Birth of a blog post

Okay, I admit it. I‘ve written a blog post on this specific topic before, all the way back in 2015. But that’s now what, eight years? A lot of things have changed since then. I’ve changed jobs twice, had seismic changes in my personal circumstances and lived through a pandemic! What’s more, my work method has changed massively since then, so I guess it’s high time to let you in on how I actually map out and write my blog posts. Besides, it’s an easy way to recycle an already existing idea!

However, before we get to the meat and bones of this post, I do need to point out a few rather important caveats. For starters, this doesn’t apply to an spur-of-the-moment posts, mostly opinion pieces, that I put out. These tend to go straight from brain into the draft and then onto my blog. I also won’t be able to with regards to style. Blogs are a highly personalised medium, meaning that any advice I could give would be so generic as to be almost useless. Finally, this post should not be taken as a step-by-step guide to writing a post. There is nothing liner about the process and you may very well find yourself working on two or more things in parallel, or having to backtrack on your own earlier work. But then again, that’s part of the fun, the fact that the whole process is ever so slightly unpredictable. 

Every blog post starts out as an idea and I’ve found that it’s important to capture these ideas as soon as possible. As someone once said, your brain is great for having ideas, not keeping them. The method is pretty irrelevant. Whether it’s the4 default note-taking app on your phone, an app like OneNote, an old-fashioned paper notebook, or a hybrid solution like the Rocketbook I tested a while back. The important part is that you get your ideas documented so you can continue working on them later. And to be fair, I’ve used all of those in my blogging ventures, though I find myself somehow always gravitating back to either Apple Notes or OneNote. Keep in mind though that the tools aren’t the crucial bit here. What’s important is the ideas that are captured in them.

Whether it's on paper or electronically, a place to quickly write down your ideas is crucial when blogging.

It takes more than a mere idea to make a blog post though. Unless I’m writing a pure opinion piece, there will likely be a certain level of research involved. Whether that’s looking up the tech specs for whatever gadget being reviewed, linking to a news story that’s being commented on, or just double-checking the history of a particularly interesting landmark spotted on a recent trip, all of this will likely result in links or screenshots that need to be saved. I’m not going to lie here, I find this to be the most tedious part of any blog post, but it’s crucial to be thorough here, to not rush anything and most importantly, to use multiple sources whenever possible!

Once I’ve gathered all the information, my next stop is trying to bring a semblance of order into that chaos. For me personally, that means Notion, which is my primary tool for outlining any future blog posts and consolidating my resources, as well as any to-dos I still need to get done. I personally find it helpful to write out a short paragraph with a rough idea of the article first, before then diving into a more detailed outline. This is usually where it all comes together as the outline forces me to structure my thoughts into a certain sequence in order to remain coherent and internally consistent. This does take some time so once again, I try not to rush this, as frustrating as it might sometimes be. Given the amount of structure that this phase of writing requires for me, I tend to use a custom-built Notion template that helps me work out the structure of my post, as well as providing dedicated space for resources and links as well as a to-do list. Whilst I find that this works really well for me, there are other options, and I’ve used one of them, OneNote, for a couple of years before getting started with Notion back in September 2021.

Spotify, Notion and coffee (or tea in this case). Time to get my thoughts into a structured outline.

Okay, everything is in place: 

Resources – Check! 

Outline – Set! 

Music – Enabled! 

Coffee – Check! 

Social Life – Inoperable! 

Well, err, anyway, with the preliminary work and preparations sorted, a nice cup of coffee on my desk being kept nice and warm by my Ember Mug, stay tuned for more on that, it’s time to start writing, the part I usually like the most. After all, writing is one of the reasons I started my blogs over a decade ago. For me, writing usually means opening up a new Word file and working there, with the document being saved in OneDrive, though there are of course numerous other options available, both paid and free to use. I tend to not be too fussed about multiple drafts, given the pre-work I’ve already spent on outlining my post, so my first draft tends to also be my final draft. Any changes can easily be made in-document or in the blogger.com backend, once I’ve copied everything over there. Why don’t I work directly in the backend? Redundancy and offline availability. Beyond the technical aspects, this is just a matter of sitting down and clacking’ the keys, although I’ve had more than one situation where I had to type out  post over two or more days. Real life does have a way of getting in the way, you know?

It is usually at this time that I start preparing the images I want to use for my post. Depending on what I’m working on, I may have taken those pictures while preparing my notes & resources, or I may have taken them even earlier with a future blog post in mind. And of course, I might just dive into my personal archives. With over ten years of blogging under my belt, there are a lot of “stock” photos I can reach for. While I generally try to use my Canon EOS M50 when I’m out on a deliberate hunt for photos, or on a trip somewhere, there’s no reason to go out and buy a massively expensive camera, as even older or mid-range smartphones sport pretty decent cameras these days, so I generally use images from both in my blog posts.  In many cases, getting these images ready for publication is just a matter of a slight touch-up in Lightroom, followed by watermarking them. The cover image takes a bit more work in Photoshop, but here as well, I have a template that I just adapt to my needs, which cuts down massively on time. I used to do this with a free web app called Canva but I’ve found Adobe’s Creative Suite to work much better for me.

This is the fun part for me, turning my thoughts into a coherent article.

With the images and text sorted, it’s time to bring it all together into a blog post, which happens in the Blogger.com back-end. It is only now that I actually hit the “New Pot” button in blogger.com. It’s now just a matter of copying over the prepared text from Word, although I make sure to only copy over the text and not any formatting, in order to make sure that the font matches the general theme of my blog. Only once that is done do I start adding pictures, captions and links to my blog, with links generally being the final thing for the text. After that, It's just a matter of setting the proper tags and setting the time & date for publication and that’s basically it. Only one thing left to do now.

But if you thought that at this point, all that was left to do was to hit the “Publish” button, you were sadly mistaken. Well, not exactly sadly, but you get what I mean. I do try to stick to a certain publication schedule, generally trying to publish a new blog post every Wednesday at 9.30 AM Irish Time, with “try” obviously being the key word there. My questionable track record with sticking to that schedule aside, this method of working does help me balance out times of high output, where I’d finish three or four posts within just a day or two, with quieter periods.

Finally, there’s the whole promotion aspect. Writing a post is one thing, but I also want that post to be read, which means promoting both the post and my blog in general. To be honest, I don’t really like that type of promotional activity but the times when simply publishing a blog post was enough have long since passed. I do have a dedicated blogging site over on Facebook and on Twitter which I use to get the word out. At the time of writing this, I haven’t tried mastodon yet, but with two posts scheduled for publication before this one, I should have some preliminary experience pretty soon.

And that’s it. That’s how a blog post goes from idea to finished & published. Now, it should go without saying that this is the process that works for me personally, but it is by no means some sort of fool-proof method or universal truth. You might have a completely different process, or you might just go straight into the backend and start writing there. That’s the beauty of blogging, there’s space for everyone.