Organizing blog material

By now, you've all begun publishing posts with exquisite, click-inspiring, audience-luring headlines. Yay! Go team!

Now, let's talk about how to wrangle all your content. Oh, it doesn't seem like much now. But 435 posts later, you'll wish those images and rough drafts and final versions were corralled neatly together.

Obviously, create a system intuitive to you. Here's my suggestion, however, based on bitter, bitter experience. Keep a folder with original text (then copied-and-pasted into the post form). Maintain copies of all images, before you resize, crop and caption them for the blog – as well as final compressed versions.

For extra gold stars, once you've polished a post, grab the code (click "edit html" on Blogger's top-right tab above the entry submission field). Back this up on your hard drive. Should you ever accidentally wipe your site – or, say, sell an e-book based on your blog – you will be so, so, so very happy to have the components assembled.