My blogging routine

I thought this might make a bit of an interesting post, at least I hope so! I've been blogging for about six years and I've now got into a real routine so thought I'd share it with you so you can get a bit of behind the scenes info.

I'm not a full time blogger as I work during the week 9am - 5pm as a PR Consultant. This means the only time I really get to blog is at the weekends. I tell myself every week that I'm going to make full use of Saturday and Sunday for blog photo taking and writing, but usually it ends up that I start taking photos around mid-morning on the Sunday.

Most of my photos are product photos and are taken on my bedroom windowsil with those handy wooden floor tile samples from B&Q, however I popped in there yesterday and picked up the marble effect sticky back plastic so now I'm a 'proper' blogger. I am keen to try and get away from flat lays on these backgrounds because it's become so overdone now but until I can think of an alternative, I'll carry on.

I use a Canon 500D for my photograph taking and I am forever learning. Vince bought me a set of lenses and a small ring light for Christmas so I'm currently trying out all the different lenses and using the light to my advantage in these dark and dreary days. It's working out ok but I always feel like there's room to improve! I do my photo editing in Gimp or Picmonkey and it usually consists of brightening them a bit!

I tend to take all my photographs before writing any blog posts. As I write this it's a Sunday evening. I'll usually aim to write my posts on the Sunday evening or even write them once I get home from work of an evening. I'm currently going through a phase of scheduling posts on a Monday, Wednesday and Friday. I was previously scheduling one week on a Monday, Wednesday and Friday then the following week on a Tuesday and a Thursday but am happy with my current set up. I was finding scheduling posts every day far too much work to cram into one or two days and I was finding that comment numbers were down because before people had a chance to find a post, a new one was popping up.

I was previously scheduling posts for 5.30pm when people would be home from work and be logging on but have recently changed this to 8.30am so people can read my post before work, hopefully. I use Tweetdeck to schedule blog promotion tweets and these are scheduled for 8.30am, 12.30pm, 5.30pm, 20.30pm and 23.30pm. I'm not sure whether I should change this up a bit more but I guess these are key times of the day for most people.

During the week I like to reply to comments on posts, return comments and get involved with Twitter chats. I'm hoping once the lighter evenings start then I can get some more photograph taking crammed into the week. I feel like this would really help a lot and leave my weekends a bit free-er for general lazing around.

I am pretty happy with my routine but as I've mentioned I would possibly like to change it up a bit. Change is always good and I'd like to get a fancy new layout for the New Year so watch this space! I'm also aiming to have one non-beauty post per week and I currently have a long list of ideas jotted down in my notebook. I think it's going well so far...

What's your blogging routine? Do you enjoy it or is it time to switch it up? Do you have any tips to share? Let me know in the comments.