How I Prepared My Business for Maternity Leave
As I'm writing this post I am 28 weeks pregnant and it's April 19. When you finally get to read this I will have a newborn hanging out with me and I will NOT be worried about blogging, social media, or building my list. The only things I will be focused on is our new baby and my family. And I'm only allowed to do this because I prepared myself and my business.
Having a baby is a pretty major life event. Even if you get months to prepare it seems like the last couple sneak up on you. Especially when you have other little ones running around.
My online business is very important to me. When I found out I was having number 3 I knew right away that I didn't want to hit pause. I went into full blown planning mode for a few reasons:
I didn't want to have to worry about blogging for at least a month
I didn't want to have to worry about social media for at least a month
I didn't want to have to worry that my email list was collecting dust
The thought of nursing a baby and trying to figure out what to blog about just didn't mesh well. I wanted all my focus to be on this new little person (right now I don't know if it's a boy or a girl.) #drivingmycrazy
So, I thought about the next (this was at the beginning of April) 5 months and I started writing ideas on a piece of paper. I ended up with 17 different ideas.
Then I looked at each one and labeled them as to what category/theme they would fall into. Like email marking, personal development, sales, etc.
I ended up with 5 different themes, which worked out perfectly. I like to plan my months in chunks so I knew this system was working well for me so far.
Here's an example: for the month of May I blogged about email marketing. I had 5 different ideas/blog posts and they fell under the email marketing theme. So, May's blog schedule looked like this:
I did this type of planning all up to the end of August. I assigned myself to get 1 blog post done a day (more on the weekends) and I ended up finishing everything in less then two and half weeks. That's a lot of blog posts for that amount of time!
It's the best feeling ever to see all of the scheduled posts ready to go in the backend of my site!
I also scheduled all of my Instagram posts, Pinterest pins, and Podcast images (and episodes) in this amount of time as well.
I wouldn't have been able to do all of this so seamlessly if I didn't have a template to guide me right through it all. I got a huge feeling of satisfaction every time I got to check off a new task as complete.
You don't need some fancy project management system to get things done. All you need is all you need. Make sense?
You can use this template for anything. Being pregnant is not a pre-requisite ;) I highly suggest you take a peak and see it's something you'd use because it saved me!