A Witch’s Guide to Magickal Blogging Part 4: Post Planning and Editorial Calendars

Welcome to Part 4 of A Witch’s Guide to Magickal Blogging. This post will cover how to use an editorial calendar to plan posts. This is the last installment in my four part guide to magickal blogging; I hope you enjoyed it.

Planning Posts for Your Magickal Blog

Step 1: Why Have an Editorial Calendar?

In order to explain why you should have an editorial calendar at all, I’m going to use myself as an example. For a while I posted when ever I had an article finished, then it was about once a week, then for a while I alternated between Tuesday/Thursday/Saturday and Monday/Wednesday/Friday posts. I found that M/W/F worked best for me: it was versatile, and people don’t seem to be online that much on the weekends. I also never, ever publish posts right after I write them. Usually they’re written weeks or even months in advance. That’s because it’s just me here, I have no editorial team (or proofreader), and that creates a few issues that the editorial calendar helps with.

The first issue with being a solo blogger is that I’m a typo monster, I find typos in old posts all the time. Tip: If you see that an old post is suddenly getting hits again, open it up and proofread it; I always seem to find something that I want to change. Second, and I’m going to blame my Scorpio Sun/Virgo Moon combo for this one, I’m a mean reviewer. It’s that Scorpio sting, coupled with Virgo’s perfectionism, I’m telling you. I’m naturally a hyper-critical perfectionist, and I’ve had my critical chops cultivated by my education and profession (I teach writing and literary analysis). Because of this, I write my reviews ages before I post them, then I go back and take out most of the unnecessary snark, then I re-read it again before it’s published. All told, my posts go through an average of a dozen revisions each, with some posts getting over two dozen edits. Perfection, go!

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A Witch’s Guide to Magickal Blogging Part 3: Tips and Tricks

Welcome to Part 3 of A Witch’s Guide to Magickal Blogging, post three in a four part series meant to help you take the steps you need to in order to start writing your magickal blog. This post will cover tips and tricks for taking your magickal blog to the next level, taken from my decade-long blogging journey. Part 1 and Part 2 can be found here.

Magickal Blogging Tips and Tricks

You can read about riding a bike, but the only way to really learn how to ride one is to actually get on a bike a pedal. Blogging is much the same way; you can theorize about it all day long, but you won’t know what you’re doing until after you’ve already started doing it. Once the basics are in place and you’ve started your blog, it’s time to get into the nitty gritty and go over some helpful hints, tips, and tricks.

Consistency: Consistency in what and how you write is huge, and this can only happen over time. The idea of consistency will trickle down to every part of your blog from your writing style and post structure, to use of categories and tags, to you posting schedule, to when and how you write. This this is rhythm that you hit as a blogger that can only happen over time.

Categories & Tags: These may seem silly, but nothing lets me know that a blog is a hot mess like a list of 500 tags. You may think the purpose of tags are to get you search results, but that is not the case: the purpose of tags is the help your reader navigate your website. When you think about tags in this way, the way you use them will change. Categories are for posts and is set while you are writing.

Drafts Posts: I have a technique that really works for me, which is having a ton of draft posts. I’ll get an idea for an article, a list, or a spell, and I will start the post and save the draft. Sometimes it has all of 100 words in it, but it’s saved. Then, during the 75% of writing sessions where I’m not inspired, I’ll open one of the incomplete drafts, re-read it quickly, and start adding to it. I’m actually adding this draft posts idea to a post that was in drafts because I woke up and had no idea what to write. This method works super well for me, and maybe it will work well for you too. Regardless, experiment until you find a system that works.

A Witch’s Guide to Magickal Blogging Part 2: Finding Your Voice

This post is a continuation of the Witch’s Guide to Magickal Blogging, a four part series meant to help you take the steps you need to in order to start writing your magickal blog. If you haven’t read Part 1: Where to Start yet, please head on over there now. Part 2 covers finding your voice as a magickal author including tips for making the leap from wanting to write a blog to actually writing one.

Step 1: How to Find Your Voice

Even if you’ve written before, your voice as a witchcraft and/or paganism writer is likely going to be different. ‘Voice’ is essentially your style as a writer and covers things like formality of writing, tone, punctuation, etc. Some authors use a lot of personal anecdotes, and others speak factually; some use evidence or sources, while others don’t. (I do suggest, if you want to have a credible site, give sources of information at the bottom of your posts, just so your readers know you aren’t making up information.)

The only way to find your voice is to start writing and publishing posts. This is so hard to do, and I get it, but you have to take the leap. You’ll risk publishing posts that you aren’t completely happy with down the line, to which I say: welcome to blogging. No one is 100% happy with every post they write. There are some posts that I feel aren’t my best work, and they end up being popular, while other posts that I adore are barely ever viewed. There’s never going to be a perfect overlap between writer and audience, and that’s okay.

Luckily, when your blog is in its infancy, not many people will be visiting it anyway. For example: The first year I wrote this blog it was viewed a total of 400 times; the second year I wrote this blog it was viewed 6,000 times. A huge improvement! While I was sad that no one saw my writing that first year, now I’m glad that no one did, since my articles weren’t consistent at all.

A Witch’s Guide to Magickal Blogging Part 1: How and Where to Start

So you want to start a magickal blog. Great! Now the question is where to begin. You might have a lot of great ideas, but you don’t know what to do with them, or maybe no ideas, but a desire to write. A Witch’s Guide to Magickal Blogging is a four part series meant to help you take the steps you need to in order to start writing your magickal blog. I have been blogging for well over 10 years, so it’s definitely something I feel comfortable talking about. In Part 1 you will take the first three steps, finding out who you are as a writer, exploring what you want to write, and deciding where you want to host your blog. Let’s get started …

Step 1: Who Are You?

One thing that will largely influence what your magickal blog is like is who you are. Ask yourself the following questions:

• Are you younger or older?
• Are you an experienced witch or new to the Craft?
• Do you have a set path or are you finding your way?

Your age means that you will have specific experience that relates to your phase of life. A young witch in college can write study spells, whereas a parent raising magickal children could write about their witchlings. A teenaged college student wouldn’t know about being a magickal parent, nor would the adult with kids know about being a carefree college student, and you know what? That’s a good thing! Your life experiences inform your magick which, in turn, guides your witchy writing.