Blog Planner Board

One of the things I took away from ProBlogger event a couple of weekends back was an idea presented by Christina from Hair Romance and Carly from Smaggle. They talked about productivity and how to find more time for blogging. Their session was super practical and I went away with a bunch of ideas of things to try to change in the way I get my blogging done.

One of those things was the task of writing a list of 100 blog posts ideas so that when you sit down to write a post you don’t spend ages thinking about what to write but rather can just get on with the writing. I loved this!

For me, though, I needed to consolidate the ideas that I already had. I had some in my WordPress calendar. I use a plugin on my blog called WordPress Editorial Calendar and often write ideas as new posts with a title and couple of lines of notes then save them on a date in  the coming month. However there are a bunch of drafts sitting on the calendar in the past that were never finished.

I also had ideas written in various notebooks at my desk, and even some ideas in Evernote, which I started trying to use at one stage but quickly gave up. (I’m sure it is a great program but it just didn’t work for me.)

I needed to collate all these various notes and ideas into one place – and then I would have a lot more than 100 ideas to go on with.

I considered creating some kind of document on my computer – either in Word or Excel or some other option. But I wanted something that would actually take me away from my computer to brainstorm regularly. I seem to be tied to my computer for blogging a lot and I want to be spending less time online and less time sitting, so perhaps I could create some other way.

Then it hit me: I love visual and I love colour so why not create a visual board with all my ideas in a format that could be added to and changed as I needed.

On my way back from the Gold Coast I stopped into Ikea and bought a large poster frame for less than $10.

The next day I popped into Officeworks and bought a bunch of coloured post-it notes. (I originally tried some stick on notes that I had in my stash but they were cheap and nasty and didn’t stick properly!)

Ta da!

I have a colour coded system: purple notes for projects to make, blue notes for blog posts ideas that don’t require an actual project, yellow notes for categories or themed posts, and pink notes for possible guest posts to give away.

All my ideas are gradually being added to this board. It won’t be large enough to have them all laid out in one layer if I put them all up, but I’ve started with a section of my WordPress drafts and a plan to add more once a month if needed.

Interestingly I’ve found that since I set up my board, I’ve had a number of times in a morning when I’ve just had ideas sparking and been able to add another handful of notes. The post-its sit here on my standing desk with my computer and the board is just nearby so I can easily add things as I get an idea.

So far this is working fantastically so I wanted to share in case it might be something that would work for you too.

Your Turn

Share how you collect your ideas and keep them organised. I’d love to hear!