Balancing the Time You Spend Blogging
Does the time you spend blogging take away from the time that you have doing “offline” tasks such as socializing and networking with friends and family, conversing with those you love? Sure it does. What if there was a way to minimize the time you spend in front of your computer and increase it elsewhere?
In previous posts, I mentioned How to Manage Multiple Blogs and other time-consuming tips to maximize productivity and boost your work flow. Today, I want to introduce a few more tips and ways, which will surely maximize the time you spend blogging, rather than “idling” or consuming unproductive hours.
In what has become the firestorm of blogging, a lot has evolved from the basic from of blogging. Ten or more years ago, people didn’t blog on user interface-conscious platforms such as WordPress, MovableType, and to some extent, the Drupal and Joomla content management systems. A blog was simply a line of communication between a writer and any readers, or followers they received.
When you take a step back from the mess that is a blog today, content and a means of communication to the author always remains intact. Without this, a blog is simply a regular website, only consisting of content and perhaps, a contact form. No one needs to face the difficulties of blogging in a crowded space, full of distractions and obstacles ultimately getting in the way of our goals.
Many of the steps that I address below cross the lines between what is believed to be true and what I have found to work (well for me, at least). I may not be the most successful blogger, but these approaches have led me to be able to meet many of my goals, and can serve as guides for meeting your dreams and aspirations.
Eliminating Time Spent Networking
Along with each post published, a lot of time should be spent promoting that post, launching campaigns, and informing others who follow you about your recent postings. While these tactics certainly can yield great results, the minutes that is spent informing dozens of people, submitting the content to social networking sites, and aggregators adds up to hours upon hours per year. You will never again hold this time in your hands again, and for what it is worth now, may not be the best down the road.
Sure, your blog’s total monthly traffic, links to individual posts, subscriber base, and comment count on each post largely affects how much income you are able to drive from the advertisers into your pocket, but your most loyal subscribers do the promoting for free. In a sense, any blog can succeed with absolutely no promotion except by the natural traffic and subscribers that read your blog everyday.
Nearly every post that draws people to contemplate their own actions, the way they think, or provide a resource that will be useful down the road, if not immediately, is Stumbled, Dugg, and bookmarked heavily within a few hours of being published, even more quickly on popular, heavily trafficked blogs.
In other words, if you relied solely on your visitors to do the work of promoting your content, the time spent on writing each post can be dramatically reduced.
Repetitive Actions
Many people follow the same schedule each and every day; wake up, make breakfast/coffee, get ready for their day at work, head off to work, put in their full day, then head home, eat dinner, enjoy some form of entertainment, whether it be television, the computer/Internet, or whatever it may be, at which point they head off to sleep to prepare for a new day.
6.83 billion people currently live in the world - each has exactly twenty-four hours, to complete what they need to get done each day and coexist among one another.
The struggle that nearly everyone faces is the lack of time. While it is recommended that you receive between seven and nine hours of sleep each night, what if you were able to squeeze in an extra half-hour to hour each day? You’d have between eight and fifteen extra days to spend each year, provided you kept the same schedule.
Countless fields, whether it be in medical, business (general), government, computer (graphic designer, video editing, blogger, developer), and nearly ninety-nine percent of other areas, require that time be spent wisely, without any wavering from standard procedures and schedules.
No matter what action you spend consuming your time, it must be done efficiently. You must also be conscious about how you execute those same tasks while transforming your standard day over to a more productive schedule - quality can’t be reduced or you’ll be repeating the same tasks over and over again until the same results were previously achieved on your non-optimized schedule in a fraction of the time.
Form a Framework You Can Follow
When you take a look at many blogs, they, whether the author knows it or not, follow a fairly consistent pattern in their posting. It doesn’t matter what type of blog it is. Blog authors like to keep everything consistent, whether in post length, types of images used, grammar and writing techniques, and topic.
When you have established this point in your writing, a framework can be implemented, which essentially creates a set of standards, or “flexible boundaries” that you can follow daily. It will be easier to extend beyond your creative boundaries once your writing style is defined and addressed.
Schedule, Schedule, Schedule
Several useful tools have been created for managing your daily life. Simple calendars from Google and Yahoo have become the preferred methods for tracking calendar events, while Remember The Milk is an alternative tool for quickly managing tasks.
No one is able to remember events months into the future unless they happen to have some fantastic ability that I, myself, don’t possess. Using these tools, or using “older” forms of writing events down on calendars, agendas, Post-It Notes, etc. will make you more productive should you stick with it.
Using calendars allows you to manage and schedule posts, advertisement deals, changes to your site, or general reminders, working around your personal and offline life.
Focus on Time-Consuming Tasks First
Focusing on larger projects, then moving onto smaller projects, or breaking apart each project to be a set of smaller projects, can in some ways, help you become more focused on attaining long-term results rather than short-term gains.
More often than not, you see large spikes in traffic, from social networking sites - Digg, StumbleUpon, Reddit, del.icio.us, not to name countless other sources, as a major success point. In fact, they are. Once you obtain quite a number of posts that have been Stumbled or Dugg, it results in a long-term effect beneficial to success down the road. After each post is submitted, your traffic will typically level out higher and your subscriber base also ends up higher than before the series of spikes.
Change the game of your site and those in your niche by sizing up your competition. Publish a series, while not necessarily one after another, of long (1500+ word) posts. Writing these posts can easily take a few hours (or a shorter period each day) to research, draft, revise, and publish, but it will indicate that you are ahead of your competition and are devoted to what you do.
Don’t Become Distracted
The ever-growing in popularity microblogging tool, Twitter, and similar service Plurk, which both allow you to connect with others quickly on your ’status’ may appear as necessary bogging tools, but do they help your blog/business?
While many swear by using Twitter and other social networking services, I feel that they open everyone up to the evils of distraction and reduced productivity.
These tools were not solely created to cause people to become addicted to them, but as tools, that used sparingly, help people connect to one another in a faster manner. If you realize that you spend too much time logging into each service, replying to comments/invites/recommendations, then you may want to focus on developing a schedule (there’s that word again) - a certain time period built into each day for responding to comments and socializing/networking.
Once you have set a period each day, you know that you are guaranteed that set timeframe, and if you stick with it over the long-haul, you will become more productive and less distracted, constantly checking email, tweets, and comments when you really should be involved in marketing and promotion (writing, organizing your blog, etc.).
Put Nothing on the Back Burner
Nothing can escape the wrath of the ‘back burner’ effect on your blog and the visitors to your website. There are plenty of examples, in both the corporate and online worlds where putting everyday, planned events aside to complete alternative tasks, undermining the success of the individual or company involved.
Once you stick with a goal, keep it and don’t sway from it. It is important to set realistic goals, those that can be met with some effort, leading to either an increased revenue stream, more traffic, or an increase in comments (whatever your goal may be).
Putting either a rudimentary or significant task to complete later, whether you state that to your readers or not, typically ends up never being completed. It will be pushed aside, by another event or occurrence, only to never to recovered again.
Ultimately, Do What Works for You
In conclusion, if you find that the time you “spend blogging” isn’t as productive as you think it should be, it may be time to restructure and reorganize your day-to-day tasks. It may mean a drastic shift in your thinking, the way you conduct your blog, or network with others. Suspecting that you will become successful for doing basic stints everyone else has been doing for five plus years holds true for less than one percent of people.
While I covered some main points, I didn’t address on some smaller points, including drawbacks of blogging without clear goals. What other examples can you think about that eliminate the time spent behind the computer blogging and back on your feet doing something you “love?”
