How to get organized as a beginner blogger
Introduction
Starting an online business is like taking 20 different jobs, especially if you are a solopreneur and do everything on your own.
You will need to complete many tasks on a regular basis to keep your blog or website up and running, and being organized will help you be much more productive with your time.
Staying organized as an online business owner is hard. However, following a few tips and using the right resources will help you optimize your schedule and keep everything under control.
In this blog article, I am sharing the exact steps and resources I use to organize my 2 online businesses for you to steal my strategies.
Want to know how to get organized as a beginner blogger? Let’s get started!
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Why should you take time to get organized as a beginner blogger?
As a beginner blogger, you probably want to launch your website and start writing blog posts right away. You’re all fired up and want to get it done asap so you can start making money fast.
I get it. Been there, done that.
This is exactly what I did with my first website, and I quickly realized that getting organized later on is way harder than doing it from the start.
If you wait until you make your first bucks online to organize your business, you will waste a lot of time trying to implement systems and sorting files and receipts.
Getting organized from day 1 will save you a ton of time and stress in the future.
Ready? Let’s dive in!
Organize your laptop
As an online business owner, your laptop is your most valuable asset.
Keeping it safe and organized is key to organizing your entire business. Start with creating folders with a clear intent to organize every aspect of your small business.
Consider creating the following folders:
- Organizers: We will discuss the organizers you should create for your business in a minute but gathering them in one place will be important to keep all your information and documents at hand.
- Website set-up: Keep a copy of your theme and the fonts used on your website, site pics, logo, and favicon on your laptop in case you need them in the future.
- Free resources: Storing the final versions of your opt-ins on your laptop can be useful if a subscriber complains about not being able to download them. Should it be the case, you will be able to email them after confirming the user’s subscription to your newsletter. Saving your mock-ups as well as a jpeg of the different pages included in your free resources will also save you time when creating promotional content.
- Paid resources: Just like for free resources storing a copy of the last versions of your paid products, mock-ups, and jpeg files of the different pages will help you keep them at hand should you create new promotional content.
- Affiliate marketing: Gathering all affiliate programs you joined or are planning to join in one place will help you have a clear overview of your affiliate marketing strategy.
- 3rd party paid products: Keep all digital products you purchase for business purposes at hand so you can read them again if needed.
- Pinterest: If you plan to use Pinterest to promote your business and products, you will have to create a lot of visual content. Create one folder to store your board covers, pin templates, a copy of all your posted pins, and new pins to schedule. You should do the same for every social media platform you plan to use.
- Posts: Keep a copy of every blog post you publish in a Word file or Google Docs, you know… just in case.
- Budget: Gathering all your financial data (income/expenses, bank account statements, etc.) in one place will make your life much easier when tax season comes.
Create an automatic backup on the cloud
As a small business owner, losing your laptop and its content can have disastrous consequences on your business operations.
Schedule automatic backups on the cloud to ensure you don’t lose important files if your laptop is stolen, damaged, or lost.
Cloud-based platforms such as Google Drive or OneDrive offer a lot of storage space at cheap prices.
Schedule a weekly automatic backup of your laptop’s content and keep an additional copy of important files on an external hard drive.
Doing so will save you a lot of trouble in case of data loss.
List your Blog posts
Another simple thing that can save you a lot of time when it comes to creating promotional content is to list all your blog posts on one Google Sheet or Excel file.
Create one table and include the blog post title, the URL, the targeted keyword or key phrase, the category, the date of publication, and the date of the last update.
Updating your content at least once a year is important for Google SEO. Keeping track of your last changes will help you identify old posts that need to be refreshed.
Do keyword research
Keyword research should be at the core of your strategy to drive traffic to your website or blog.
It is particularly important if you use Pinterest to promote your content or want to focus on Google to get leads.
Create one tab gathering all the keywords you want to target on Pinterest and another one with the keywords/keyphrases your blog posts target on Google search results.
If you need help finding keywords for Pinterest, I’ve recently published a blog post about how to use Pinterest to promote an online Business. It includes a section about keyword research that might be helpful to you.
For each keyword you target in Google search results, write down the keyword, its search volume, difficulty, the domain authority (DA) of the 3 first search results on Google and the lowest DA on page 1.
This information will help you with the next step on this list.
Create an editorial calendar
Although blogging includes a vast range of activities, most bloggers struggle with one of them: writing content.
Creating quality content is key to growing your audience and becoming a reference in your niche.
Truth is you won’t make any money blogging if you don’t provide your audience solutions to problems they encounter.
But before providing them with a solution, you need to raise awareness of the problem itself. And the easiest way to do so is by writing informative blog posts.
Writing killer blog posts is a mandatory step when it comes to making money with a blog.
Although writing quality content is hard, having an editorial calendar will make this process much easier.
To create your calendar, take the tab including the results of your keyword research, and come up with a blog post title for each keyword.
You should target one keyword per blog post. For each of these articles, set a deadline. Setting a clear publication date for each of your blog posts will keep you accountable.
This calendar will help you define your business strategy and plan your blog posts around your product launches.
Organize your social media channels
Another important part of your business to organize is your social media strategy.
Content creation for social media, especially when you post on several platforms, can be very time-consuming. Staying organized will help you save a ton of time and streamline your process.
To do so, create templates so all your posts across platforms are aligned with your branding and plan all your future posts.
Having a social media schedule will help you be consistent in your social media campaigns.
Social media can be a powerful resource to help small business owners promote their businesses. However, you should aim to optimize your strategy so it does not take you too much time.
This is especially true at the very beginning of your blogging journey when you should be creating content and working on your products.
Automate your social media presence
A simple way to save a lot of time on your social media strategy is to automate it as much as possible using 3rd party tools such as Tailwind.
Small business owners have so much to do that saving just a few hours a week can make a huge difference in their schedules.
Tools like Tailwind will help you schedule your posts on Pinterest and Instagram. I post over 500 pins on Pinterest every month.
Thanks to Canva and Tailwind, creating and scheduling them takes me less than a couple of hours per week.
These 2 tools combined will help you ensure you post content daily, save time on your Pinterest strategy, and create systems to automate your social media presence.
Set goals
If you just launched your blog, chances are that you still work a 9-5 and don’t make any money blogging yet.
Staying motivated will be hard, especially when you have to work on your blog or online business after long days at work.
This is the reason why you need to set blogging goals. Doing so will give you a clear direction and help you stay motivated.
Think about what you would like to achieve in the upcoming year, set yearly goals, and break them down into quarterly goals.
Once your quarterly goals are defined, you will be able to break them down into monthly goals. Breaking your yearly goals into bite-sized chunks will make them seem much more achievable.
Having clear goals in mind will help you focus on your business growth and keep going even when you’re not seeing results yet.
Track progress
Making money with your blog will take time. It’s not an overnight process, and your success will be the result of months, if not years, of trial and error.
To ensure you make money blogging, you will need to track your progress, see what works best in your niche, and adapt your strategy accordingly.
To do so, you should track the following stats:
- Visitors
- Pageviews
- Outbound rate
- Average session duration
- Email subscribers
- Emails sent
- Open rate
- Click rate
There are, of course, other metrics you can track depending on the social media platforms you use to promote your business.
Doing so will help you ensure you reach your business objectives and ensure the strategies you implement pay off.
Create a to-do list
If you want to become an organized blogger, creating to-do lists should be at the core of your strategy.
Writing to-do lists is key to avoiding missed deadlines and keeping everything under control.
Furthermore, if you’re anything like me, crossing items off your list will give you a great sense of achievement which will be highly motivating.
To create to-do lists, you can either use an app like To Do List Schedule and Planner, a paper planner, or a Google Sheets organizer.
All that matters is that you find the system that works best for you so you can stick to it on a daily basis.
List affiliate programs
Your affiliate marketing strategy is another aspect of your online business you need to keep organized.
Create a Google sheet file to list all the affiliate programs you joined, your user IDs, passwords, and main affiliate links.
This will give you an overview of your affiliate programs and will help you save time when writing new content. The idea is to gather all your main affiliate links in one place so you do not need to connect to different platforms to find your affiliate links to be added to your new content.
Keeping an eye on your affiliate programs will also help you come up with content ideas to boost your affiliate income.
Create a budget
Making money blogging is not an overnight process. So a lot of beginner bloggers do not take the time to create an actual budget for their online business.
Although you will not make money right away, you will need to spend money to do things right.
Keeping track of these expenses and revenues later on, is key to keeping your finances organized.
Keeping your small business organized will not only ensure you do not lose track of your expenses but will also help you get ready for tax season.
Take a few minutes every week to review your income and expenses and log them in an Excel or Google Sheets file.
You will be glad you did in a few months!
Schedule automatic backups of your website
Did you know that your website can literally break after every plugin update or WordPress update?
Being able to roll back to a restoration point will guarantee that your site can be completely restored after a crash.
A website backup will be very useful if you delete or change an important element of your website by mistake or if your website gets infected or hacked.
Total UpKeep is a free WordPress plugin that will allow you to schedule automatic backups of your website in just a couple of clicks.
After each plugin, theme, or WordPress update, Total UpKeep will ask you to take a few seconds to test your website and confirm everything still works.
Should you notice that something is no longer working correctly, you will be able to roll back to your last backup in just one click!
Use a digital planner to schedule repetitive tasks
To keep your online business organized, you will have to complete some administrative tasks on a regular basis.
You will, for instance, have to:
- Track your expenses and income at least once a month
- Reply to your emails daily or a few times per week
- Publish new content
- Create social media campaigns
- Work on new products
Creating a blog schedule will help you ensure you make time for all these activities and don’t spread yourself too thin.
The easiest way to create your schedule is to use a digital planner so you can create occurrences of these repetitive events.
If you don’t know what tools to use, Google Calendar is a great place to start. You will be able to access your calendar on the go on all your devices, which will help you stay productive throughout the day to make the most out of your time.
When it comes to business organization, there is no need to spend money on pricey apps or software. Free tools will help you get the job done. You just need to find what works best for you!
Schedule one day per month for administrative tasks
A simple way to keep your online business organized is to block one day every month to focus on administrative tasks like:
- Tracking your income and expenses
- Checking your analytics
- Running a blog audit to identify broken links and potential issues
- Look for backlinks opportunities
- Look for new keywords to target
Doing these time-consuming and boring tasks in one sitting without postponing them will help you get them done.
Organizing your business from the beginning is key to not losing track of things and being able to make time to focus on creating your content and products.
If you want to thrive, you will have to organize your business from day 1 and make time for these administrative tasks. Although these activities do not create immediate value for your business, they are necessary to stay organized and be able to scale your business later.
Use Boosted to log your time
Once your online business starts growing, you will have to define your priorities and consider outsourcing some activities to a virtual assistant.
Small business owners are generally reluctant to spend money and hire people. However, doing so might be necessary to scale your online business because there is only so much you can do with your time.
Before you get there, you will need to have a clear idea of what tasks can be outsourced and how much work they actually represent.
And this is where apps, like Boosted – Time and Productivity, come in handy.
Boosted is a time management app that will help you log the time you spend on specific projects.
This free app is super user-friendly and allows you to create as many projects as you want and color-code them.
As soon as you start working on a project, click on it, and the app will start recording. You will then get an overview of the time spent on an activity which will give you key information to plan your time better.
Using a time management app will also help with strategic decisions, especially if you need to outsource tasks to a virtual assistant or hire a freelancer.
Stay organized on the go
With so many hats to wear, you have to find a way to balance all blogging tasks efficiently and effectively.
Making the most out of your time will considerably help you stay organized and get things done so tasks don’t pile up.
To improve your time management skills, staying organized on the go is key. There are a lot of activities you can complete throughout the day because minutes here and there quickly add up!
Downloading mobile apps will help you stay productive on the go.
You can, for instance:
- Check and reply to emails during the day
- Answer to customer questions
- Reply to comments on your blog and social media platforms
- Engage with clients
Good project management software can also help you organize your ideas and take quick notes on the go.
Don’t know where to start? Trello, Notion, and Monday are great free apps you can try to get started!
Final thoughts
Business owners have to wear many hats, especially when they do everything by themselves.
To make the most out of your time and balance tasks effectively, implementing an organizational system is key.
There is nothing more frustrating than paperwork getting lost, tasks piling up, and wasting time looking for information that should be readily available.
Understanding how to organize your online business will increase your productivity, help you make time to scale your business, and ramp up your revenue.
Successful entrepreneurs keep their businesses organized. If you want to reach success, keeping everything under control is key to being able to focus your energy on activities that will grow your business.
Taking a few hours every month to complete administrative tasks and ensure everything stays under your control will help you reach long-term success.