microsoft Office OneNote. I have several notebooks setup in OneNote – one is for archiving all those blog entries on a regular basis. Another is called simply Blog Articles.

My OneNote setup

Rather than telling you about how this is setup, some simple screenshots might do. Here is my Blogging Editorial Calendar and ProPlanning of Content

1. Schedule

Note 1: I do not own Microsoft Outlook 2007 as it does not come with the home Office package. If I did it would be a simple matter of linking in a reminder / appointment from this schedule into my Outlook calendar. As mentioned above I use another task manager for these daily task prompts.

Note 2 : Above you will make out a schedule for actual idea generation also. That’s dedicated time for coming up with ideas on particular topics for the blogs. In most cases I don’t use this dedicated time on the correct day, or in one large chunk – but the schedule serves to provide a prompt to keep my ideas concentrated ahead of time on all three blogs.

2. Article Template

Note 1: Under my Admin section in my Blog Articles notebook I keep some reusable templates. This is the original Article Ideas template – which you’ll see in use in the next screenshot.

Note 2 : I call them “Articles” simply because I do. Most are blog content or items, but I have submitted articles from these ideas also.

Note 3 : The key shows serial content ideas, PDFs (for viral marketing of articles / ebooks), One Off items and Articles.

3. A Working Blog Content ProPlanner

Note 1 : I have a grouped tab containing my Blogs as separate tabs. Under each tab you will find the top sheet of an Articles Ideas page, and under this will be other pages such as research material and pages, other registries of ideas (in this case you can make out a Terms and Concepts definition page).

Note 2 : I chose to show you the Juiced on Ebooks Ideas ProPlanner here, because it’s not giving away too much in detail. My Juiced on Writing and Scrapability blogs ProPlanners contain quite a lot more ideas of upcoming articles. The content planner for Juiced on Ebooks has not been updated with everything I’ve done – that’s because I have followed other ideas at the time of inspiration and simply published them into the blog immediately. The Article Ideas proplanner is for times when you don’t have any ideas. And some of the ideas in here may never be written.

Note 3 : The Blogs and Schedule and supporting pages on each tab are linked to each other via OneNote Html links page to page, and also by the tags. Note that my Juiced on Ebooks blog is tagged with a small green square tag. Searching for all items for this tag will find me all I need to know on that particular blog.

4. A Bonus : My Writing Projects

The above screenshot is from a different OneNote notebook – my writing projects one. This simply shows you the template I’ve setup, with links to all the pages I might need for creating a writing project. Because of OneNotes copious clipping facilities, and freeform writing capability, it is perfect for my research and planning for writing projects, whether ebooks or novels. There is also an addon that integrates Mindjet MindManager into and out of OneNote and other Microsoft Office applications such as word and excel. You can also publish blog content from it if you really want to, but for that I use the Microsoft Live Writer software.

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