Being a blogger is tough, because you pour all of your energy into creating content. And at the end of the day, you have nothing left to actually start promoting your blog.
Here are 15 ways to save time and maximize your productivity, so you can focus on growing your blog instead.
15 Time Saving Tips for Busy Bloggers
- Always start with a specific goal. All of your daily activities should support your goals. So start by identifying what you want, and then work backwards to figure out what steps you need to accomplish each day to reach these goals.
- Write about topics people care about. Before you start writing, look around and find the topics that people love to read about. You can start with your own most popular posts, and the popular posts of other bloggers to identify patterns.
- Write the post people want to read. There are certain types of posts that always do well. So start writing more deep, rich “How-To’s”, tactical lists and tips, and stories with lessons.
- Make your posts sticky. Successful blogging is all about getting your posts to resonate with readers. So buy yourself a copy of Made to Stick, and learn specific ways to make your content better for people.
- Use a few key metrics to gauge your blogging success. Keep an eye on your blog analytics to see if you’re wasting your time. Think about your marketing funnel and watch how many people are visiting, sticking around, subscribing, and finally – buying.
- Separate your research, writing, and editing. Speed up your content creation by separating your research, writing and editing. Identify when you’re most productive, and save that time for the hard part – sitting down to write. Spend your lazy period of the day researching new topics and outlining potential posts. Then batch the time you edit and schedule posts.
- Address the “low hanging fruit” of SEO. Your SEO strategydoesn’t have to be complex. Learn how to take advantage of the “low hanging fruit” and get 80% of the results with 20% of the effort.
- Read an SEO tutorial to get to the next level. Once you’ve mastered the basics, find a good
SEO tutorial that will teach you how to get more traffic from search engines month-after-month. This Beginner’s Guide to SEO from SEOmoz should be required reading for all bloggers. - Always look for traffic and link building opportunities. Link building is essential for SEO. But you want to focus on the high quality tactics that will also get you traffic and build your brand. You can start by submitting guest posts to large sites, creating partnerships with similar bloggers, and even run social media promotions for your fans with a “viral” component (like ReTweeting your link, or the winner will be the one with the most votes from their friends).
- Work “Top Down” in social media. Don’t tweet to an empty room. Instead, go after larger sites and reach out to bloggers, offer to submit guest content, and interview influential people. The definition of social media is business development, not just community management.
- Funnel your existing fans for quick growth.If you want to build a new social network like Google+ or Pinterest, then start funneling fans from other places. You could use your current website traffic, email list, and other networks to cross promote your new channel. You shouldn’t do this long-term, but it’s great for building a quick base of people.
- Chunk and divide your social media time.You almost never have to spend longer than 20 minutes on social media at a time. Instead, schedule 3 or 4 times throughout the day when you’ll “check-in” and engage for 20 minute intervals. You’ll get more accomplished, and it will seem like you’ve been active all day.
- Find tactical inspiration from other niches. For example, when you’re trying to decide on how to use Google+, look at other niches and see how successful people are using it. This will help you avoid the echo chamber and give you a fresh perspective.
- Ignore the Twitter Home Feed and focus on lists.The Twitter Home Feed can quickly become useless and disorganized. Keep up with the important people by creating private lists. That will help you jump in an out of the conversations during your scheduled time.
- Make your status updates go out automatically. Take advantage of tools like Timely or Buffer to spread your messages out, and maximize engagement. You can also use Hootsuite’s “batch update” feature, and the Tweet Old Post plugin for WordPress to automate your recurring status updates.
What About You?
How do you find ways to save time in blogging and social media?
Have you used any of these tips listed?
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