Ever since I got into blogging, I find myself with less and less time on my hands, and constantly searching for ways to make my blogging easier and a smoother process. To that end, I have a whole mess of systems I use to help me keep everything running as it should.
This is a rework of a Tumblr post I did a while ago because I wanted to make it easier to share some of my tips and tricks. Please note this post contains referral links, where I don’t get paid for you using these services but I will get credit of some sort if you sign up.
My house is possibly the least organized thing on the planet. I just sort of glare at everything and ignore the mess and the fact that I can’t find anything. However, I have a planner I’m addicted to in order to keep my life in order, and an online system that works with said planner to keep the blog in order.
In the planner I have pages for “Things to Do and Places to Go”, which are ideas for future adventure reports. There are also separate lists for Disney Date Ideas, Frugal Friday, Theme Park Spotlights, and other general article ideas. I also have calendars for each month with important events in Orlando and National ______ Holidays, like National Pretzel Day. There’s also a social media schedule but I’ll get to that in a minute.
Since I move around a lot and work on different computers all the time, all of my articles are stored on Dropbox. This means I can edit them from any computer, and they’re super easy to send to my team of proof readers. (When I say team, I mean whichever one of my friends is the least busy that week.) You can edit live in Microsoft Word through Dropbox, and it’s awesome.
Twenty Something in Orlando is run on Wordpress. It is my favorite blogging system and super easy to use. I actually talked my former employer in Tennessee into letting me switch them to Wordpress when I overhauled their website a few months ago. I think it looks pretty darn good!
Like a lot of bloggers, I use Trello to organize the articles once they’re written. Trello is an organizational site that lets you create Boards, and list items on the Boards called Cards. Cards can be assigned to a date and you can add checklists. Every article I write has three checklists they have to go through: Draft, Format, and Promotional. Disney Date Ideas only have one checklist, but it’s a combination of the three. It basically ensures I haven’t forgotten something for any given article and everything runs as it should, that way I never have an article that doesn’t have images or doesn’t get cross posted to social media the way it should. 
Speaking of social media, let’s talk about my favorite scheduling system! It’s called Later, and it was originally designed for Instagram but eventually was expanded to include Twitter, Facebook, and Pinterest. There are a lot of reasons it’s my favorite. It’s visual! It’s a drag and drop calendar, where most scheduling sites just give you a list. You can upload photos to Later and it stores them for you to use when you need to, so you can work on it whenever you find yourself with free time. Every post requires you to use an image, which can be annoying sometimes BUT it does have one key advantage, and this is why I LOVE Later. I can go ahead and do my social media scheduling for an article that doesn’t drop until next week now! Whenever I tried to use Hootsuite or Buffer, it couldn’t generate a link preview and it would just display an error message because when I tried to schedule it the link didn’t actually exist yet. Since Later posts an image, there is no link preview! So, I can go ahead and schedule away so when an article posts on Tuesday, I don’t have to touch it and it’ll get posted everywhere it needs to throughout the week! 
Later also has a built in crop device you can use, so all of your images are always the right size for whatever platform you’re using.
I also use Hootsuite and Buffer on occasion, I have both of their free plans for when I’m resharing already published articles and I don’t want to include an image. At the moment they’re mostly being used to reshare our Give Kids the World Fundraising Pages.
Since I’m not always posting about my latest trip to Disney, I tend to reshare old content more than I post new content. To make it easier, I use Airtable as a database of all my articles. Airtable is a website that lets you make what are basically Excel tables, with more control of how they’re displayed. It’s also easier to use if you’re someone like me who isn’t great with Excel! I have them grouped by category, and list the title, shortlink, full url, and description for each article. This way when I’m doing my social media scheduling, I can just copy and paste!
Since I’m using multiple social media scheduling systems, this is where my planner comes in handy. I write any and all article publication dates on the main calendar, and then all social media posts go on the social media pages. It’s a chart that shows you two weeks at a time, and has spaces to list Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, Instagram Stories, Tumblr and YouTube posts. Writing everything down can be a little time consuming, but it makes me feel on top of everything and means every social media platform should get at least one post a day. Well, except YouTube. If you’d like to download this planner, you can find it in the Library!
Admittedly for Tumblr I don’t do a ton of scheduling. I dump most everything in the queue and then just schedule specific posts, and lately I haven’t been even doing that as much as I should.
I use Adobe Photoshop for most of the site’s graphics. I use Illustrator for Spreadshirt designs, and InDesign to make printables for the Library. I do my video editing in Adobe Premier and use AfterEffects for effects and motion graphics. I make a lot of my social media images in Canva, especially when I need to make something in a hurry and don’t have time to do anything in Photoshop.
I use If This, Then That, to make Instagram posts go to Twitter as images instead of links, so that’s nifty and comes in handy. I also use it to make sure all my Instagram posts make it to Tumblr and Pinterest automatically.
I hope this was helpful! Duffy and I have only been at this a year and a half, and we’re finding new things all the time. We’d love to hear what resources you use!
