My Blogging Routine: Planning, Shooting, Editing & More…

I’ve found it hard in the past to balance blogging with university, but this year have becoming a lot more organised with both work and blogging and have even developed my own mini blogging routine. I think it’s quite natural, the longer you blog, to slowly begin taking it more and more seriously; equipment becomes more expensive, social media becomes more active, and the general presence, look and feel of your blog starts to grow organically to fit your style. Below I’ve whipped up a little blogging routine, showing how a thought in my mind comes to fruition on Skylish…

 

Planning

A typical aspect of my life in my first year of university was to constantly be at all different types of networking events at different firms. This means that over that year I developed a very big collection of free notebooks – from The Economist, to Deustche Bank to Goldman Sachs. My Economist notebook has officially become my blog planning book. Usally, when I get an idea for a new blog post, I jot it down in my notebook. At the beginning of each week I like to plan what posts I’m going to write and when I plan to get them up, this includes scheduling in any posts I have to write in collaboration with any companies I may be working with; often I try and give myself a deadline to finish these posts. Lastly, I jot down certain things I want to look at in regards to changing on my blog itself, for example, I recently added a selection of photos from my Instagram to my footer below, and also have added a feature that allow readers of posts to share these posts on social media – these had already previously be scribbled down in my notebook as things to look at implementing a while back.

 

Shooting

Fashion photos – I shoot most of my outfit photos with my friend Andre, he’s also a blogger, and conveniently goes to my uni. At least once a week we try to meet up and take photos on whatever back street to our university we can find. We shoot these photos on a Nikon D3100 camera with an 18-55mm lens. I’m really not the most camera-savvy person, but this is definitely a cost-effective DSLR suitable for beginners to the world of photography – photos can be easily spruced up depending on your lens choice.

Beauty photos – I shoot my beauty photos on a Fujifilm Finepix s1730 12.2MP camera that I purchased in 2014, it’s a ‘bridge’ camera, so sits in between your typical digital camera and a DSLR. It’s not the most amazing camera but does the job with good editing and some natural light; I will very, very soon purchase a DSLR for this use, I’m just in between getting a Nikon or a Canon camera at the moment!

 

Editing and Writing

I use PaintShop Pro 8 to edit all of my photos, and WordPress/Smart FTP/Notepad to code my website. Before I was a blogger, I was actually very into webdesign. I started out on PaintShop Pro 7 and for years now have maintained my use of PaintShop Pro 8. It is a fairly sophisticated program, and really is capable of providing everything I need. I upload all my photos onto Photobucket, and write up all of my posts using WordPress; I really love WordPress as it’s so versatile to use, very easy to understand, and comes with a whole host of plugins you can download to increase the usability of your blog – I’d definitely recommend it to all bloggers looking for a blogging platform.

 

Social Media and Promotion

Finally, after everything has been edited, written, tagged and uploaded – the promotional process begins! Social media is the most perfect platform to use to spread the word about what you’re doing. When uploading I always try and use the most relevant hashtags (a few of my favourites beings #fbloggers, #bbloggers, #fblchat, #bloggersoc), and I try not to ever excessively spam my timeline or feed with my promotions (although a reminder or even two never hurt anyone). I’m still fairly new to Instagram, and never knew how seriously people took it until I started coming across the most aesthetically pleasing feeds… I’ve been trying to do the same with my feed ever since. I try to stick to a theme/colour scheme by using the same combination of filters. It may sound a bit excessive, but I know there are tons of us bloggers/vloggers out there that do the same, as it all shapes the online presence of your blog. You can follow me on Twitter here and Instagram here!