This blog has definitely become more planner heavy these past few months. It’s a passion and an addition. If you’re also as obsessed with planning as I am, here are 25 planner related blog posts you can write today.
My Planning Style – Are you into no white space? Love functional? Share it!
How I Stay Organized – What planners do you use? Do you also use an online calendar?
10 Planner Hacks to Make Planning Your Days Easier – Share your secrets
How to Store Your Planner Stickers – File folders? Binders? What are your tips?
Best Places to Find Stickers– In store? Online?
How to Use Leftover Stickers from Kits – Those pesky leftover stickers need to be put to good use!
My Planning Evolution – Show your first spreads and your most recent ones!
Top 5 Favorite Etsy Shops – make sure you include Oh, Hello!
Organizational Tips for My Younger Self – What planner advice do you wish you knew before?
How to Plan for Other People – What’s it like to plan for kids, significant others, etc.
Essential Planning Supplies – What planner supplies are a must?
Planner Supplies You Don’t Need – What planner supplies can you do without?
Planning for School – Show how to use certain planners to plan for school.
Different Ways to Use the Monthly Spread – Use your monthly spread for homework, travel, chores, etc. Show different ways to use it.
Planning Supply Wishlist – What planner supplies are you coveting lately?
My Thoughts On Planner Peace – Does it exist?
Favorite Character/Doodle Stickers – Blobby is a definite must.
Planning for Vacations – How do you use your planner to plan for trips?
How to Get Out of a Planning Rut – Share your tips for re-finding planner inspiration.
Planning Challenges – Challenge yourself to plan differently and share the results.
Top 5 Favorite Planner Spreads – Share photos of your favorite planner spreads.
Planning Starter Pack – What stickers would you recommend to someone getting started?
How to Organize Sticker Freebies – How do you make sure you’re using up freebie stickers?
Project Sticker Use-Up – Challenge yourself to use up your sticker stash!
How Planning Has Changed Your Life – Share your planning story.
Save this list and you’ll never be without ideas for planner related posts! Leave more post suggestions in the comments!
I recently celebrated my two year anniversary for working from home and it got me thinking about all the things I’ve learned from the experience. There are a ton of pros to the stay-at-home life, but there are also a quite a few things needed in order to stay organized. I highlight all of them in today’s video, but I wanted to share a more detailed, written version as well.
The best way to truly stay organized working form home is to have meetings. Whether you work for yourself or someone else, it’s super vital to set aside time to meet so you can really focus on what’s going on, what projects need to be worked on, and what the other person is up to.
I also find it helpful to create a weekly to do list and a daily to do list. It’s good to have one master list of everything that needs to get done, but it’s overwhelming to look at. I like to take that master list and break it up throughout the week into more manageable chunks. That way I’m still getting everything I need done, but it doesn’t feel like I have to do it all at once.
Another thing Alex and I have found helpful in our working from home life is to separate work from home by leaving the majority of our working space in the basement. This might not be a possibility for everyone, but being able to close off a work area or tuck away work supplies makes it so you can actually relax when the work day is finally done.
Although I’m a strong advocate of separating work spaces from home spaces, I don’t think that’s true when it comes to planners. I strongly suggest not over-complicating things by having more than one planner. Sure it may seem like a good idea to separate everything out into different planners, but over time you’ll find it’s just too much work to keep up with. Plus you’re just one person and will have to do all these things at some point anyway. So might as well put them all in one place to make things easier for you.
Finally, give yourself a schedule throughout the week. Give yourself certain days for certain tasks to give your week more structure. That way you know generally what your week looks like so you can fit things into it accordingly.
There are tons of factors that go into working from home so if there’s anything you’re interested in, leave a comment!
I’ve been blogging for about seven years or so and my process has changed a lot since those earlier days blogging on sites I’m happy to forget about. Whether you’re just getting started or are a blogging pro, it’s always interesting to see other people’s processes. I’d love to know about your process in the comments so I can learn how to better mine!
After so many years my process has become second nature. Usually I start off by hunting for inspiration if my content calendar is sparse and needs some post ideas. I follow a lot of lifestyle blogs who write content that’s vastly different form mine. Just reading blogs can spark a ton of new, unique ideas. More times than I can count I’m reading a post about someone’s weekend trip to New York city and I suddenly have an idea for a planning related post. Inspiration hunting is more about getting into the mindset of blogging than anything else.
Once I have a healthy list of post ideas, I get to content scheduling. Since I run this blog and a YouTube channel I like to try and get my posts and videos to lineup. So if I have a video about how to stay organized working from home on the schedule, I may add in a blog post about the topic as a supplement. I put all of my posts down into my Google Calendar and move them around until they’re in an order that makes sense.
Then comes bulk blog photography. Tuesdays are my filming and blogging days so I create all of the content I need for the next week or so that day. Bulk photography is the best way I’ve found to make sure I get all the photos I need.
Next up is editing the photos which is always a lot faster when I take bulk shots. Since I’m using the same settings on my camera, I’m able to apply the same edits to all of the photos. Then I go in and tweak things here and there for specific photos. My favorite program is Lightroom since it’s so easy to do a bunch of photographs at once.
Once I have all my photos figured out, I create a bunch of draft posts and add in the photos. I’ll add in blog post titles as well and save them for the next step. I usually find that I have to be in a certain mindset to write posts so I try to do as many as I can once the inspiration strikes. Since all the posts are already drafted, I just open up whatever post I feel like writing and start typing. If I happen to finish the post, I’ll schedule it to go live when my content calendar says, or publish it to go live immediately.
The final piece is social media. I always make sure to share the post on my Facebook page and Instagram. I often have more than one photo for a post so I’ll choose a couple to spread out over the next few days to keep referencing back to the post. Social media is also the part of my blogging process that I want to improve on. I have so many old posts that I need to work better at referencing. That way my content doesn’t vanish to the archives after a few days.
My process isn’t overly complicated, but I find that it works best to keep blogging consistently. It’s a tried and true method but I’m always trying to hone it in to be even better.
So you’re thinking about starting an Etsy shop. When I started Oh, Hello almost three years ago I honestly didn’t put much thought into it. I opened shop on a Saturday and learned as time went along with a lot of mistakes along the way. There are five things I wish I considered before starting, and you should too before opening shop. Plus I’ve created a handy little worksheet you can work through to really hash out all these ideas. I cover all these points in today’s video if you fancy a watch.
Above all else, I wish I had given myself a budget to take this new business seriously. So ask yourself, what things do you need to put your best foot forward to get started?
Definitely if you’re considering opening a sticker shop, consider what sets your shop apart from the other shops out there already. Do you design all your own artwork? What is it about your shop that would make people want to shop there over another shop? This will really help you have a clear idea of your identity moving forward.
Another incredibly important aspect I basically just winged was choosing a name. Pick a name that’s available on all social media sites, but that’s also easy to spell correctly. Also pick a name that can grow with your business. Sure it seems easy to just pick your nickname or combine something about your family pet and your favorite color. But if your business starts to take off, you don’t want your name to seem silly like The Purple Corgi. At second thought, that’s a great name and I call dibs (lol).
Figuring out goals and benchmarks is also something I wished I would have done starting out, and I recommend it for anyone considering owning a shop. Where do you see your company in six months? A year? Figuring out these things in advance can help guide you during the first months of your shop, dictate how much time and energy you need to put into the business, and it’ll help you take the entire venture more seriously.
The final thing you really should consider before opening shop is pricing. Take a look at what other shops in your field price their items at. Take into consideration the cost of goods and the time it takes to make your items and really think about how much you should charge for your work. More often than not beginning shops pay themselves so much less than minimum wage for their work just to try and be competitive. It’s not worth it if you’re working yourself to death.
Opening an Etsy shop is an incredibly exciting thing, but it’s important to consider these 5 things to make sure you’re getting the most out of the experience. Don’t forget to download a copy of the worksheet to answer all of these questions for yourself!
It wasn’t all that long ago that the planning community was itty bitty. Now it’s exploded into this huge, wonderful thing, but it’s definitely a lot harder to be noticed in such a big crowd. Lucky for me I had a growing business and an established blog to help propel me along, but if you’re just getting started it can seem like a lot to wade through. So if you’re trying to stand out in a crowd full of planner people, here are a few of my tips and tricks.
Cultivate your own style. People are constantly looking for new ways of planning or to find something different than what they’re doing. Whether it’s stamping or putting stickers into an uncommon planner, find something to set your planning ways apart from everyone else. And then share those ways. Post regularly about what you’re doing so people will stumble upon you more often.
The best way to cultivate your own style is to ignore everyone. The planner community is super big on sharing, I get it. I’m sharing right now and do it regularly on my YouTube channel. But if you’re serious about trying to figure out your own style and start to make headway in the community, you can’t be constantly watching what other people are doing. It’s so easy to get caught up in trends that way and to try and shape your planning to fit someone else’s style. The best thing I did was unfollow a lot of the planner people I constantly found myself trying to keep up with. It’ll do wonders for your personal planning style and you’ll be a lot happier without all that self-imposed competition.
One of the most important things to help you stand out in the planning crowd is to take good photos. Even if they’re just for Instagram, make sure your photos are well lit. No one likes a dark photo. Use natural light from a window during the day to get your photos nice and bright. Plus take a bunch of photos at once so you’ll have them to post or use for blogging when it gets too dark.
If you really want to start gaining more traction in the planner world, be consistent beyond belief. Give yourself a schedule and stick to it. Even if you’re just trying to gain a larger audience on Instagram, post regularly. No one is interested in following someone who posts once every two weeks randomly and then disappears again.
With so much noise in the planner community it’s easy to feel like your voice isn’t being heard or that no one cares about what you’re doing. But don’t give up. Try some of these tips and keep planning away. Because at the end of the day you plan because you love it, and other people will see that too.
I’ve been blogging for around ten years. My blogging life is the age of a 4th grader. I haven’t achieve wide success for my blogging and I definitely can’t quit my day job because of it, but I haven’t stopped after all these years.
There are a ton of reasons why I haven’t given blogging up as a hobby after all this time. Blogging has done a lot for me over the years. It’s helped with my anxiety. It’s improved my photography skills so much that I’ve started getting freelance product photography gigs. It’s helped me get “real” jobs before I started my own business.
I’ve also continued to blog for so long because this is a type of hobby that changes and adapts with the author. My blog has come miles since I first started it and I’ve abandoned quite a few other blogs along the way for platforms that suit my style better. You get what you give to blogging, which I love. The more energy you put into it the greater self-accomplishment you’ll feel.
The main reason though, above everything else, is that it makes me better. It pushes me to create a better post than the last, take a better photo, and encourages me to try new directions in content. It’s always there waiting for me, like a loving pet, to type up another beauty post or gab about new planner supplies. It’s been my friend when I’ve felt alone. It’s brought me out of my shell and has given me a voice.
So yeah, I’m a big fan of blogging. I’m certain that the blog as it is today won’t always be around, but that’s ok. My life will change as my family expands and my interest goes into different directions. But it’s nice to know that this friend will be with me through it all. And I hope you will too.
