Keeping up with several blogs or sites can be a challenge. For some people, it’s difficult enough to manage one so what do you do when you have multiple blogs and websites to maintain and keep organized? First, you’re going to need to create a plan. When you only have one hobbyist blog, you can probably get away with haphazardly posting whenever the urge strikes you but when you have multiple blogs, you need a system to help you keep organized.
So before you succumb to chaos, here are some ideas to help you keep multiple blogs and sites organized.
Have a Content Strategy
Content strategy refers to the planning, development, and management of informational content—written or in other media. Forbes’ Michael Brenner gives us a bit more insight into what this really means:
“I define it as the mindset, culture and approach to delivering your customer’s information needs in all the places they are searching for it, across each stage of the buying process. It is a strategic approach to managing content as an asset, with a quantifiable ROI.”
Your content strategy is the why and the how of what you deliver. This applies to all content marketing but when we’re looking specifically at your blog, you need to determine and develop the purpose of your blog. Who is your audience? Why are you writing? What is your purpose? All of this is part of your content strategy.
Brainstorm for Ideas
When you manage a lot of blogs, you cannot afford to run out of ideas. You always want to have interesting, fresh content going out on your site. This is when it pays to know how to brainstorm for new ideas.
Some methods I use for creating new blog ideas are:
- Subscribe to Google Alerts in my topics
- Participate in communities and see what people are talking about
- Use Twitter hashtags to see what people are saying about my keywords
- Find problems to solve
- Use mind-mapping and charting
- Revisit your most popular posts
Scheduling Is Everything
When managing multiple blogs, scheduling is everything. Without scheduling, it will be very difficult to know when and where you need content. When you get busy, it’s easy to forget something important and it makes managing several sites a lot more stressful than it needs to be.
Here are some ways to schedule posts and remain organized:
- Create a posting schedule for each of your sites so you can easily keep up with when you need new content to go up.
- Determine how many days a week you want content to post on each site and organize what days those are. For example, you can schedule for posts to go up on Mondays and Wednesdays for a couple of your sites, Tuesdays and Thursdays for a couple more and then on Fridays, post for one or two more of your sites based on how many you have.
- Post date as often as you can. This isn’t always possible with breaking news but I try to stay at least 2 weeks ahead on my content so I don’t run out of posts.
Use Spreadsheets to Organize
As part of my editorial calendar and my plan to stay on track with my scheduling, I use spreadsheets to list all of my blogs, the topics, who is working on them (if I have other writers submitting), and when it will post. Then I make a note on the spreadsheet once it’s live and include the live link. If it’s secure, you can also add your passwords and logins to the spreadsheet so you don’t forget them.
All I have to do is open my spreadsheets and I have everything for my blogs in one easy place. This saves me time and ensures I don’t forget anything important.
Do you have any special techniques that help you manage the content that you would like to share?
