If you had one thing that you could manage better, what would you say? Most would answer with one word: time.
When you can manage your time, you can manage how productive you are.
When you are able to manage your time in a more efficient manner, you are able to:
- Have the time to plan ahead for other projects that you want to accomplish.
- Have the time to complete more tasks within the same amount of time.
- Have the time to take on unexpected emergencies or situations that arise.
- Have the time to improve the quality or quantity of tasks within the same timeframe.
This holds true in blogging as well. When you manage your time for activities around your blog, you increase your blogging productivity. This can lead to overall blogging success. When you manage your time more efficiently, you will have more time to accomplish other tasks; other tasks you may focus on could be: social networking, marketing, advertising and of course living life. After all, not everyone is a full-time blogger; some have families, full-time jobs or other commitments.
Now that we understand how time management can benefit us, we still need to know – what can be done to manage that time in an efficient manner? Here are two basic strategies to help you manage your blogging time more efficiently:
Plan Content Ahead
When you plan your content ahead of time, you are not rushing to find another idea to write on everyday to publish to your blog. I have heard of bloggers that will go day to day finding ideas to post to their blog. I am not one that follows this method.
When you plan your content ahead of time, anywhere from 2 – 7 days ahead, you will have a few days to a week of blog posts already setup to publish. I usually like to take a day or so to sit down with pen and paper and write out what I want to post on. Once I have my ideas on paper, I begin writing out the first drafts to my posts. Once I have my first draft, I will mop up and edit accordingly. Now rinse and repeat for each post; when you are done, you have several days of content all ready to be published.
Schedule Your Posts
I am one that likes to automate processes whenever possible. When I have to do less work, I have more time to concentrate on accomplishing other tasks.
In blogging, I am able to do this through scheduling the publishing of my posts. I use the WordPress platform for my blog; within WordPress, there is a scheduling feature for publishing blog posts. When you enter a post into WordPress, you can publish the post immediately or schedule the post for publishing on a certain day and time.
The scheduling feature ties in with planning your content ahead of time; you don’t have to wait till the day you want to publish your post, you can schedule it. This is another handy feature for planning your posts ahead of time; scheduling posts can assist you at times when you are away or you have no access to a computer with Internet access. Using scheduled posts, you don’t have to sit in front of the computer every time you want to publish a blog. Just schedule it and forget it.
As you can see, by using the previous time management strategies for blogging, you will save time in your blogging. With extra time, there could be extra tasks accomplished within the same timeframe. Today, time is something we all want more of; when you follow the previously outlined strategies with your blog, you will take back some of that time.
Thanks for sharing these useful time management tips in relation to Blogging! I too was facing lot of problems with managing time for my blog.
I have thought ahead and wrote down the ideas or title for my future blog posts but not able to find time to write them completely. The idea of scheduling is great! I generally use it but only schedule to a specific time whenever I publish a post on my blog. As you said, I could have thought about writing all at once and scheduling all for several days ahead. This will remove a great burden and also gives time for other interesting activities like marketing, commenting on others blogs and taking break etc.
I never thought that if we have all the thoughts and ideas ready, we can just write articles offline and later when online publish all in one go with scheduling feature. This saves internet costs as well. Blogger is great! It gives scheduling feature.
I completely agree that building a backlog of content is the way to go. I, however, like to take things a step farther and generate several months worth of entries that I can then schedule to future post. If I should happen upon a timely topic I will then reschedule one of these future entries and post the time sensitive material instead.
I prefer this method because then I never feel pressured to come up with content. Also, should I desire time off, I can easily take a vacation while my blog continues to stay up-to-date.
Hi George,
Great tips!
Managing your time is crucial when it comes to business. If you don't organize your work and don't know exactly how and where to do it then it is really hard.
You save a lot of time when you have content ready to go. As you said with WordPress you can upload your posts and schedule them.
It is a great advantage because you have more time to do other things.
Thank you,
^PV Reymond
@Heather,
That is an cool idea! Especially if our blog is about timeless content and we already have done all the research to write articles months ahead, we can take a vacation on that and still see our blog get automatically updated.
@PV Reymond,
Not only WordPress even Blogger allows scheduling of posts.
Time Management is critical to your success and lets face it to your Sanity. I do plan ahead for promotions, sales, email etc for my Ecommerce business. But when it comes to blogging, I sit down to plan entries ahead only when inspired. Most of my blogs require daily news, such entertainment, gossip. For whateverebay it’s a mixture of both. Planning entries ahead is a bit easier than my other blogs.