How to Batch Prep Content for a Blog and Instagram
Why Batch Prepping
For the majority of my blogging career, I have been working a full time job and/or going to school! It’s been quite the journey trying to work and blog, but it’s far easier to do so when you also plan content ahead of time. When it comes to creating captions and photos, I try to give myself a set time each week/month to really prepare. This allows for maximum creativity and keeps me from burning out easily!! Blogging can quickly become a second job and we must treat it as such. Keep reading to see how I stay on top of my work!
Monthly Preparation
First, when you are looking to batch prepare content, you need to figure out what can be done on a monthly basis as opposed to a weekly basis. I recommend planning your content calendar and blog posts a month in advance. If you work in fashion like me, it can be somewhat difficult to fully prepare for a month worth of content. However, there is value in having some idea of what you want to post or say. I try to at least decide on some holidays I want to mention and I try to prepare whatever outfits I need to post ahead of time.
Similarly, you can prepare blog posts ahead of time whether it is topic prep or actually writing your posts ahead of time. I definitely plan blog topics ahead of time and I have even begun to prepare blog posts ahead of time. With my Squarespace website, I can actually write and save posts to automatically go live at a particular time. This allows me to share content at an optimal time!
Weekly Preparation
Alongside my monthly preparation comes my weekly preparation. This usually includes Pinterest, Instagram and Facebook. With Pinterest, I try and prepare all of my pins for the week on Tailwind, the best scheduling app!! When preparing for Pinterest, I try to share both my own pins and pins that inspire me from trending topics.
Another aspect of my weekly preparation is Facebook and Instagram posts. I try to get all of the photographs taken ahead of time (see below) as well as prepare the captions and hashtags. This allows for easy posting and I don’t have to stress about completing a post 20 minutes before it is to go live. Again, this is something you will want to do ahead of time so everything is just ready to go.
Photography Preparation
Finally there is batch prepping your photoshoots. I try and do this by designating a day or two each week for pictures/videos. I plan out all of the looks ahead of time so I can go out into my city and take the best possible images. Oftentimes I leave with around 5 outfits in a bag to go and shoot. Because of this, my hair and makeup tends to look the same throughout my feed! When I prepare all of my pictures ahead of time, I can then just upload them to my computer and edit everything at one time. I edit my photos on Lightroom and export them into a monthly folder that holds all of my outfit pictures. This way I can easily export everything and always have outfits to share!
Go Create
I hope these tips are useful to you! I love when I can sit and be creative for a chunk of time, it allows me to feel prepared for my account and allows for wiggle room when something comes up. Comment down below what your top planning tip is, I’m curious!
Best,
Lauren
