How Mom Makes Money Online
Web Writing
Organizing Your Workload

Quick Links: Writing for the Web

Running an online site or blog is much like anything else, the more organized you keep yourself the more efficient you will be at getting your workload done. Here are five steps that will help you get your blog or website organized and keep it that way:

1.) Set up a favorites folder or tool bar with links to your blog, your admin or control pages, important pages on your blog and other blogs or social network sites you read and use. Everywhere you need to go on the internet to research for your site and all the sites you use to promote your blog should be one click away from where you are at all times.

2.) Create a work-in-progress folder for working blog post ideas, to-do lists and images. I'm an ideas person - to the point that I could have hundreds of them milling around on my computer(or my brain) with nowhere to go. Keeping this folder helps me sift them out into usable blog posts or website articles and know which ones I have available to me. Here is an example of how I use this folder:

1. I read an article about how much work a blog or website is - and idea strikes!
2. I open a Word file and type Organizing Your Site or Blog's Workload.
3. I free write some thoughts and then save.
4. I open my to-do list file and under the site HowMomMakesMoneyOnline.com section I type something like 'finish Organizing Your Blogging Workload article and post'.

Then when I am ready to write something up, I look at that section of my to-do list and pick an idea to finish. There is always more than one there, sometimes it's just a file with a title, but it's still an idea that didn't get lost because I kept it organized.

3.) Develop a routine that you will accomplish with every blog post or article because just posting a blog post and writing articles is not all we do. In order to get the best bang for your buck, you'll need to post to your article and then promote each time you do. This is best done if you establish a routine of where you go to promote. You could twitter it, comment on other blogs, post it to your MySpace or Facebook, ping it, submit it to the serach engines, add it to your sitemap, whatever. A routine becomes a habit and this habit will keep your workload very organized.

4.) Set up a time once a week to check stats of your traffic and advertising efforts. While you may be tempted to check these more regularly, if you do so you will be taking yourself away from the work that actually makes you your money. This is the time to reassess and make any changes to templates, plugins, widgets or advertising.

5.) Do a regular backup of your online site or blog. Saving yoru work in more than one place will keep you from a total melt down should one of thos places crash.

Following these five steps will help you keep your blogging workload under control, so you can focus on creating a successful blog.

Quick Links: Writing for the Web