WHAT WE DO WHEN WE’RE FEELING UNINSPIRED (+ HOW WE PLAN OUR POSTS)

We all know that blog burnout is a real thing, when you work in an industry or job that requires you to be creative on a daily basis it can be difficult to keep inspired and constantly come up with new and exciting ideas. We tend to get this feeling right after Christmas, it’s a new start to the year and after creating content based around a Christmas theme for over a month we sometimes struggle to get back into the swing of things, but good news! There are ways to combat this if this happens to you too.

We create 5 posts a week for Bespoke Bride and we like to keep these a good mix of DIYs, real weddings, advice posts and personal posts but how do we come up with these ideas? Well we’re here to share our top tips on keeping inspired and working ahead of schedule!

BRAINSTORM

First off we have a big brainstorming session! This includes us looking through wedding forums to see what brides are asking questions about and whether we can write some advice pieces around them. We also look through all of our liked instagram posts to see if anything sparks inspiration from those, we go through the comments in our past posts to see if anyone had any questions that we could build posts around and we look through magazines and real weddings to see if there’s any decor pieces, favours, etc that we could create as DIYs. We then read back through our reader survey results to see what you guys want to see more of, what DIYs you’d like, any issues you’re struggling with, personal pieces you’d like to know about us and anything else! (by the way our current reader survey is still going so we’d love to get your feedback here!)

NO BAD IDEAS

We set the rule that there are no bad ideas, meaning anything and everything that pops into our head we write down in a word document until we’ve got a huge list between us! We then go through the list together and talk through our ideas, what we envisioned and how the post would work. If we love the idea we roll with it and keep it on the list! If we think it’s not going to work then we either scrap it, or save it for perhaps a different season or when we’ve got more time to create the bigger projects.

PLANNING

Once we have a list of post ideas that we think will work we go through and plan what images we’d like to use in those posts, since we like to create as much of our content ourselves this means styling, photographing and editing our own images for the majority of our posts so we like to think about what props we might need for certain posts, if we need to hire a studio for photoshoots, what outfits we’d roughly like to wear, etc and then we create a private Pinterest board with all of these styling ideas on to keep everything in one place. We then order things that we need 1-2 weeks before we’re going to need them so we’re super prepared!

SCHEDULING

We like to try and get a 6 week schedule in our calendar to work towards, now this doesn’t mean we’re working 6 weeks ahead of ourselves at all it just means that we’ve got a plan in place! That way if we need to move things around we can, say if a real wedding gets submitted that we love or a styled shoot or sponsored post we can easily move back one of our other posts to make room for it and keep everything flowing nicely! There’s nothing worse than realising you have nothing going on the blog the next day and trying to quickly shove together something for the sake of getting a post on, it ends up being low quality and not how we want our blog to be! Also having a schedule in front of us allows us to be much more organised, we know when we need to get materials in time for and when we need to schedule in photo shoots for certain posts, etc

And that is pretty much how it works behind the scenes! Or at least how we try to keep things running smoothly, obviously we have projects go wrong along the way and have to move things around but that’s the good thing about having a schedule! We hope you guys enjoy reading our posts as much as we enjoy creating them! xx