The Ultimate Blog Podcast - The 3 Tools That Save Our Sanity Every Week

Episode Date: September 16, 2025

Blogging can feel like a juggling act. Without a plan or the right systems in place, it’s easy to get overwhelmed and feel like you’re always behind. That’s exactly why Amy and Jennifer have fallen in love with a few blogging tools that help them stay organized, focused, and sane. Tune into this episode of The Ultimate Blog Podcast to hear three of their go-to tools they use every week. Whether you’re brand new to blogging or several years in, these are simple, beginner-friendly tools that can grow with you and make a real difference in your business.🗺️ Get our free Blogging Systems Blueprint ✉️ Try Kit for email marketing🖱️ Try ClickUp for project management🔎 How to get started with Google Drive💻 Join The Ultimate Blog Roadmap🔗Click here and check out the show notes for this episode!Do you love this podcast? Say thanks by leaving a positive review and/or rating!

Welcome to the Ultimate Blog podcast. This podcast is the podcast we wish we had when we started blogging. I'm Amy Reineke and I'm Jennifer Draper. Our episodes dive deep into how to monetize your blog, sharing unique insights and practical tips. We bring you in-depth interviews with successful bloggers and experts who offer valuable, actionable advice. Our mission is to educate, support, inspire, and empower you in your blogging business. Welcome to the ultimate blog podcast. Okay, today's going to be a fun episode. We are going to share with you some tools that we use each and every single week,

actually every day, if we're honest, in our blogging business, also within Spark Media, to just help us feel organized, to help us feel like we have some control and to keep our sanity, because let's be real. That's what we all need. So we have not always used all of these tools. So I feel like we could be like a before and after story in regards to what organization looked like before and after. If you caught some of these other episodes, then you've heard us say that, you know,

we used to be the women of sticky notes and notebooks. And it often led us to feeling like we just weren't getting done what we wanted to get done. I think that there are probably ideas that we've had over the years that have never come to fruition. and if I can be really transparent, there's probably some success that could have happened that didn't because we didn't have a plan for it. And we didn't have the ideas or capacity for it because we weren't organized. So we started this business back in 2017. So we've had a lot of ideas over the years for sure. And while not every single idea can be implemented, we do think that having some

tools and systems in place is one way to take those really good, solid ideas and to make a plan for them and that way they can be, you know, obviously dreamt up, but then they can have a plan that moves forward to where it's not just this thing in your mind anymore, but it's something that you're actually going to do. So we're going to share three tools today. We're going to keep it pretty simple. All of these tools are tools that we use. There is a learning curve with every single tool. I want to be really clear about that. But that doesn't mean that you shouldn't use them because I know that you're capable. If you can have a blog, then you can learn these tools. They are adaptable to what you need them to be. They can start out very simply, and they don't need to be expensive.

As you grow, they might have other costs associated as you grow, but you'll be ready for those when that happens. And so just know that these are tools that we firmly believe can really, really help you in your blogging business. Just stay organized. Keep her head on straight to where you can be working towards the goals that you are going after. Yeah, our goal is just to really provide you some foundations so that not only are you learning, like, how to do keyword research and write a blog post, but also how to run your business and how to run it in a way that feels good, that feels like something that you can actually accomplish. And so there's a million different tools out there. And like Amy said, we chose three today that we

we want to talk about because we feel these are kind of the basic level things to get started with that will make a true difference in your business. And whether or not you're, you know, years into this or you're starting today, these things are for you to do. So the first one that I want to talk about is it's kind of in relation to a system. So a tool that you use to help you with a system in your business. And so one of the very first things is to have task and project management. And I don't even know how many times we've talked about ClickUp because it has truly been life changing for us. ClickUp is a task management project management tool. There are so many of them out there. There is not necessarily one better than another. This is the one we

chose. And so that's the one we talk about. That's the one that we use every single day. Amy and I have other businesses. We use it for that as well. And it just keeps us. very organized. So, you know, whether you use ClickUp, whether you use Asana or Monday or, you know, Trello or any of those things. Those are all options. Just pick one. Pick one and just do your best to stick with it. So the idea is that, you know, start with the basics. Just your brainstorming to-do list. You can just start putting those things in there. So maybe it's your list of blog posts that you want to write. Maybe it's all of those recurring tasks that you might forget to do otherwise. Update your blog plugins or check your email. You can go to a great level

of detail or you can just be basic here. But the idea is to start with the systems that you have in place and then tie those to, like if you listen to the last episode where we talked about batching, maybe you're assigning the days that you're going to do those things. So that way every morning when you wake up to sit down and work you can go into click up and you can see oh today's my day to edit post or today's my day to schedule my social media whatever the case might be you know what's expected of you that day you can get in the right mindset and you can look ahead you know for the rest of the week you're making sure that everything makes sense that you're meeting any deadlines that you may have to meet you know if you're if you've got a brand deal or something like

that you're able to get that information in there. And so that is just the best way to start with a project management tool. And there's a free version of ClickUp you can start with. Just start getting your tasks in there. It can do a lot more. It can help you in so many ways in your business. You can use it for documentation and SOPs and training tools and sharing it with VAs. It can expand with you. But if you start today and just start making a list of your tasks and keeping the important information in there. It's going to be such a huge tool that will improve your life. So just sign up for clickup. We'll put a link in the show notes. And just today, set it up and go in and put in your content calendar and just start to see how good that feels

to know what you've got upcoming and what you need to plan for. Yep. It really has been a game changer. We actually even started implementing it a little bit with like household stuff, like things that me and my husband need to talk about. I also use it for the nonprofit board that I'm on. So we use a different platform that has like tasks in it. And I'm not going to name the platform because I don't want to talk negatively about it. But it does not function well at all. Like when you've used something like click up or something that like really works well for you. So like tasks will get entered in there for me. And then I just take them and put them all and click up for myself because I have found that that is much easier for me to know

like what is expected of what I need to do. So whether it's a blogging business, whether it's an organization that you're a part of, you can have different work spaces within there. So if you just feel like in general, you want to have some organization surrounding your life, it really can provide that. And I was probably a little resistant to it. And the beginning simply because it was such a huge change from like notebooks and sticky sticky notes but looking back now i cannot even imagine our business functioning without it i don't know how i would do what we do every single day without having it so highly recommend click up so good like we're just going to keep talking about it i think so if you have any trouble or

whatever with the setup please feel free to email us and we can give you a great resource as well for that. And then we could help you with, you know, little things here and there. But we've also trained the people in the roadmap to be able to use that and can answer questions within the roadmap. So if that's an area that, you know, you want to be part of the roadmap, that is an area that we could help you with, like with the system in there. We did a training on ClickUp in there. And then if our members want to do that, then that's an area that we can support you with. So another area, another tool that we often sing the praises of here is Kit. And that is the email marketing platform that we use and that we

recommend to all of our members, anybody who we have ever told about blogging. We often say something about Kit in the same sentence. Building your email list from the go, you know, is a really important part of having that strong foundation. Having a platform that you can trust and that is easy to use and that they have a great customer service team. I think is also equally important. And Kit provides that. You can automate your emails, which is going to allow you to be consistent. You can also set up different series, such as a welcome series or a nurture series. That way, you can continue to stay engaged with those people who are finding you, whether they're finding you from a Google search or social media or

Pinterest or however they are finding you. If they join your email list, they automatically get plugged into a welcome series. And you can do all of that work ahead of time. That way you are staying engaged and staying consistent. That way they can stay connected. So this will really help you in regards to staying on top of mind with the people who are subscribing without a ton of effort. Another reason that I love this tool as well is you can also sell products within the kit platform. So let's say you have an ebook or something that you have created, even if it's like a video email series or something like that that you've created, you can set that up and sell it via kit, which I think is a really awesome opportunity for bloggers to start building some

revenue, especially if like you don't have ad revenue coming in or you're not working with affiliates yet or things like that. You can sell products within your email marketing platform and set that up there. It connects with Stripe. And it makes it. very simple and easy to use. And so that is another way that you can be building some revenue with your blogging business. And another thing I love about it is that it has something called the creator network within it.

And so it allows you to create these connections with other bloggers. And so when somebody subscribes to you, it's going to pop up some other creators that they recommend. And we have had great success with the creator network and getting a lot of new subscribers and finding new people that way who are learning about us. us via the creator network that is within the kit platform. So you have to be a kit user, like you have to have that as your email marketing platform in order to be able to use it. And so I just firmly believe that this company truly has the creators at the heart and soul

of their business. They have a conference that we've been to multiple times. And we leave that conference just feeling so encouraged by them, knowing like this product is so much more than just an email marketing platform. This is the product that. has been designed to help creators find success. So highly recommend Kit. If you do not have your email like platform signed up yet with your blog, this is the one that we recommend. They do have a free version of that to get started on. So that is an option. We have both used other email marketing platforms. This is far and away better than what I know I was using before. I think Jennifer would probably agree. And it's one that we can feel really confident about when we are

sharing within the roadmap and helping people get this set up, like, the support is incredible. And if we can't help you figure it out, we know that they are going to be able to help you figure it out. And so highly recommend Kit for your email marketing platform just to stay connected to get those blog posts out to them when you write them. And also series, just so much goodness there. And we will continue to just sing their praises because we know it can be a really beneficial part to your blogging business. Yeah, I love how you can start. You can start. with it in a small area and it they're just adding stuff all the time so it can really grow with you and it can help you grow your business and that's really why we recommend all of these tools

is because they're either going to help you organize or grow your business right and so speaking of organizing I think one of the trickiest things to implement but one of the most important it's not exactly exciting like click up or kit but like organize your content and organize your images. And so having a tool to do that is just going to make it so much easier. And when you're thinking about organizing your images, where you're going to save those, where you're going to keep a copy of them so that you can find them easily. There's lots of different things you can use. One of the easiest and most basic places to start and it's generally free unless you just get a ton of content, Google Drive. So set yourself up at Google Drive and set up folders within Google Drive.

to keep things organized so that you can find it. But start saving any images you use in your blog post. You can create a spreadsheet that has a list of all the content that you want to write, any supporting documents that you have that you're going to use in writing a blog post, and even any of your organizational documents, you can keep all of this in Google Drive. And that way you have easy access to all that important information that you need. and it's not on your hard drive that's really important because computers die crash get coffee spilled on them i don't i'm trying to think of somebody who did oh yeah that was me i spent coffee on my computer and ruined it at one point in time yeah you don't want to lose everything so use some

kind of a cloud storage like a free google drive if you are you know creating a lot of con or a lot of images and you have you need to have the need to like share and stuff like that you can't can use Google Drive. You can also use Dropbox. That's another great tool. And also, you know, if you're keeping lists and things like that, you can use Airtable, which is a combination like spreadsheet database. But just in the very simplest way, start with Google Drive and create folders, create one for blog posts, create one for organizational documents, things like that. So that's where you can store those ideas. The research that you've done, any contracts for brand partnerships, you can put everything there so that everything is in one place.

You're not losing things in notebooks and sticky notes. I know we all like to write things down. And I think that that's a great way. Like there's something about the handwriting brain connection. But I've gotten to the point now where I've lost so many notebooks or I can't find that one page or I can't find that one back of an envelope that I scribbled something on. I try to take anything like that and put it. in a document that I can label and save and easily find later.

You can just hop into Google Drive. You can search for that document. And it will just save you so much time, so much frustration that you might have with, oh, I remember, but I don't know where it is. Everything is in one place. If you need to pull back an image that used in another blog post,

it will be right there for you, all of that documentation you need. So just implementing some, like this right away as soon as possible. I cannot stress enough how much this will help you out in your blogging business. Yeah. And I just want to encourage somebody to like it's okay to be a beginner at the organization piece of all this. Yeah. And to find your own way. We've said that in the other episodes, but let yourself be a beginner in the organizational piece of it. You might like open your Google Drive and like put some folders in there and then you end up being like, I don't like the way

this functions, good news. You can move it around. You can rename the folder. You can do all kinds of different things with it. But you're not going to ever get there if you don't start and start simple. Just like we said, like with all these other things, start very simple. And then add on, you might, you know, might like really get excited about organizing all of this and put more in there. And you might start organizing other areas of your life because you find that it feels so much better when it's like that. But we just want to offer that encouragement. Like, Yes, it might be a shift, but let the shift happen. Otherwise, it can happen.

And we don't want that to happen to you. So just let yourself be organized. Let yourself be a beginner. And this might be the first episode that we're going to have an explicit warning because I just said the S word. Yeah. It's overwhelming probably to get started. But it's so freeing the way that being organized and having a systematic approach

can actually just open up. up your creativity, open up those channels and help keep you from getting in hot water down the road when you're looking for a contract or something like that. Or you forgot a deadline, whatever. Like having these things in place is really truly going to help you in the future. So don't let it overwhelm you. Just pick one thing and start simple. Start with it today. What's the biggest pain point you have right now? Is it that you can't remember due dates? Is that you can't find important documents. Pick one of these tools and just start on it today in the very basic form. Let it, let yourself be a beginner at it and just keep knowing that you can change and adapt as

time goes on and none of it's written in stone so you can certainly improve things as you go. Now, we've only talked about three tools today. We have more to share with you. So if this sounds of interest to you, if this is something you want to implement in your business, then head over to the Ultimate blogpodpodcast.com slash systems. We have created a blogging systems blueprint. It will also share with you two sample days of how to organize your blog work and your workflow. But at the end of that is also included a list of these three plus several more blogging systems for you to think about and learn about and see if they will solve any pain points that you are having in your blogging business.

Okay, so the call to action is to download the freebie. You can do it. Let yourself be a beginner. Allow the shift to happen. Allow yourself to just step into this so you can find success. Q4 is right around the corner. Maybe this year, that's the focus this year is Q4, is I'm going to get organized to where I can flip that calendar to January, 2026,

and I can feel more in control of my blogging business. than I ever have before and I don't want to spend 2026 overwhelmed. I don't want to feel like I don't have a plan and spend the next couple months like ironing out the details starting with this blueprint. And if we can support you further, we would always love to do that. If you are listening to this, you always have an open invitation to join us in the ultimate blog roadmap. That is our course plus membership community where we can support you, whether you are a beginner blogger, whether you have yet to start your blog or whether you are already blogging. We can offer you the support in there that you need, helping you build your blog,

helping you create those solid foundations, but also encouraging you along the way. We have monthly calls. We have course content in there. The goal is that you can get poured into more than just this episode every single Tuesday. We love that you hit play today, but we would love to connect with you and just really be a bigger part of your journey. So if you have any interest in that, we would also love to invite you to join us over there as well at ultimate blog roadmap.com is where you can find more information on that. And there's

also a link in the show notes. So go forth people and get organized and create a workflow and a system. And we're going to be here. Cheer anyone always. Thanks for tuning in today. Thanks for listening to the Ultimate Blog podcast. If you'd like to learn more about building your blog, visit The Ultimate Blogpodcast.com backslash newsletter to get signed up for our email newsletter. If you enjoyed this episode, we'd love for you to share it with a friend, subscribe, and leave a rating and review on Apple Podcasts. Thanks for tuning in today and we'll see you next time.