Being successful as a blogger (that is, meeting your blogging goals) can mean many things. It could be to get more readers, subscribers, or comments. It could be to generate more indirect income like affiliate sales or freelance writing work. It could be that you’re looking to monetize your work directly. Whatever your goals, there is one common goal for all bloggers, and that’s what I want to focus on helping you get better at with this blog post:

Productive bloggers must update their blog content.

It doesn’t require you to be a rocket scientist, but I feel that every blogger could be a little bit more effective in their process of getting fresh content on their blogs.

First, focus on your blogging style.

If you keep a newsy blog or you blog when you’re button is pushed, you have a more immediate style and probably write and publish. I am not going to say that to be  a more productive blogger, you must start scheduling posts. Keep your spontaneity up…just create a blog post template that you can work with that has things like headings, subheadings, image codes, your routine openings and closings, and anything else you have in every blog post.  That way each post you pen and publish will get out there sooner.

Bloggers of a less timely and more scheduled content focus can benefit from having several blog post templates and a regular routine, and also a category storyline. Effective blogs have effective categorization, and that means that you regularly provide information on a variety of  topics. Mindmap, create a time line, make lists or outlines–however you find yourself best organizing what you’ve covered and what you will on each category. This will give you a reference point as you begin each blog posts and some continuity as you schedule them. A good idea for these bloggers is to use an editorial calendar if that doesn’t feel like too much organization. Do what works for you and spend as much time as possible getting content on the blog (not getting organized to do so).

Second, find the right environment.

Beyond the writing, the style, the mechanics, and the tools, you need to be blogging at the time and in the place that is most conducive to your blogging. If somewhere during 9 to 5 doesn’t cut it, don’t be afraid to blog at midnight. If you need absolute quiet, get up before your family or get away from them to somewhere where you can get blogging solitude. Find what works for you and make it happen.

Finally, ensure your most efficient writing process.

If you like to outline and then write, or jump right in, or write and then rewrite (or something else entirely), make it easy for you to write your blog posts that way. Find the best helpers and tools to organize your prep work and to backup your blog posts.

These are my tips for being a more productive blogger, but I just wanted to open the discussion. You blog: how do you practice being an effective blogger? What are your struggles? What are your strengths?

I’ll agree with the following rules Jenn has beat into our brains (lovingly) throughout this blog:

• a member of your target market should be able to pay your rates
• free work that will help your career should advance your exposure, expertise, and platform (if you must do it) and it shouldn’t be considered part of your billable hours but part of your marketing time

Now, what about those love projects? Jenn doesn’t pay a crappy sum to her bloggers, but I know that most everyone who writes for Jenn on All Freelance Writing charges others more, often much more for their time. It could easily be eliminated from the scam category with the above two rules. I love writing for Jenn, and I have no doubt in my mind that I’d be doing it no matter what the cost, so I’m not complaining. I’m just illustrating the fact that sometimes, we freelance for the love of the freelance writing work.

I recently took up a gig that I know I will spend a lot of time on that does not pay. I took the gig without hesitation because I knew it was something I was excited about working on. No pay. Lots of time. Lots of motivation beyond money.

Sometimes, you’ve got to fill up the fuel tank next to the money tank. I’m not saying depressions in your business should send you off to write on whatever whimsical fancies you possess. I am saying that you should pay attention to what keeps you going, and focus on it.

I’m making a lot of changes to my freelance business, now, in light of so many things changing for me. If it wasn’t for this latest gig, I wouldn’t have been able to pinpoint some things I need to change. Epiphanies and growth are way better than revenue, to me at least.

Do you freelance for motivation beyond money?

The point is that life changes, and sometimes you aren’t the glorious motivated person you once were. When your productivity is struggling because of emotional stress, try these things to keep going and to heal:

• slow down and take small steps, one at a time
• make critical lists of what actions must occur to help you prioritize and not get entangled with urgency daily obligations meddling with the “big deal” things to handle

• do less, when stressed, don’t guilt or overwhelm yourself

• simplify: create and implement your simplest, no-fuss system for making progress on daily tasks and bigger goals

• experience your emotions–yell out your anger and cry out your sadness—but remember not to attack people (tell them you need to vent)

• get support

This deployment isn’t something I can do completely alone. With my husband as my rock, I discuss everything I can with him and he can help with discussion making and consolation, but he’s got a mission, too, and that means I need a support system of friends and, if need be, professionals in counseling and depression.

How do you handle the emotional side of productivity? Tips, tricks, hints, questions…leave your comments below.

No matter what you call time management–energy management or some other replacement title–it is still fundamental. And, fundamentally, time management is managing your own energy to focus on productively meeting prioritized objectives.

I recently changed my work schedule a bit to accommodate the rushed feeling I was getting by doing all of my billable work at the end of my business day. I was doing all of my marketing with the first four hours and was really enjoying cranking out email queries to prospective clients, tweeting, blog commenting, and assorted marketing tasks I’d given myself from my marketing plan. But after I finished these tasks, I was lacking the air I needed to do my writing. I had become less effective in completing my client work, and I knew I had to change something. So I set my business hours and I flipped around my schedule. I share this with you to share that probably the most crucial time management advice for freelance writers is that you be aware of how you use your time and where you put your energy. You’ll discover that you can seemingly create time for your work by using your most productive hours for the necessary tasks you have.

How do you accommodate your productive, energetic hours to manage your time?

Recent posts at All Freelance Writing have been discussing the efforts of the team members to use query-free writer marketing methods to get their freelance writing businesses going, growing, and profitable. The keyword to all of these posts would be effort: you have to take on tasks every day to market your business, query-free or otherwise. What makes marketing tasks so vital to the query-free writer method is that you need to make regular and consistent progress to develop a platform that brings you work.

One of the best ways to get things done is to put them on a calendar, a to-do list. I find that using a calendar for marketing tasks makes me focus on each day’s tasks, not only to complete them, but to not feel overwhelmed with the big-picture objectives and goals underway.

If you need ideas for query-free marketing methods, check out 30 Ways to Build your Writer Platform and 20 Things You Can Do Today to Market your Freelance Writing Services. These are all task-oriented marketing tactics that you can schedule throughout your week, and your month, to put a dent into platform development. An excellent option to add to your calendar? The 14 day ebook process. Whether or not you participated before, why not write an ebook? If you put in about 30 minutes to an hour for fourteen consecutive working days, you can have an invaluable tool to market your freelance writing services.

Get out whatever calendar you normally use, mark off the days that you won’t be working from the end of May to June, create slots for however many hours you allot for marketing, and fill those slots up with marketing tactics. Then, stick to your calendar and take daily steps to a better writer platform.

When you finish creating this calendar, I’ll hope you’ll feel like I did: confident and excited. I know where I’m going with the rest of May and the 13 days of June I’ll be working, and I know that my freelance writing business will be the better for it.

Share with us some of your query-free writer marketing calendar objectives, and let us know what you have on the horizon. Here’s a few things that are coming up for me:

• series of three ebooks
• a white paper
• Twitter following to nurture
• LinkedIn profile to network with
• a new blog post series
• starting a Twitter chat

This catastrophic situation was made all the less catastrophic by the fact that I’ve done a lot of what LaToya is telling you to do: I’ve got savings and I’ve got an emergency fund. This is a little PSA to let you know that if you don’t have these things, you’re probably not prepared to handle freelance writing business disasters. What if your back up and all of your computers failed at once, right now? Do you have enough money to practically start over in your savings or in your emergency fund? (I definitely go with this as a qualified emergency, as it was unexpected and catastrophic!) Okay, now back to our scheduled broadcast…

Marketing is very, very important. But, then again, you already knew that. I’m not the go-to marketing guy (Chris is and I highly suggest you check out his posts as well-bound to find organized marketing solutions there: Chris loves lists!) but I’m the neat freak here at AFW, and I’ve got three very, very simple steps for an organized marketing campaign.

1. Have a marketing plan. Within your marketing plan, you should decided campaigns and maybe some tactics to get going. Jenn has an excellent marketing plan and calendar in my career bible, The Web Writer’s Guide.
2. Schedule regular marketing time. Put it in your schedule and stick to it. Marketing should be as regularly scheduled as writing.
3. Set goals. Measure the progress you make on this goals and act accordingly. Again, Jenn’s WWG has a great goal-setting method that can help you set measurable and attainable marketing goals.

How do you keep your marketing organized? Do you track your efforts, paying attention to where you get a client and therefore how your marketing efforts are paying off? Please, share your questions and comments, and look for the May post in this monthly series, where we’ll be discussing filing systems.

As the resident neat freak, I’m equally excited about preparing and organizing myself for the e-book challenge. Excited about the prep work or not, it can be simple. Here are some simple organization and productivity tips for the e-book challenge:

• If you aren’t already, get into a regular writing groove by writing something every day, even if it is just a journal entry.
• Read / scan over the last e-book challenge’s material, especially the pre-challenge reading, to get an idea of what you’ll be doing.
• If paper is your thing, get together a binder or a notebook to work the challenge in.
• If digital is more your style, create a folder on your computer and plan how to back up your docs.
• Schedule appointments with yourself for each day in the challenge.
• Decide how you’ll participate-will you:

1. Work on each day’s task(s) until they are completed?
2. Work for an allotted time each day, regardless of completion?
3. Take note and notice but participate in the challenge later if this isn’t a good time for you? (Definitely check out the e-book writing challenge e-book if you opt for this path.)

Any specific concerns about preparing for the e-book challenge? Leave a comment and Jenn and I will do our best to help you out.

Jenn was recently contacted by Freelancer-Tools.com and asked if she would review the article tracker they offer on their Web site. Jenn passed this opportunity along to me, and the free beta account along with it. If you’d like to use it, you’re looking at a $5 / month investment.

This article tracker is extremely simple-nothing complex beyond your basic HTML coding, and I like this a lot. I found that it is effective as both an inventory and a daily tracker for your progress / output and your earnings. You are able to add clients, and add prices and clients to articles.

You can select a daily article goal as well. I think bloggers and article writers will find this helpful to keep them chugging along each day towards their output and earnings goals in a simple and easy to use format.

I recommend this product to a freelance writer whether they’re tech savvy or not. I mean it when I say this is a simple tool-that doesn’t already have a trusted project / article inventory system and wants a simple way to track how much you’re earning, how much you’re getting done, and which clients are giving you the most work or the most profitable (or least profitable) work.

Of course, that profitable theory is only good if you’re taking about the same amount of time to complete the article, so if you aren’t, you may want to put in an average hourly rate for the project so that you can track these things. You could also use the printable spread / search results of this article database to track your most profitable topics. So if you haven’t nailed down a specialty but you’re publishing / selling, this may be a good way to investigate your most profitable topics.

As I said, I recommend this tool for those without their own spreadsheet or database if they want something ultra-simple (I know I like the simple feel and will be using it myself), but I would like to tell international freelancers that you don’t have the option to change the dollar sign in the price part, so if you’re working in another currency you’ll want to disregard that part.

Any questions about the Freelancer-Tools.com article tracker? I’ll do my best to answer them or find the answers for you.

I recently fired a mentee. I said that, until he would invest real time and work in their business, he wouldn’t be receiving my help. I wanted him to be accountable in the way I’m sharing the writing process today, among other things I wanted from him…but the point in mentioning him is saying that I had to stress this again and again:

“Amateur writers are the ones that simply pop off a draft and send it to a client. Professionals organize their work, rewrite for their best work, and proofread for errors.”

Even small, simple projects require at least some outlining and proofreading…it will only take a few more minutes and you’ll be sending a more professional piece of work in, rather than something sloppy. Yes, as professionals, we can “get away” with rushing some things or taking a few short cuts, but if we held ourselves accountable, would we? I think that when someone pays you to perform the core competencies of your business for them, you should provide your best work possible. After all, you should be asking for fair compensation for your work, so how about doing the work you’re being paid for!

Okay, here endeth my rant. Here beginneth the organized writing process post…

The writing process is five steps: prewriting, research, outlining, drafting, and editing. In The Freelance Writer’s Guide to Project Management, I mentioned having contextual to-do lists for these actions. To maintain my writing process workflow, I use folders with each of these contexts labeled and move the project documents from one folder to the next. Because I work with paper, I have a final folder called Data Entry, but as you could easily use this workflow on a computer, you could simply have an Email or WordPress or similar folder for publishing / sending your work to publishing.

However you decide to organize your writing process workflow, you need to have tools to maintain said organization and to keep you productive. I’ll be walking through each of the five steps with you, and providing some free .pdf documents for reference in creating your own or for printing and using.

1. Prewriting

Prewriting includes mindmapping, drawing correlations, and finding informational needs of a market and developing one or more ideas to publish in that market. During the prewriting process, you’ll need to organize ideas so that you can develop an idea to research, write, and edit.

This often involves a great deal of asking questions, reading around, and sketching and scribbling across paper. The best tool to keep this all organized is an idea inventory. I’ve created an idea inventory index and an idea inventory detail page .pdf so that you can print them out and organize your ideas. You may want to use them as a guide to creating a notebook or digital files to organize your ideas.

Tip: In the table column of the idea inventory index that asks if the idea is active or archived, write an “A” for active when you’re working on the idea and haven’t developed a piece from it. When it is completed, write an “r” so that you have “Ar” for archived.

Freebies:

• Idea Inventory Checklist
• Idea Inventory Detail Page

2. Research

All research for freelance writing projects comes from three sources: other written material, observation / surveys / experiments, and your preexisting knowledge and experience. I use a research plan template to figure out exactly what questions I’m seeking the answers to in order to complete a writing project. The classic reporter’s questions / 5 W’s and H serve as a good guide for what you’ll need to research and learn about a topic. Determine what the question would be for each of these topics, such as the “how” question for an article could be “how can Web writers use a keyword density tool to keep from keyword stuffing an article?”and so on.  I also add spaces for follow-up questions to those questions, such as “how can you tell you’re article is keyword stuffed?” for that sample question.

I find working with a research plan template helps me to discover all the questions that need to be asked to fully write a draft. After compiling the questions I search for references and take notes from what I already know, numbering each question with a small, circled number above it on my research plan and answering it and adding the corresponding number to my notes.

Tip: Also ask the question, “What’s the point?” to be sure that you’re developing an idea that matters to editors, publishers, clients, and readers. If you can’t answer that question, there’s no reason to work with what you have. Revisit your idea and your questions to be sure you’re looking for something worth finding.

Freebies:

• Research Plan Template

3. Outline

Outlines: best friends to some writers, bane of their existence for others. All an outline needs to do is organize the information you have into something that can become a cohesive draft. Whether you love or love to hate outlines, using my outline template you can quickly and efficiently organize your piece.

Tip: Write notes for your introduction and conclusion last, after you’ve determined the body content of the article, and only touch on important points. Introductions and conclusions are something that will need to be polished throughout the drafting and editing process.

Freebies:

• Outline Template

4. Draft
I like to write one draft, after doing steps one through three, without referring to any of the notes and research and outlining. I like to see what kind of writing will come from this first draft, and it frees me up to get the best turns-of-phrase and unique ideas into a project I know I will organize more thoroughly later.

If you don’t have time to do this, however, simply begin writing from the top of your outline to your bottom. This means writing the introduction and the conclusion last. Which one of those you do first is up to you, but I think writing the introduction immediately upon finishing a draft can add immediate pertinence to the introduction, and writing the conclusion as the very last item in drafting leads to the most cohesive conclusions.

Tip: Unless the project is especially large, try to complete a first draft in a single sitting. If you complete the more extemporaneous first draft I suggest, do write it one sitting to capture the freshest ideas within your mind. If you only do the follow-the-outline draft, try to do it as well to get the most coherent depiction of the ideas in your outline.

5. Edit
The editing stage of the writing process involves rewriting and proofreading. Initially, your editing should focus on the big picture-how well you stuck to your outline. After you’ve gone through this initial phase, look at your writing more in pieces: first a full walk through of the paragraphs, and then of sentences. The do a proofreading to check for spelling errors and grammatical inconsistencies that remain in your work.

Tip: Try to create some space between a draft and editing by waiting-whether it be thirty minutes or three days, and between the stages of editing, so that you’ll have fresher eyes to focus on the material. Being too close to your rough draft could compromise your ability to see errors.

Here’s my spin on the writing process. I hope I’ve given you some tools to make this process more organized, and that I’ve not gone too basic this month in the topic.

Tell me more about your writing process, and how you keep it organized.

Take small steps.

Set a goal (or rather table of goals) to check it only once every 30 minutes, then an hour, then every four hours (which is probably twice per workday) and then you can do it once per workday / 24 hours. You can create a time table that works for you.

Charge yourself. You probably have some money you allow yourself to spend on something you don’t have to have, you just really want, like a Starbucks budget or similar. For every time you break your set goal, you take away a certain set amount. It tends to demotivate the bad behavior because it suuucks.

Reward yourself.

Jenn does a great job explaining this in her goal-setting post. (And she really goes into good detail about this in her Web Writer’s Guide. If you haven’t invested the $37 in that book yet, stop reading this post. You’d do better with your time to get to that book now!)

Set reasonable exceptions.

Allow yourself to respond to networking conversations or really important queries when you want to, so you can check for that email (and that email only!) unless it’s a client email.

Really, it is just a good idea to look at email but not take more time than it takes to scan subject lines (or emails if your contacts haven’t maneuvered those well) and only respond during a set, important time and not get distracted and off track.