141 Five Checklists For Increasing Your Blogging Productivity and Save Time

In today's podcast episode, I'm going to be talking about how to use checklists to increase your blogging productivity and save time.

Listen to This Episode

We're not just going to talk about how. I'm actually going to give you some checklists. There are SOOO many tasks that you need to get done if you're building a business with a blog – daily tasks, weekly tasks, monthly tasks.

It's really all about systematizing your business so that you are as productive as possible.

One of the ways to make sure you get those things done and don't end up the way I ended up yesterday (more on that later) is to have checklists, so that's what we're gonna talk about today!

Inside This Episode

Yesterday I was recording an interview and in the middle of the interview I realized that my SD card had run out of space. I needed to quickly delete some files so that I could continue with the interview.

Well, I did just that, and ended up deleting the file for the episode that was supposed to be posted today. If I had a checklist, this would NOT have happened. So, I've created some first drafts of checklists and I'm sharing that with you. Feel free to use them, or modify them to suit your needs (better).

Here they are:

Recording Podcasts

• Figure out Episode Number
• Setup laptop and iPad
• Check SD card Space to make sure there's enough space
• Check volume levels
• Record Podcast
• Transfer to Laptop in Appropriate folder with episode number as name
• Convert to MP3 using iTunes
• Tag my MP3 using ID3 Editor
• Upload my MP3 to Libsyn
• Add episode to be transcribed by V.A. in Basecamp
• Write my Show Notes and add them to WordPress
• Double check for spelling/grammatical errors
• Write email to send to my list
• Schedule podcast episode to be posted

Structure of my articles

• Descriptive, attention-grabbing headline
• Attention-grabbing Lead in paragraph (Question, story, etc)
• Detailed how-to
• Includes relevant images
• Short conclusion
• Add closing call-to-action
• Create Pinnable image using pinterest
• Add excerpt
• Double check for spelling/grammatical errors

After Posting Checklist

• Create pretty link for the post
• Like post and share on social media
• If interview, contact interviewee and let them know it's live
• If a podcast episode, send out email
• Respond to comments
• Thank people who retweeted post

Daily Social Media Checklist

• Curate content using Feedly
• Find interesting quotes relevant to your content
• Schedule interesting content to go out via the Buffer App
• Engage with your community, especially when they interact with you
• Engage with people you follow based on what they post
• Post X number of times on Social Media

Daily Miscellaneous

• Update Dashboard with Stats and Numbers from the previous day
• Check and respond to all email (inbox zero)
• Create Content
• Reply to Comments

Weekly Checklist

• Review Analytics from the Previous week
• Review Dashboard for Previous week
• Compare numbers to previous week
• Plan content and strategy for upcoming week

Hope you got tons of value from these checklists.

Transcript

Some people just love being able to read along with interviews, or they might just prefer to skip the audio completely and just read through the transcript. Hey, if that’s what floats your boat, it is all good. Here’s the transcript just for you 

Click here to download transcript.

Resources for this episode

• Boss Jock – an app I use to play recorded audio.
• Libsyn – where all of my MP3 files from my podcast episodes are stored.
• Basecamp – a tool I use to manage my team.
• Pic Monkey –  an image editing tool I use to create pinnable images for Pinterest.
• Pretty Link – a plugin I use to shorten my URLs.
• Feedly – a tool I use to curate content.
• Buffer App – a program I use to schedule Social Media posts to get published at different times of the day.

About The Podcast

Learning With Leslie is a podcast dedicated to helping you build a business around a blog. No, not one of those blogs that will fall by the wayside when Google has a mood swing, but one that will thrive no matter what gets thrown at it.

I share tips and strategies that I’ve learnt building blogs since 2008 and interview experts who are knowledgable about various aspects of blogging so that we can learn from their experiences.

If you’re a blogger, thinking about becoming a blogger (pun intended) or are not even sure if blogging is right for you, go ahead and tune in to see what this blogging thing is all about.

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