My Blogging Process

I've been blogging for 5 years now and in that time I've talked about how I take my blog photos and how I try to stay organised, try being the operative word. But I haven't shared how I blog as a whole. How a blog post starts at an idea and turns into an actual post. 

This of course involves many steps so I thought I'd share with you how I blog and if you're also a blogger I'd also love to know your own process as I know everyone has a different way of doing things! 

Putting pen to paper 

Around Thursday of each week I will sit down with my To-Do list notepad and write what I plan to blog about for the week ahead. I've tried to work farther ahead than this in the past but I simply can't do it; I'm just not organised enough. To decide what I will be blogging about I look in my notebook of blog post ideas for ideas, look at my photo notes for random blog post ideas I've wrote down during the week and of course I have a think about any products I want to mention. This will give me 4 or 5 blog posts for the week ahead which I write down on my to-do. 

Taking the photos

Thursday morning is generally when I take the photos for the blog posts. I spend 3-4 hours taking all the images. I first bring all the products down that I will be including and create piles of products on my dining room table, I will then select the first lots of products, style them on my photography background by my french doors and take the images. This takes time and backache as my background is on the floor and I stand above it, so once I'm finished I take a break with a drink, whilst I take the SD card out of my camera and transfer the images onto my desktop and into a folder that's titled with a rough description of what the images are about, for example - blogging process, months favs, beauty haul etc. I then place my SD card back into my camera and get on with taking the next set of photos, again taking 5-10 minute breaks in between each set until the images are all taken. 

Editing, editing, editing
Next onto photo editing. I like to edit the photos of two blog posts at a time so I don't get too bored. First I scroll through them deleting all the rubbish images until I have the ones I will be using in my blog post. I then quickly open them up in Windows Photo Gallery and increase the warmth slightly to remove that blue cast and retouch any areas that may have a stray dog hair! I then open each image individually in Photoscape. I've talked about Photoscape many times now as it's my favourite free photo editing program to use...just Google to download it! I then increase the brightness and sharpen the image. Next I create all the photo collages for the blog post in Photoscape, finally saving them with the correct name that will appear in Google image searches instead of a bunch of numbers. I then upload all the images I have edited to Flickr ready to be inserted into blog posts when needed. 

Getting down to the writing 

Generally on a Sunday evening I will sit down to write two blog posts for the upcoming week. I first grab the images I need from Flickr and place them in the correct order in an empty blog post. I then give the blog post a title, add the correct tags and schedule the blog post for the right date and time (this also stops me from clicking 'Publish' instead of 'Save' and it goes live there and then by mistake!). Next I write all the sub-headers for the post or the products and find the links for them all. I then finally get down to writing my post! This takes around 45 minutes with slight procrastination. Last but not least I proof read the post and hit 'Publish'! 

If I'm totally organised and on the ball I will also click on 'Permalink' and grab the link to the upcoming post and schedule a few tweets before publishing/scheduling it.

So there you have it! My blogging process. 

Hope this has been interesting for a few of you.

Fee xo.