If you own or contribute to a busy blog you may find it difficult to organize your blog writing process. Writing high quality posts or articles often requires a great deal of research and organization. There are usually images to incorporate into your article. If you quote sources in your articles, you need a way to keep track of them. You need a way to keep as much of your research as possible in one place.
Organize your blog writing process
The easiest way I’ve found to keep my writing organized is with Scrivener, a very affordable piece of software promoted and used primarily by authors of fiction or non-fiction books. I first “met” Scrivener several years ago when I bought it to help me with my fiction writing, but have since found that it is extremely useful for far more than book manuscripts.
To some users, Scrivener seems overwhelming because of the incredible number of features it has. But it does not have to be complicated to use. In fact, for most bloggers or freelance writers Scrivener can be a simple way to organize your writing.
Scrivener is basically set up as a system of folders. Inside those folders are the text files containing your actual writing. The folders can contain other folders and text files. That, for me, is the primary feature that makes organizing any type of writing easy.
Scrivener can be a simple way to organize your writing.
Let’s say you have a blog about bees. You might want to plan a series of articles in advance. One month you publish an article each week about a different bee species. The next month you plan to publish weekly articles about threats to the bee population. Then, the third month you publish an article each week about the art of beekeeping.
If I had that schedule ahead of me, I would start by creating a folder for species, a second for threats, and a third for beekeeping. Within each of those folders I would open a new text document and write my article.
If you were writing a very long piece of pillar content, you could have a folder for the entire article, then subfolders within it for each section of the article. Within each sub-folder would be a text file containing the writing for that section.
The versatility of Scrivener
The beauty of Scrivener is that it is so incredibly versatile in how you set it up. The scenario I just wrote about is just a tiny example of ways you could manipulate your work to suit your working style. If you are a person who finds it easier to use a card system, similar to 3 X 5 cards to organize your thoughts, you can also view your work in the corkboard mode. In either view – corkboard or file view – you can very easily rearrange your work by clicking and dragging files and folders (or cards in the cork-view mode).
Scrivener will allow you to collect your research within each project. If there is a website page that you frequently visit to gather information, you can very easily embed it in the research folder. You can then view the webpage inside Scrivener whenever you need to. You can collect images and practically any other type of research material. You can color-code your work in different ways.
This is just the tip of the iceberg with Scrivener. But using the basics I’ve described here can make your writing life much easier to organize.
I use Scrivener for my blogging. In fact, I wrote this article in Scrivener for Mac. Scrivener is also available for Windows and iOS. You can find out more about Scrivener here.
