Preparing Yourself For Blogging: Offline & Online Strategies Part II

In the first part of this post, I explained how to pre­pare your­self for blog­ging offline, where I went over doing sim­ple stuff like eat­ing some­thing or work­ing in a clean work area to help you blog bet­ter. Now this is Part II, and I will share some tips for prepar­ing your­self for blog­ging through online activities.

So peo­ple say that stay­ing in front of your com­puter for too long is bad for your con­cen­tra­tion. While I believe that to be true, there are some things on your com­puter you can do that aren’t so bad at all for your thinking.

Always keep in mind, you should limit your­self to how you pre­pare your­self online, because regard­less of what you do I still find that you can lose your train of thought by spend­ing too much time on your com­puter (don’t let [intlink id=“3423” type=“post”]obsessions[/intlink] occur either).

Online Strate­gies

“Online”, mean­ing that you are in front of your com­puter doing some kind of activ­ity. Like brows­ing the web, using an appli­ca­tion on your com­puter, etc. Always remem­ber to take breaks when you’re online.

Sim­pli­fy­ing blog­ging with Blog­ging Tools

Blog­ging tools range from a vari­ety of dif­fer­ent top­ics. Most blog­ging tools out there are Edi­tors where you can write and pub­lish blog posts from your desk­top. Then there are other kinds of blog tools, like noti­fiers and some pro­duc­tiv­ity tools. I want to share with you a few tools that I some­times use, or know of.

Word­Press Noti­fier for Mac OSX

Sorry to all of you wacky Win­dows users, this tool is only for Mac. What this tool does is it noti­fies you of com­ments you get right from your desk­top. It sits in the Menu bar at the top, and updates every time you get a new com­ment held into moderation.

It’s so great, because with this plu­gin you really won’t need to have those pesky emails sent to your inbox con­stantly every time you get a new blog com­ment. Saves you some time too, and sav­ing time is all the part of blog­ging convenience.

Down­load WP-Notifier (Freeware) »

Ecto Blog Editor

I think peo­ple are skep­ti­cal when it comes to using 3^rd party blog edi­tors because they don’t offer every­thing that their blog­ging soft­ware does. How­ever, there is one in par­tic­u­lar I find to have a lot of great stuff.

Ecto is a great blog edi­tor for your desk­top. It’s very con­ve­nient to use, and has most of every­thing the stan­dard Word­Press Edi­tor has. You can use Ecto on a vari­ety of blog­ging plat­forms suchs as Blog­ger, Dru­pal, Mov­able­Type, Type­Pad, and of course, WordPress.

Ecto is free for the first 21 days (as a trial with full fea­tures), but after those days you have to buy it for a measly $19.95.

Try/Buy Ecto »

Back­pack Orga­ni­za­tional Tool

This is a very cool tool for keep­ing every­thing orga­nized. You can store notes and files in there, so it can be great for post plan­ning and plan­ning any­thing else for your blog. If you run a co-authored blog, you can keep up to date and assign tasks for each of the blog admins to do. There are a ton of fea­tures for Back­pack, and there’s no way I would be able to explain them all here.

Like Ecto, it does cost money. How­ever, you get 30 days free to test it out and see if you like it. This is a tool that is insanely help­ful, but is really for blog­gers who are drop dead seri­ous about blogging.

Sign up for Backpack »

Other Use­ful Blog­ging Tools

• Win­dows Live Writer

A great blog edit­ing tool for Win­dows. Cov­ers var­i­ous blog­ging plat­forms, and is absolutely free.

• Scrib­Fire

A Fire­fox plu­gin that allows you to blog within your browser, on a spe­cific web page. So, if you are review­ing another web page, you can do it all on that page and pub­lish it to your blog.

• Blog­lines

Orga­nize your feeds in your browser with­out down­load­ing or installing any soft­ware. This is great, because a great way to pre­pare for blog­ging is read­ing (will be talked about later in this post).

• Auto­Copy

Select text and it’s auto­mat­i­cally copied to the clip­board. Like Linux or mIRC. Great if you use quotes in your posts a lot, or have to copy and paste the same things repeat­edly in your post (Fire­fox Extension).

• Site Meter

A great, easy way to check your blogs statistics.

All of those tools I listed above are meant to make blog­ging mroe con­ve­nient and easy to use. Some of these tools make tedious tasks eas­ier for you. When you can break some­thing down and sim­plify it to it’s low­est form, then it just makes blog­ging so much easier.

Plan­ning & Brain­storm­ing Ideas

Some­thing I hate to do is sit around and try to think about what I want to write. It can really eat up a ton of time that could have been bet­ter spent tak­ing action on something.

Get some brain exer­cises in

Brain exer­cises are when you are doing a cer­tain activ­ity that requires a level of “crit­i­cal think­ing” to get your brain work­ing. One thing I have just started doing (as in, today) is to play some puz­zle games that take crit­i­cal think­ing to achieve. I played on this one game site called Games for the Brain before I started writ­ing up this post, and I would say that it has helped me to do the following:

• Helped me con­cen­trate to write up a lengthy post such as this one.
• Opened my mind up for more ideas off the top of my head.
• Gets me into a “work­ing mood” where I will want to go above and beyond what’s nor­mally expected from me in a post.

So I would have to say that doing one or two lit­tle puz­zles on that Games for the Brain web­site before you start blog­ging will really get you think­ing harder.

Online Read­ing

Noth­ing beats read­ing a tan­gi­ble book, but I do find that read­ing online helps you too. You could read about the stuff in your niche, or some­thing totally unre­lated. Read­ing can have the equiv­a­lence of those brain games, because of the level of think­ing that’s involved because it puts you in an easy going state of mind and allows you to think better.

But what is there to read from online? Some things you can read from:

• Blog RSS Feeds
• eBooks
• News Arti­cles
• Forum Posts
• Twit­ter Conversations

Let me explain this one. Some peo­ple use Twit­ter like an Instant Mes­sag­ing ser­vice back and forth over and over again. Some pretty intel­li­gent Twit­ter users do it with other intel­li­gent Twit­ter users, so there’s bound to be some use­ful con­ver­sa­tion going on, espe­cially if the con­ver­sa­tion is about your niche.

Putting Offline + Online Strate­gies Together

If you haven’t read Part I with my offline strate­gies, you may want to briefly skim over it really quick and come back to this spot when you’re done. If you already did, keep reading.

I put in my best ideas of being able to pre­pare your­self for blog­ging into these two posts. After see­ing them, can you think of any way you want to pre­pare your­self for your blog? Maybe you can do some offline prepa­ra­tions, or some online prepa­ra­tions, or even mix the two. While it may be time con­sum­ing, or too over­whelm­ing, you should at least give it a good and hon­est shot.

Hope­fully these tips have made you think before you start to work on your blog. Maybe how you pre­pare for blog­ging right now is work­ing for you. If so, just ignore both arti­cles and keep doing what you’re doing. I will never ever write a post forc­ing you to do some­thing, just posts where I can give you ideas.

Good luck, and I hope you find out what works best for you!

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