I resisted the idea of a blogging calendar for a long time- I’m pretty sure it was due to laziness. Or maybe I just liked the thrill of getting up in the morning and NOT knowing what I was going to write about, and then spending an hour cudgeling my brain for a good topic.

Nope, it was definitely laziness.

My blogging calendar is my saving grace these days! I don’t always follow it religiously, but having it in place helps me stay on top of my blog to make sure I don’t do the “wake up and wonder what the heck I should write about” thing that I always used to do.

I start out a couple of days before a new month starts by filling in all of the pre-determined posts, like Monday Mash-Ups. Then I take a look at my Day Designer monthly calendar to determine when I have anniversary sessions and weddings, and then I schedule the posts for those events accordingly. Weddings are usually schedule to be blogged about 10 days after the date, and anniversaries take a little bit longer since I have to wait for my film scans to come back from the lab.

Then I start filling in the remaining days with educational, business, and personal posts! I swipe a little strip of highlighter or colored pencil at the bottom of each post to help me see an overall picture of how I’m spacing out personal, business, educational, and photo-related posts.

I always write in pencil, just in case I need to change something halfway through the month. And because sometimes, I wake up and something else is on my heart, so I share that instead. Have the calendar written out like this has been SO helpful! It’s made it so much easier to write a post a few days before, so that I’m not scrambling to come up with something the day of.

I’m a paper girl, y’all already know that, but this would be JUST as easy to do with a Google calendar- just color code the text of your days to keep track of the different categories! This calendar stay taped to the wall right next to my desk for easy reference, and whenever I’ve published a post, I go ahead and cross it off with a pencil. Anything NOT crossed off throughout the month means I either posted something else that day, or just didn’t post. And the ones that DON’T get posted are usually rolled over to the next month- i.e. I’ll be blogging about our Ikea frame wall later in March :).

The printable calendars are from The TomKat Studio, and I LOVE using these. The pop of color makes filling out my calendar just a little less of a chore!

I’d love to hear from y’all- what are you best practices for staying organized and on top of blogging? Sound off!