Blogging is a self employed job where a professional blogger does not really have a boss that carries out orders and sets deadlines. Even the quality of a blogger’s work is often subjected to self evaluation as there isn’t anyone to report.
This situation is excellent for people who are disciplined and love to deliver quality work consistently, however the same is often challenging for people who can’t deliver unless there’s a pressure situation building up. Sometimes, it is easy to get distracted and side tracked and before you realize, valuable time gets wasted and blogging goals start to suffer.
In this demanding world of blogging, here are some tips to keep a blogger busy and productive throughout the week.
1. Understand how much you can write in a day: It is important to know for sure that how much content you can actually write in a day. This will help you understand how many articles you can publish on a weekly basis. For example, if you are able to write 5 articles a week, then you should plan to publish 3 articles a week and schedule the other two for the next week’s publishing slots to keep the queue full.
However, one needs to plan the content for posting in several other places along with his own blog. For example, guest posts, article submissions, medium, LinkedIn pulse etc. All this content publishing places will eat up the total articles that you write in a week, so plan your content writing well.
2. Create enough images per post: A lot of bloggers make the mistake of making just one image per post. There are many social media sites today and all of them have a preferred image size for example Pinterest likes taller images while instagram likes square images. More images pretty much means more ways and reasons to share the content.
3. Set aside time for paid work: One needs to prioritize their time and any work that is bringing direct money has to be kept on top of the priority list. If there are sponsored posts pending, article writing and other free lancing jobs that are on a deadline etc. then these work needs to be done first, before attempting anything else.
4. Do Blog Commenting: Both posting comments on other people’s blog and responding to comments in your own comments section are important blogging tasks. While such work does not really requires a lot of creative juices when compared to other blogging tasks, because this is fairly easy, so keeping such work for later into the night or any other off time is a good idea.
5. Actively Reach Out: Outreach is an important part of blogging and one needs to dedicate enough time for this activity. From Roundup requests to interview offers, one need to consistently reach out to fellow bloggers to keep the connection working.
6. Update Old Posts: Posting new content is important but there’s a ton of gold mine buried in the older posts. One needs to consistently update old posts with new and relevant information to keep those posts useful.
7. Spend time on Social Media Carefully: For a blogger, social media is a great place to drive high quality traffic. Simply sharing good content on the social media can bring in a lot of visitors. However, it is easy to get distracted on the social media and waste valuable and productive time. It is important to keep a time limit for social media and restrict strictly the scrolling of social timeline.
8. Look for Paid Gigs: As a blogger, one needs to keep looking for places to get extra money. Freelancing for content writing paid jobs is a good way to supplement the online income. Finding such work takes up a lot of time and it is thus important to keep aside a few hours a day for hunting such type of paid work.
9. Research: Blogging requires time for keyword research, niche research, learning new things and keeping on top of the competitors. All this requires some specific time of the day and hence one should always keep some time off for doing research.
10. Quora: Searching for questions that are relevant to your niche and then answering them with the best of your knowledge can drive a lot of targeted traffic to your blog. But Quora is much more than just answering questions. One can follow Quora members; vote up or down other people’s answers and even post questions.
11. Forums: Forum marketing helps in growing the blog faster. There are active people in many online forums and such places are great to build up a profile, post relevant replies and drop related links from your blog if sharing external links is allowed in such a forum.
12. Site maintenance: Site maintenance, which mostly includes updating of plugins, themes, keeping images and scripts light for quicker loading times etc. Along with that, one needs to keep a complete files and database backup and store this backup once in a while in an off line medium so that it stays safe and does not gets corrupted by online means.
Setting aside some time for such work is necessary, otherwise over the months, such tasks get ignored and in a time of crisis, you might recall that you don’t have a recent working backup of your website.
13. Email Marketing: Setting up auto-responders, actively sending customized emails to your subscribers and making way for catching more new subscribers is part of the email marketing process. Just like the other blogging tasks, email marketing requires some dedicated time so that one can utilize this medium of marketing up to its fullest capacity.
14. Prepare a Course: As a blogger, one needs to consistently look for more and more streams of income. If your income screams are diversified, for example: contextual ads, sponsored content, writing and editing gigs, logo design work etc. then your income will be more and more stable. Along these lines, setting up an online blogging course can further strengthen your income. Such courses are mostly on subscription that makes way for regular monthly income.
Blogging is a great way to make money online. But to keep the momentum going, year after year, it is necessary that people setup a daily schedule on what important blog work will be done at what times to keep the blogger productively busy overtime.