“Batching” has become sort of a buzzword these days. If you aren’t familiar with the concept, you’re basically bundling like tasks together so you’re not spending your entire day jumping from one thing to another. A great thing to batch is blogging. But blogging has so many pieces to it, you’re better off really breaking it down and batch your blogging tasks into totally separate areas. It’ll make your blogging more efficient and go a whole lot smoother. Here’s how.
How to batch your blogging tasks
Idea Generating
When you’re in brainstorming mode, just run with it. Especially if you’ve got a million and one ideas flowing. Don’t stop the momentum to take on other tasks and capture your ideas in Evernote or the tool of your choice. When I’m brainstorming, I also like to sketch out a quick outline which may include a potential title, a quick summary and possible subheads as well.
Writing
If you’re in the writing zone, embrace it. You can go back and batch edit your content on a different day, just get all the info out of your head and onto your blog post. I like to dedicate an entire day just to writing, which can include blog posts, writing newsletters and writing social media content, too.
Editing
Once you’ve let your work breathe–which you need to do for every single piece of content that you write!–then it’s time to go back and edit it. Take a look at your sentences and see how you can make them snappier. See if you are making the best word choices and, of course, edit for grammar and punctuation. I run all of my content through Grammarly (there’s a free and paid version) which makes suggestions on how to make my pieces stronger.
Graphic Design
I try to do all my graphic design at the same time because once I’ve got Photoshop open, it’s easy to just continue designing more and more graphics. I have pre-made blog post and social media templates (I talk about this in my resource guide) so this tends to be a pretty quick task! I can create 1-2 blog post graphics + my Instagram graphic all at once and do this for several blog posts at a time.
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Links + Extras
You should always include helpful links within your blog posts, whether that’s linking to a related piece of content your reader may like or other helpful tools. But it can be distracting to look up links while you’re writing, so go back and handle this task at a later time.
I also like to go back and analyze posts to see what “extras” I can include. This can be tweaking the sentence in my “Click to Tweet” or coming up with a great content upgrade idea.
SEO
Yoast SEO is the WordPress plugin I recommend (for more recommended WP plugins, check out this post). It’s an easy way to help you integrate keywords in a natural way and make sure you’re optimizing your post with things like appropriate title tags, a good meta description, and inserting alt tags into your photos. Plus, it’s a totally free tool.
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If you’ve been thinking about batching to increase your productivity, batch your blogging tasks. Separate time to work on idea generating, writing, editing, links, graphic design and your SEO.
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