I just dump it in, spread it out evenly and pack it down by hand lightly. My boa and bp do the rest like digging it up, pushing it into piles, pooping and peeing on it and my boa grabs a tailful of it as she is climbing out of her cage and drops it on the floor for me to clean up. Otherwise, I have never had a problem using aspen. I use the finely shredded Zoo Med stuff. More expensive but I like how its finely shredded and packs down. I also completely dump it after about 2-3 months and just spot clean inbetween then.
I've been using the zoo med stuff and I like a lot. It smells good and looks good. But I've been scrapping the whole thing every week when I clean which is pretty expensive, which is why I was wondering if I was maybe doing it wrong lol.