Creating Your Blog's Blueprint

If you’re itching to start a blog, you must have a bank of ideas scribbled on your phone, notepad, word docs, mail drafts etc. It’s time to bring them all together in a systematic format. 

- Use an excel sheet to dump all the ideas

- I’d recommend Google Sheets, cause it’s all online and you can access it anywhere, on any device

If you want to see what the bloggers are writing about, you can see them individually at https://indianbloggers.org. This website is a “directory of top blogs in India and the most popular YouTubers”.  

This sheet will give structure to your ideas. Here are your next steps:

You can decide how frequently you want to post. If the topic needs to be current, then the frequency should be daily or multiple times in a day. For Miss Malini, she has to be connected 24/7 as she needs to be the first person reporting the story. 

But if your topic requires a lot of research, then quality should trump quantity. You can start by posting an article a week and slowly move on to an article a day. But it’s entirely up to you.

Blogging is a full time job, which means it warrants holidays too! So keep in mind your holiday time and create enough posts to fill that time. You can also choose to announce in your blog and social media that you’re off for sometime. Everybody needs a break, people will understand.

Once you know how often you want to post, you need to make the plan more elaborate. 

Here’s what Nicole Avery, a ProBlogger expert recommends. Create columns for:

Week – so you can keep track of how many weeks into the year we are

Date – so you know when to post!

Focus – if there is something going on at that particular time that you need to be aware of like school holidays, course launches etc

Post type – A mix of post types for the blog, some will be list style posts, some will be recipes, some will be long form, some will be about planning, some will be about parenting for example. This allows you to offer a mix of content across the week, months and year.

Topic/title – sometimes you will know the exact title for a post, other times you will know the topic like “goal setting for 2017” and the title will come after you have written it.

Here’s how it’ll look once you fill it up.

The first posts you can add to the plan are seasonal posts. 

Posts for:

New year

School holiday

Diwali 

Children’s Day etc

These holidays should be relevant to the theme of your blog, else your blog will be scattered. If you have these posts planned out, you can publish them at the right time – either before the event as a lead in or on the day of the event. This will make your posts relevant and timely for your readers and also hopefully relevant to the search engines!

If you post regularly on particular topics, schedule those in next. For example, if you want to write about one unique plant every week, put that down in your schedule. You might not know what plant you want to write about yet, but putting it down will guide you to writing about one every week. 

If you share personal stories on your blog, then factor in those events to the relevant dates. For example if you have holidays planned in July and November and you will write about them on your blog, schedule them in for August and December.

By the time you have reached this far, you will hopefully have a full content plan to start now! Slowly, you can create varied content buckets and keep filling them as time goes by. This will be a creative guide for you to use as a base to make the blog writing process as efficient and as easy as possible.

1. Scan through a large list of Bloggers and make a list of what they're writing about

2. Dump all your ideas in a sheet and narrow it down to 1 topic based on uniqueness, your interest and your audience's interest.

3. Make a detailed plan on the regular topics, plan for special days