If you’re interested in getting started with creating systems in your business to make things easier and get more productive, one of the best places to start is with a blogging workflow. 

I like to call it a “blogging workflow” because blog posts are the type of content that I personally love to create. But this process (or something similar to it) can actually be used for ANY form of content. So whether your primary form of content creation is blog posts, video, podcasts, etc. — you can use a blogging workflow like this one to streamline the creation process! 🙌 

Keep this in mind as you read this post: the exact steps of “write the post” vs. “record the podcast” aren’t really what matters here. It’s about building a repeatable process that you can use every time you need to create a piece of content for your business.

What is a Blogging Workflow?

Most systems that you create in your business (like your Client Onboarding System or your system for creating client proposals) will have a workflow associated with them. And your Blog Post System is no different! A workflow is basically just a templated list of tasks in a specific order. These workflows are created based on a process that you’ve come up with for your unique way of doing something (like creating a blog post).

Basically, your Blog Post System (you could also call this a Content Marketing System) refers to the entire scope of everything content-related that you do in your business, including all of your posts, the strategy for those posts, the timeline, etc.

One important piece of that is a Blog Post Workflow. This workflow will take your specific process for how YOU like to create content and turn it into a repeatable list of tasks that you can complete over and over again for each blog post.

For example, here is a super basic example of what a blogging workflow could look like (I’ll go into more detail on this later!):

Why is a Blogging Workflow Necessary?

You may be thinking to yourself “Do I even really need a blogging workflow?” 

It could seem like a lot of extra work to put something like this into place. But whether you’re a solopreneur or have a team, a blogging workflow can be a very helpful system to have. 

You’ll Remember to Do Everything (and in the correct order)

When it comes to creating content, there are SO many different steps that you have to remember to do. One reason having a workflow can be helpful is because it means that you will actually remember to do all of those steps (and in the correct order).

These steps are going to look a little different for everyone (although I do include several different versions of content creation workflow templates in The Systems Society if you’re looking for a plug & play solution!). 

But no matter the steps, the goal is to build a blogging workflow that includes everything you want to do as part of your content creation process.

Imagine that it’s time to write your next blog post… 

What if all you have to do is go into your project management system and duplicate your blogging workflow template? You assign out all the tasks to your team and voila! Without barely having to lift a finger, you have a perfect piece of content that has been thoughtfully strategized, passionately created, well-optimized, and is already in the process of being promoted across all of your platforms.

That’s the dream, right?

It Prevents Stress, Overwhelm, and Burnout

Even if you don’t have a team, having a blogging workflow that you can super easily follow every single time you create a piece of content will allow you to be so much more productive. What this does is makes it so that you don’t have to think about it — it just happens. You won’t ever have to sit there and think “what do I do next?”

You may not even realize it, but every time you go to complete a project or task in your business that doesn’t have a set workflow or process for completing it, your brain is constantly thinking: “Okay, what now?” Throughout the whole time you’re working, your brain is in the background working in overdrive to make sure that you don’t forget to do something and that you’re doing everything correctly. It may not seem like that big of a deal, but when your brain is constantly in that overdrive mode all day long it is way easier to fall into a state of burnout.

When you use systems and workflows, you’re creating a roadmap for yourself that allows for things to get done without anyone’s brains having to work overtime. You want to be able to use all your brainpower for the actual CREATION of your amazing piece of content — not having to be burning itself out in the background worrying about things like your image alt text or reminding you to share it on Instagram.

Workflows like this one help reduce the stress of these recurring tasks to take the pressure off of your brain and make sure you’re not getting burnt out! You might not even realize that this is happening until it’s too late. Workflows like this help prevent you from getting stressed out and overwhelmed about things that can be easily systemized. No more reinventing the wheel! 🙌

No More Procrastinating

It also helps you just get started. When you have a concrete system in place, it becomes an easy-to-follow habit. You’ll stop procrastinating and putting things off! 

Instead, you will fall into a rhythm where you are frequently putting out content on a consistent basis, and you don’t even really need to think or worry about it anymore. The tasks you need to complete as part of this workflow will pop up on your daily to-do list and all you need to do is complete them! 

Have you ever gone to start a blog post and felt like “ugh I don’t even want to think about this right now”? Having a blogging workflow removes that from the equation, because you don’t have to think about it! All you have to do is follow the steps, which really helps to remove the pressure and stress from the situation. Before long, it’ll be a fully ingrained habit that you don’t even think about anymore. It’ll just get done on autopilot!

You’ll Be Able to Easily Delegate to Your Team

It’s also a great idea to put things like a blogging workflow in place so that you can easily delegate tasks out to your team. Having your process for content creation broken down into several different tasks (instead of just “write this blog post”) will make this so much easier! 

First of all, it will look and feel a lot less overwhelming. And then you could even start slow by delegating just 1-2 pieces of the workflow at first. I also find that having a workflow broken down into many smaller tasks helps me more easily decide which tasks I want to do myself, which ones I want to delegate, and who I want to delegate them to.

Delegating pieces of your blogging workflow can also help serve as a major procrastination-buster, too! You’ll be way more likely to complete your tasks in the workflow if you know your team members need those things done to complete their tasks.

Even if you don’t have a team yet, it’s always a good idea to start putting systems in place NOW before you bring on any team members. Take this as an opportunity to really nail down your workflow and make sure it functions exactly how it needs to. Then, once it’s become a regimented part of your business, you can start outsourcing some of the pieces to your team.

How a Blog Post Workflow Fits In Your Business

A blogging workflow is actually one of the first systems that I ever put into my place in my business. When I started my business, I was putting out a new blog post every single week. So it was really helpful to have a blog post workflow that I could routinely follow to create a great piece of content each time.

I’ve also been blogging since probably around 2005 — so I’ve got some experience here! But it wasn’t until I started my own business and fell in love with systems that I really perfected this idea of having a blogging workflow.

Actually, I became so good at producing high-quality blog posts with such an amazing system that I even created a packaged service offering called The Perfect Blog Post Package. This is a service that my clients can sign up for, and we produce weekly or bi-weekly blog posts for them using my tried-and-true Blog Post System.

And it really works! Creating content like this is a great way to promote your business and use it as the entry point into your content marketing funnel. 

For example, my Perfect Blog Post Package works really well in conjunction with my Perfect Pinterest Package. We send our clients traffic from Pinterest to their blog posts, and then their blog posts work to promote their free lead magnet(s), which then promote their paid offerings.

The combination of Pinterest and blog posts is SO POWERFUL. This combo is my biggest source of new clients and email list subscribers (and I don’t even have to spend any money on ads!).

Besides Pinterest, your blog posts can also bring in organic traffic from Google, too, if you implement SEO correctly. If you’re not sure how to do that, I recommend checking out Mariah Magazine’s course on Easy SEO for Solopreneurs.

This Should Not Be the Very First System You Create

If you’re a service-based business owner looking to get started with systems, I actually wouldn’t recommend starting with a blogging workflow. Although I LOVE this type of workflow so much and definitely think everyone should (eventually) have it, I also don’t want to steer you wrong. 

I think it’s important to really prioritize what systems you start with, since they can sometimes take a while to get right. And the ones that are going to give you the best ROI are your Discovery Call System and your Client Onboarding System. 

But once you have those important client-related systems in place, you can start working on some of your more front-facing marketing systems that will help bring new prospective clients in the door. And a blogging workflow is a great place to focus on if you’re looking to do that, because the content that you create is a really foundational element of your business. 

But make sure you’re ready! I talk about the order to work on the marketing pieces of your business in this post on What Types of Marketing Should You Focus On?

Use Your Content to Fuel Other Areas of Your Marketing Funnel

Pretty much everything that you do in your business, whether it’s your social media posts, your newsletters, your launches — it all comes back to your content. It’s really the crux and heart of your business when you think about it. 

Everything revolves around your free content, and each piece that you create can be repurposed in so many different ways. For example, in my Instagram System, all of the content you create for the whole month is repurposed from blog post content that you’ve already created. 

And remember — it doesn’t have to specifically be blog post content. When I say “blog post” I’m just referring to whatever type of core content you produce in your business, regardless of its form.

Having a blogging workflow means that a lot of these other marketing elements will start to fall into place. Especially if you include those pieces into your blogging workflow — like having a task to make sure that every time you write a blog post, a newsletter promoting that post also gets sent out.

What Does a Blogging Workflow Include?

We already briefly covered what a workflow is, but I’ll remind you! A workflow is basically just a templated list of tasks in a specific order. These workflows are created based on a process that you’ve come up with for your unique way of doing something (like creating a blog post).

A blogging workflow should include all of the steps that go into creating a blog post (and anything else associated with it, like newsletters and social content) in the order that you need to complete them in. 

WARNING: Don’t get too overly ambitious with your blogging workflow. 

If you’re anything like me, you might be something of a perfectionist. 🙋🏻‍♀️  As perfectionists, we have a cute tendency to bite off a little bit more than we can actually chew (I’m so guilty of this.)

This problem doesn’t come up with every single system you create in your business. But sometimes (especially when it’s marketing-related projects for YOUR business, not tasks you need to complete for your clients), we get a little bit in over our heads. 

We use the reverse-engineering method to build out these massively complex, amazing workflows based on our big, awesome goals that…aren’t actually feasible for us to complete on a consistent basis. 😬  I’ve been there. And the only thing you’re doing when you build out workflows this complex is setting yourself up for failure.

So when you’re creating your blogging workflow, make sure to be REALISTIC about what you and your team will have the time and capacity to complete. And don’t underestimate how long these tasks are going to take to complete! (Hint: It’s always longer than you think.)

How to Plan & Systemize to Avoid Overwhelm

Sit down and write down a list of everything that you’d love to include in this workflow in a perfect world. This helps you see the full picture of everything and all the options of what you could potentially do. Then, get serious and figure out how much time you (and your team) actually have to dedicate to this workflow, and make adjustments based on that.

You may need to make adjustments after you create the workflow, too, if you find that it’s still too overwhelming. Go into it knowing that you might need to further pare it down or delegate even more of the tasks to your team.

There are also ways to better systemize your workflows so that you can be more productive or delegate even more to your team. 

For example, one of my blogging workflow tasks that I don’t always have time to complete is writing a newsletter for each post. But if I took the time to sit down and build out an SOP for creating that newsletter, I could delegate it out to my team and only have to glance at it to approve before it gets sent out. 

It’s a good idea to start out with something SUPER basic (like the example I showed above!). Then, once you’ve fully mastered the “bare-bones” version of your workflow, then you can start to get a bit fancier and add on to it. 

I also recommend putting a daily or weekly schedule in place. This will help you make sure that you’ve set aside plenty of time for working ON your business as well as IN your business.

If you’re still feeling overwhelmed, in The Systems Society I include several different versions of copy & paste blogging workflow templates that you can pick and choose from, depending on what you need in your business! There’s also a training on my Easy Weekly Block Schedule that allows me to prioritize both client work and tasks for my own business.

How to Build Your Blogging Workflow

Create Content Marketing Goals and an Overall Strategy

Before you dive in and start creating the nitty-gritty of the workflow, it’s important to think about your content from a broader perspective. How do these pieces of content fit into your overall marketing strategy?

One mistake I see people making is just randomly creating content with no purpose or goal in mind. Your content should ALWAYS have an end game, and you need to be thinking about that way in advance. Because it’s not just about the goal of one singular piece of content — it’s also about how all of your content works together.

So before you create even one more piece of content, sit down and make a strategic plan. 

Think about things like:

• What are my promotional goals this year?
• How does my content work towards and build to achieving those goals?
• How frequently do I want to publish new content?
• What type of content do I want to produce? (i.e. blog posts, Facebook Lives, YouTube videos, podcast episodes, etc.)
• How much time do I have to dedicate to my content each week/month?
• Are there weekly, monthly, or quarterly themes I want to stick to?
• How will I come up with and choose my content topics?

Once you have a better idea of what your overall content marketing strategy looks like, you’re in a better position to create a workflow that will make sure your content and blogging workflow is best optimized to achieve your goals.

Related: How to Create a Super Effective Editorial Calendar

Brainstorm All the Elements & Steps of Your Blogging Workflow

We talked about this a little bit earlier, but because your core content is at the center of your overall marketing strategy, you have the opportunity to create a lot of other elements along with each blog post to help fill out those other areas. 

Brainstorm Your Elements

First, sit down and think about all the elements that you want to create along with each core piece of content. This could be things like:

• Blog post
• Facebook Live
• IG Live
• IGTV
• IG Reel
• TikTok video
• YouTube video
• Email newsletter
• Lead magnet
• Instagram feed posts
• IG Stories
• Facebook Page posts
• LinkedIn article
• LinkedIn posts
• Facebook Group posts
• Social media and/or featured graphics

Again, do not bite off more than you can chew! 

For example, you don’t necessarily need to have a brand-new lead magnet for every single post. Some people like to do this, but it’s not mandatory — you can just promote a more general lead magnet in each post.

But if you’re already planning on creating email newsletters or Instagram posts anyway, repurposing the content from your blog posts is a great way to save time and be more productive!

You can also repurpose your video, too. For example, the idea of creating a Facebook Live, YouTube video AND an IGTV for one piece of content probably sounds pretty overwhelming. 😅  But you could easily just record one video and edit it slightly differently for each platform.

If you do plan to incorporate video, I recommend doing a live video (like a Facebook Live) first. Then, you can get that video transcribed and use that as the outline for your blog posts. And then you can edit the live video for YouTube and IGTV. These are also all things that are pretty easy to delegate out to your team! So all you would be responsible for is just recording that one video, and then they could take it from there.

Brainstorm Your Steps

Once you’ve figured out all of the elements that you plan to create in each blogging workflow, you need to list out all of the steps and put them in the correct order.

This is where the whole “reverse engineering” thing really comes in handy. Think about all the elements you want to end up with at the end of this process, and what steps go into completing them. Try to be as specific as possible. 

For instance, in the super basic workflow example I showed above, “Promote blog post on social media” is definitely not specific enough. 

You will want to have steps more like:

• Design 1 square IG promotional graphic
• Write 1 promotional Instagram post for the new post
• Write 3 repurposed content Instagram posts from the blog post content
• Schedule the Instagram posts using Later
• etc.

It’s especially helpful to break it down like this if you have multiple specialized team members, like a graphic designer and copywriter. That way, you can delegate out the graphics task(s) to your graphic designer and the copywriting task(s) to your copywriter!

Create Your Blogging Workflow in Asana

I usually like to brainstorm all the elements and steps on paper or in a Google Doc first. Once you feel like you have all the steps you need, it’s time to move everything over into your project management software.

Personally, I love and use Asana!

In Asana, create a workflow template in whatever project you’d like to put it in. My blogging workflow template lives in my “Content Marketing” project.

Related: How to Make a Task Scheduling System for Your Team

Test Your Workflow

Once your workflow is created, I recommend to fully test it by running through it by yourself several times before attempting to delegate it to any team members. During this testing phase, I often find several things that I want to adjust or change before I officially finalize it.

It’s also a great chance to review your process and see if there are any further ways you can streamline it. 

Like maybe you can create a newsletter template for the newsletter that goes along with each post (if you’re doing one) to make that part of the process easier and faster. Or Canva templates for all of your social media graphics.

Or maybe there are certain tasks that simply don’t need to get done. For example, I recently cut out the creation of IG Story promotional graphics for some of my posts because I found that I just wasn’t using them 🤷🏻‍♀️ 

This is the perfect time to run through your workflow over and over again to make sure that there aren’t any sticking points. It should really FLOW. As you work through it, identify if there are any pieces that just don’t feel “right” or as easy as they should and see if you can think of a way to improve your workflow to solve that issue. 

One sticking point I identified in my blogging workflow a few years ago is a great example. We have a tech VA who formats and schedules the posts in WordPress. While doing that, they would realize that the Yoast SEO plugin was occasionally flagging the posts with a red or orange readability score. But our tech VA isn’t an expert in copywriting or SEO, so they struggled to fix these errors on their own. We solved this issue by (a) including a task in the workflow for someone else to review the posts in WordPress after they had been scheduled to address any lingering Yoast issues, and (b) updated the blog post writing SOP for our copywriters so that they can work on following all of Yoast’s guidelines while they’re writing the post, which means that we now have way fewer instances where we need to fix things after it’s been scheduled.

Putting in the upfront effort to make sure your blogging workflow is really streamlined and efficient will help save you HOURS of time down the road. And now is the perfect time to do it, while it is all still fresh in your mind!

Create SOPs for the Tasks You Plan to Delegate to Your Team

During the testing phase is also when I’ll create any SOPs or instructions that will be needed for whenever it’s time to delegate those tasks to my team member(s). I like to create my SOPs while I’m doing each task so that I remember to include every single important detail. You can also use this as an opportunity to simply record a video of yourself completing the task!

Note: This is a topic for a whole other day, but I actually don’t recommend using video SOPs for several reasons. But it can be a great starting point, especially if you don’t have a ton of time to dedicate to a written SOP! Another thing I like to do is record a video and then have one of my team members create a written SOP based on the video.

SOP creation can be a little overwhelming, especially if you’re not super experienced with doing it. (Honestly, though, I LOVE creating them!) But don’t put too much pressure on yourself. Especially if you’re still a solopreneur, a great way to do this is to just create one SOP for one task in the workflow every time you run through it. Eventually, all of the SOPs will be created, but you won’t feel pressured to sit down and do them all at one time!

Now that you know exactly how to create a blogging workflow — it’s time to get started! All you need to do is set aside 1-2 hours to brainstorm your process. Then you can start building out the workflow the next time it’s time for you to create a post.

If you want even more tips on creating a Blog Post System for your business, make sure to check out The Systems Society. It includes multiple one-click plug & play blogging workflow templates (and tons of other resources) that you can start using in your business today!