How to Maximize Your Blogging Productivity Workflow

Today’s post is for bloggers.

Or those wanting to be blogging…. but saying that they “don’t have enough time.”

Today, I share my workflow to help you maximize your own  blogging productivity.

The workflow is really quite simple…

Capture Idea -> Write Post in Markdown -> Paste into WordPress -> Publish.

Let’s take a deeper look.

Finding Time to Blog

I have been blogging for almost four years now on TMN.

My blogging productivity has gone from beating my head against the wall and spending 4 hours making a single blog post… to now being able to take an idea to concept to blog post in 30–60 minutes. (Depending on length and topic…)

With the hard lessons I have learned along the way, I could write an entire course on “how to blog.”

Today, I want to share my workflow from idea to blog post.

Hopefully, it will help you to be more productive in your blogging efforts.

The above diagram shows the streamlined process which I’ll walk through step-by-step.

Capturing Blog Post Ideas: Drafts

Most people starting out as bloggers ask, “How do I come up with topics to write about?”

All blog posts start as ideas. Many of them are fleeting or simple passing thoughts. The trick is to immediately capture those ideas when you have them.

When I encounter an idea for a post, I stop whatever I am doing and take about 10 seconds to record it.

I do this on my iPhone via a great app called Drafts. (Check it out here.)

Drafts is nothing more than a quick notepad app that displays a new blank page each time your open it. It resides in the home tray on my iPhone and I can document a post idea in seconds.

I collect hundreds of ideas. Not all of them become blog posts. Some may become tweets, or newsletter concepts.

Drafts is the place to capture your ideas, and it then allows you to send them to whatever app you desire. Evernote. Dropbox. Or, in my case to… Byword.

Writing the Blog Post: Byword

Before we get into writing, I should discuss that where you write is an important decision.

I wrote straight into WordPress for a long while. Probably the first several years that I blogged.

Many bloggers eventually switch to other writing methods to prevent lost work due to a bad browser connection or refresh. If you have ever lost hours of writing a post, you know what I am referring to.

I eventually switched to a simple text editor for:

• Reliability – No lost work due to a bad Internet connection.
• Portability – My work is accessible across platforms in simple text format.
• Simplicity and Speed – Fewer distractions means more writing. Simple text editors eliminate the noise, so you can just write.
• Ease of Formatting – I hate tussling with HTML and WP formatting. Now, I write in Markdown and all my formatting is ready for the web.

Back to our workflow… Drafts exports my ideas to Byword.

Byword is a simple text editor. (See it here.)

It lets you concentrate on one thing… writing. The words flow. The distractions fade to the background. Formatting becomes an afterthought.

Byword keeps my posts in the cloud (via iCloud). I can start writing on my iPad and then continue at home on my iMac without missing a beat.

If you have not used a simple text editor before, you may be thinking that there is going to be a lot of extra formatting to be done after transferring the post to WordPress.

However, that is where Markdown comes in.

Markdown is a simple text-based way to delineate formatting. It is simple, quick, and becomes second nature once you have practiced it. For me, it is akin to a writing programming language.

When you write in Markdown, you can immediately export to HTML… paste into WordPress… and like magic you are done… formatting and all.

If you are looking to get started with Markdown, I highly recommend David Sparky’s new book Markdown available here.

The post is now ready to go to WordPress, but first I need an image to go along with it.

Finding a Picture: Bigstock Photo

I am a big fan of images to accompany a story. If you are a regular reader of TMN, you are aware of this. A picture can bring a story to life and capture a reader’s interest.

There are many great services out there. I use Bigstock photos for its price, convenience, quality, and interface.

Bigstock has a great library of pictures and I love their service. (Check out Bigstock Photos here.)

There are other photo service options, and you can always go the Creative Commons License route (free), if you are on a budget. A great WordPress Plugin for that is called PhotoDropper which will drop free photos right into your blog.

Once I find just the right image for a post, I download and perform two functions on it:

1. Resize – I use Skitch to resize my photo to the appropriate size for my site, and then save it at a smaller resolution for the web to minimize the file size. (I made the mistake early on of having photos that were too large and slowed down my site loading.)
2. Optimize File Size – I use an app called ImageOptim to further compress the image file. It is a great free app and it will save an addition 15–20% of file size.

Now, the image is ready to go… along with our written blog post.

Ready to Publish: WordPress

By the time I get to WordPress, 90% of the work is already done.

My post is written, and thanks to Markdown, it is already formatted for the web.

Getting my post ready to publish is a simple as:

1. Upload the Image – Done via the WordPress media uploader.
2. Paste the HTML Post – Simple copy and paste of the HTML text to the “Text” box of the post editor.

After adding a few WordPress settings, I can schedule or immediately publish my new blog post.

Be More Productive in Your Blogging

The above represents the workflow that I have honed over the past four years.

If you are a blogger or an aspiring blogger, I hope this detailed view will help you accelerate your blogging productivity.

While it may appear complex, it represents some of the easiest and most efficient ways to compile your blog posts.

Best wishes with your blogging productivity!

Question: What is your blogging workflow? What are your best tips to maximize your blogging productivity?