Welcome to the Book Blogger Organization Challenge!
If you haven’t heard of this challenge and are interested in finding out more, check out the intro post! But basically the concept is simple: Whether you want to dedicate a lot of time to this challenge or a little, I’m here to help you get organized and work on blog maintenance in 2015! Everything is broken down month-by-month so you only have to focus on ONE idea at a time. January seemed to kick us off GREAT! Let’s get ready for March!
MARCH 2015 ORGANIZATION CHALLENGE
Social Media & Review Outlets
March is all about getting your social media organized and updating those review outlets (outside of your blog). Now’s the time to spruce up the info on your social media accounts, delete old ones, add new ones, and work on a bunch of cross-posting reviews!
CLEAN UP SOCIAL MEDIA ACCOUNTS
- Do you have a bunch of accounts that you created that you don’t use? Delete them!
- Are you looking to try out another form of social media? Wondered if Pinterest can help your blog? Looking to start an Instagram account? Now’s the time!
- Update your bio section, location, name, profile picture, contact info, you name it!
- Clean up who you’re following. Are you missing some key friends, authors or bloggers? Do you follow a lot of inactive accounts? I use Just Unfollow for Twitter to check out accounts that haven’t been active in a long time. You can also see who you are following that doesn’t follow you back, recent followers, recent unfollowers, and more!
THE GOODREADS PROJECT
Now’s a good time to focus on cleaning up Goodreads! Here are some ideas on what to look for to spruce up your Goodreads account!
I also created a post a while back all about Goodreads and some tips and tricks I’ve discovered along the way. It’s a TINY bit outdated but still could be a great resource! –> “How to Make Goodreads Work For You“
- Delete duplicates on your shelves: Go to “My Books” and then below all of your shelves you’ll see “find duplicates”. Just MAKE SURE you’re deleting the correct version! I accidentally deleted a version that had all my status updates for a book and I was pretty bummed. There’s no way to get that back if you delete the wrong one!
- Create new shelves and delete ones you don’t really need: I’m a Goodreads shelf fanatic. If you’re looking to get more organized, create some new ones for genres, star rating, POV, currently own, or where you got them from! Or you can delete some of the shelves you haven’t really been using.
- Go through the books you’ve shelved and make sure they’re shelved properly! For some reason if I add a book to a shelf and don’t put it on Read/To-Read/Currently Reading, the default is “Read” so I’ve had to go back and swap that around to “To-Read”. I’ve also gone through ALL of the books that I’ve shelved and made sure they’re all in the right place!
- Update to proper versions: I’m not too huge on having the correct version of a book on my shelves but I know some people are! (For me what matters is the right cover, most of the time) but if you like Goodreads to reflect the proper versions that you own or have read, hop to it!
- TBR Culling! Go through your TBR and remove books that you don’t want to read anymore. I’m sure we all have HUNDREDS of books on our TBRs so now’s a good time to weed through what you might be able to part with, especially books you don’t already own!
- Check out groups and friend lists too: Here’s another place to update your friends — make sure you’re not missing anyone or remove people (if you so desire) that you don’t need to follow anymore. Same with groups!
CROSS-POSTING
This is a great place to include cross-posting as well. There are several places you can cross-post your reviews — to reach a wider audience, to give feedback to publishers, and to help out authors!
- Decide where you want to cross-post: Social Media. As far as social media goes, you can really post your reviews almost ANYWHERE. Most of us do to Twitter but there’s also Facebook, Goodreads, Pinterest, Tumblr, Google+, Bloglovin’ and even places like StumbleUpon (there are obviously more places, but those are my main ones)! You should be able to set your blog up to automatically post your reviews when they go live too!
- Decide where you want to cross-post: Amazon, B&N, + more. I try to post everything to Goodreads and Amazon. Books I fall in LOVE with, I’ll try to go the extra mile and post to Barnes and Noble and The Book Depository as well.
- Cross-posting to Netgalley and Edelweiss: As far as I know, you can only post your reviews to Netgalley if you have the book on your shelf (aka, if you’ve been approved) but you can post ANY review to Edelweiss if you search for the book (usually only books that have been published within the last few years — I’m not sure how far back their database goes).
- Sending reviews to publishers: This is something I am SO BAD AT (aka I don’t do it). I really probably should formulate a game plan of sending my reviews to publishers when I receive a book from them! This is one I’m asking for YOUR help with! Let me know all your secrets!!!!
KEEP YOUR STATS ORGANIZED
It’s hard to keep track of all your stats all the time. I created a doc in my Google Drives just for my stats as an easy place to keep track of everything! It has a little intro about who I am and then the stats for my page views as well as a few social media outlets (I didn’t include them ALL because I’m sure the publishers don’t need to know ALL of them).
- Page views: I use StatCounter for my blog. If you’re self hosted, there’s a plug-in so you don’t even have to leave your admin page to view your stats! Self-hosted also allows StatCounter to track where your readers are coming from (as in, what website or link directed them to your blog). If you’re not self-hosted, you can still use StatCounter for accurate stats on your page views — you will just have to access everything through the StatCounter website and it will only tell you what people have viewed on your blog and not where the traffic came from. If you’re a WordPress.com user, you can also use Jetpack (which I’m sure a lot do!) but I didn’t find that to be as accurate as StatCounter because it always counted my OWN page views which don’t really count!
- Social Media Outlets: Besides my blog, I include Twitter, Facebook, Goodreads, and Instagram. I also have a Pinterest and Tumblr account, but I didn’t think those were necessary to include in the stats that I send to publishers when making review requests via Netgalley or Edelweiss. I usually just updated those every once in a while through my Ultimate Book Blogger Plug-In.
- Finding out how many followers you have: It’s a bit difficult to keep track sometimes. I actually have three different places I go to check because not everyone follows me through the same means.
- WordPress/Jetpack: Since I started out as a WordPress.com user, many people still follow my blog through the WordPress dashboard. Jetpack’s Site Stats shows how many followers I have through WordPress.
- Bloglovin’: The easiest way for me to check out how many follower’s via Bloglovin’ is just to sign in and go to Blog Analytics. That will show you how many followers and also your ranking amongst the current category in which you categorized your blog.
- Feedly: I’m not a regular Feedly user so what I did was create an account and essentially I just check up on my own blog through Feedly to see what the number of followers is.
- Feedburner: I still use Feedburner for my RSS option and not many people subscribe that way but I check up on it every once in a while. Its stats and analytics are really easy to spot. It feels a bit outdated but I haven’t gotten into investigating other options! Maybe now is the time!
Organization Tools Mentioned
Just Unfollow // Goodreads // StatCounter // Bloglovin’ // Feedly // Netgalley // Edelweiss // FeedBurner
Have anything else you want to get done this March? Let me know! I’d also love to hear any tips or tricks you have to keep your stats, social media, and other things organized!
Don’t forget to share what you’re accomplishing this month with the hashtag #BlogOrganization!
Grab the button!
NEXT MONTH: Graphics, HTML, CSS, Plug-ins
- Update graphics for posts/memes/events, update button, update header
- Learn Photoshop/Gimp/PicMonkey
- Brush up or try to learn simple HTML and CSS (for layouts, fonts, etc). Take this month to delve into the scary world of coding! (Or at least teach yourself one new thing!)
4 thoughts on “Book Blogger Organization Challenge: March 2015”
I did a lot with design in February but with March need to catch up reviews, didn’t get around to that Friday! Will definitely update social media, all of it seriously needs that. Since I’m obsessed and always on Goodreads, my shelves are already organized on there.
I have a lot of work to do this month. I think this is going to be my busiest month of the whole organization challenge. Goodreads alone is a huge project because mine is such a mess.
Wow, great tips on getting organized. I will admit that in terms of my blog, there are only a few forms of social media I use: Goodreads and Twitter. I love Pinterest, but have no clue how to use it in relation to my blog.
Ooh! I am super excited to work on this this month! I especially like your comments about the stats. I never thought about making an excel sheet for it but I think I’m going to start one tomorrow. Thanks for the ideas!