April is officially over but, mentally, I’m still there. The MNINB April Platform Challenge was just that: a challenge. I’ve learned a lot and collected a lot of new tools which I’m still working at getting organized and evaluated. I think it likely that I will eventually drop some of them. I’m just not sure yet which ones will benefit and which just add to my confusion. I can’t make that decision until I finish all the tasks. I still have 6 days to go. The last week, I got pulled in 5 directions and just didn’t get things done efficiently. The 6 days aren’t consecutive. I did manage to get some things done, but I was already a couple of days behind, so I still came out short at the end of the month. There are a few things I foresee keeping, others I already feel the need to drop.
One benefit is the concept of an editorial calendar. I am a list making, calendar organizing kind of gal. I already had four aspects of my life in calendars. My normal daily todo list, my appointments calendar, my daughter & granddaughter’s work/class schedules, and my church calendar. Adding an editorial calendar seems like a natural thing, it just never occurred to me before.
One time-sucking confusion is adding more Social Networking places. I already had Facebook, LinkedIn and Google +. Now I’ve added Twitter, Triber, and HootSuite. The last one is supposed to make it easier to keep up with all the others. I’m just not feeling it yet.
Facebook itself has become more complex with two more pages, one an author page and the other a business page, to keep track of in addition to the MNINB group. I had cut my time on Facebook back to about 15 minutes a day. It’s now up to an hour or more again.
I love the wonderful support group we’ve created. I enjoy reading everyone’s posts. I want to stay involved with them. I just need to find ways to better organize my time there. Otherwise, I’ll never have time to actually visit and comment on their blogs, because my blogroll has grown astronomically. If I manage to read, comment, and link to a fraction of them each day, I’ll be amazed.
So, I’m thinking I will need another calendar. One that will consist of breaking them down into a list of 5 to 10 blogs to visit each day. I’m pretty sure I could hit everyone at least once a month that way. I just haven’t decided yet how to organize the list. I’m leaning toward dividing it into categories based on frequency of posts and subject matter. I may decide that I need to visit some of them every week and others can be only once a month. We are all at different levels of involvement with our blogs, some have barely started and others, like me, have multiple locations.
As a side-effect of all this, I’ve started actual work on my fiction writing. I have a list of pivotal characters for one of my novel ideas that includes names, relationships, and vague descriptions. I’ll flesh those out more as I go. Getting the background, characters and plot points organized is the foundation of writing the action. The editorial calendar and my revamped daily chore list (both works in progress) will include time to work on that aspect of my writing life every week. Eventually, I will push it to be a daily thing. I may even get a working first draft by the end of the year. Ahhh, the dream may become a reality.
If you have a blog or a small business website, you should check out Robert Brewer’s Platform Challenge. Even though April is over, all the tasks and recommendations are still listed on his blog. Read through them. I’m sure you’ll find aspects that can be helpful to your situation.
(Ok, that takes care of day 26, a post that includes a call to action with attention to SEO.)
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