Do you write a blog as a hobby but would love to turn it into a business? If so, it’s going to need a bit of planning. I started blogging about 4 years ago and really just thought of it as a hobby. I love writing and I enjoy sharing my life experiences with anyone who wants to read about it. But recently I’ve thought maybe I could turn The Geordie Grandma into a business and actually make some money from it. As a business venture I need to be a lot more organised about my blog, which got me thinking about planners for bloggers. A planner can really help you get organised and stop you treating any venture as an ad hoc type of thing. Which is key if you want to make money or make progress in anything you do.
My daughter bought me a Clever Fox Planner a few years ago, which I found really useful for organising my ebay business. So when I decided to treat my blog as a business I thought of Clever Fox immediately. Here’s why I feel it will work brilliantly as a planner for bloggers.
What is the Clever Fox Planner?
In a nutshell it’s a diary, planner and journal all in one, which makes it so easy to use. It has the following sections & features:
- Vision board pages
- Yearly goal pages
- 3-month goal sections
- Mind map pages
- Month to view pages
- Monthly review pages
- Week to view diary pages
- Priority sections
- Bullet journal pages
There are a few different versions of the planner. I have the Clever Fox Weekly Planner Premium Edition. It comes in 16 different colours, is hard-backed and has the little gold fox logo on the front. It also comes with a few pages of stickers, so if you’re into making your planner pages look colourful then you’ll love them.
Why I think it’s the best planner for bloggers
1. It’s undated
Unlike most other planners, the Clever Fox Planner has no dates on the monthly or weekly diary pages. You write them in yourself. This makes it ideal to buy at any time of the year as you won’t waste any months that have already gone by and you don’t have to wait until January to start planning your blog business. It’s also great for those weeks when you want to take a break or you’re going on holiday. I always feel those weeks are wasted in a dated planner as I usually just put a big cross through them with holiday written through it.
2. Creating your blog vision
Right at the beginning of the planner is a double page spread with the heading ‘My Vision Board’. Here you can map out your vision for your blog. Things such as:
- who your blog is aimed it
- how much money do you want to make from it
- why do you want to make money from it (holidays, more flexibility, retirement income)
- how are you going to make money from it
You can find out more about how to create a Vision Board here.
You can get your planner for bloggers really working for you right from the start if you fill these pages out. Knowing what you want the outcome of all your planning to look like makes it so much easier to set smaller goals that work towards the big vision.
3. Excellent for goal setting
A planner for bloggers (or any business really) needs to include a section where you can set yourself some goals. This 12 month planner has a double page for your yearly goals and then a page every 3 months for you to set smaller goals. By using these goal setting pages you can prevent overwhelm by breaking your work down into smaller parts. Have you ever heard that business term ‘set SMART goals’? It works for bloggers too.
- Be SPECIFIC.
- Make them MEASURABLE
- They need to be ACHIEVABLE
- Make them RELEVANT
- Put a TIME on them
So for example you might set a yearly blogging goal of ‘I want to have 1,000 page views per month by 31 December 20XX’. To reach this goal you need to write lots of blog posts with relevant keywords that will drive people to them. So you could then break this down for your 3 monthly goals into ‘I will have written 12 keyword targeted blog posts by XX’. You might find it helps if you write your goals as if you have already achieved them, apparently it puts you in the right frame of mind to achieve them. But don’t make your goals so hard that you can’t possibly achieve them!
5. Gives you diaries to plan your tasks
3-monthly and even monthly goals will still seem daunting. The monthly and weekly diary pages make it easy to break your goals down into even smaller manageable tasks. So taking the 3 months goal of writing 12 blog posts, you can use the monthly diary page to pencil in when you’re going to publish a new post and maybe what the post will be about. Once you have your monthly diary planned, you can break it down even further on your weekly diary pages. So you might have
- Monday – research post
- Tuesday – research keywords
- Wednesday – draft post
- Thursday – create images
- Friday – complete & publish post
Can you see how everything is slotting together to make this a really useful planner for bloggers?
4. Helps you review your goals
It’s all well and good setting fabulous goals but every now and then your need to stop and look at what you’ve actually achieved. The Monthly Review pages are my favourite and what I feel makes this the best planner for bloggers. You get a double page at the end of every month so you can take a hard look at how you’re progressing. The review pages give you a few headings so you can think about where you went right but also where you may have gone wrong. The headings include:
- What were the biggest wins?
- What were the biggest lessons learned/insights gained?
- Which life areas were lacking and why? (as we’re using this a planner for bloggers I would cross out the word ‘life’)
- What tasks were not accomplished and why?
- How do I feel about my progress?
- I am looking forward to …
- Things I will do to make myself happy next month (again you might want to change the wording to reflect your blogging business)
- How I’ll improve next month
These pages really make you think about your blogging business progress. You can take the lessons learned and improvements you want to make and put them into SMART goals for your next 3 month goal setting pages.
6. Keeps your ideas in the same place
In the back of the Clever Fox Planner there are several bullet journal type pages. Personally I’ve never quite got my head around using a bullet journal. But I find these pages really useful for jotting down any ideas for blog posts or notes for site improvements or lists of people I want to connect with. It means everything to do with my blog is in one handy A5 sized book that I can carry around in my bag. No more bits of paper with your ideas jotted down on for you to lose!
I’ve used a few different planners over the years for various jobs and life stuff but I can honestly say this Clever Fox Planner has been the most useful to me. If you’ve used this planner or any other planner let me know your thoughts in the comments below.