Have you ever thought of launching a blog, but circumstances caused you to discard the idea? Blogging can be a very satisfying career path. It is very flexible, and anyone can start writing at any point to get started on the journey. People have several interests, and anyone of those interests can become a niche of a blog site. The ideas, thoughts, and opinions on a subject with a person’s writing style help in developing an amazing blog. If one is dedicated to blogging, he can achieve good revenue from it. But as we all know, it is a risk, and many of us would rather take a full-time blogging job over the chance of being a successful blogger.
This is a rational decision as there is nothing certain about starting a blog site. Moreover, relying on blogging to start generating revenue from the get-go is a mistake. Blogging is a business, and it requires the same amount of attention and investment as a business. Just like a business would need a schedule, a blog would also need a blogging schedule. A logical man would never establish a business without planning ahead about his goals and finances.
A stable job would provide you the financial security as well as give you the funds that you can invest in the blog. But, managing a job and working on a blog site is a cumbersome task. Therefore, I have brought you some of the important tips that you can use to manage both your daily job as well as your blog site.
Know Your Audience
The best way to ensure your success in blogging is to know your audience. You are putting a lot of time and hard work into blogging, so it becomes very essential to start with the basic foundation. There are several types of people on the internet, and one type of content cannot speak to all in the same way. Therefore, when you start to plan out your journey, you must first research and decide who will be reading your blogs.
If you are going to write about traveling in Europe, then your references and style of writing must be targeted towards the people traveling or planning to travel in Europe. Your blogs must adapt to the language and culture of the people. For instance, a blog site about mobile phones cannot explain about the product without the use of tech terminologies. A reader reads to understand the topic in a simple yet detailed manner so that he may solve his query.
Moreover, the more you understand the target audience, the more time you will save as you would know exactly how to write your blogs. The time it takes to become a successful blogger is long, and managing it while doing a job increases the said time even further. So, you need every second there is to reach the end goal in a definite amount of time.
The most important factor that helps in becoming a successful blogger is generating revenue. The products or services that you will refer to your audience cannot be decided until you know your audience. So, you can see how important an audience can be for your blogging career.
Be Specific with Your Niche
The concept of blogging is simple, you write about stuff you are passionate about, but understanding it to a higher degree reveals that there is more to it than that. You may like to write about food, but most of your content is on photography equipment. Think it from the perspective of your audience, a person who came to know about the recipe of apple pie is now getting information about a lens.
You will get hectic days while working and blogging, and if you do not concentrate on this, your efforts will go to waste. All your tough days could end up becoming mere tough days instead of an investment in your future. Remember, you are working two jobs that require equal hard work and investment, and watching your traffic dip down and seeing a decrease in conversion rate is not a sweet sight when you give so much to your blog.
Therefore, make a path for your readers and help them get to the content they are interested in.
For instance, if your niche is a fashion, then any new trend in fashion or a designer’s new collection should be your target. This will also show your audience how aware you are about your passion. Moreover, you will get the traffic towards your blog site when you write about trending topics.
One more reason why you must be specific to your niche is that your blogs should be easily searchable. For that to happen, your blogs must be SEO optimized, and search engines like Google and Bing have algorithms that give preference to sites that have quality content about a specific niche. A mixture of topics is given a lot less priority by these search results. Therefore, such sites lose their ranking.
Related Read: How to Choose a Profitable Blog Niche?
Set Reasonable Goals
One of the key elements while planning something big is to set a goal for it. You may have already set a specific goal for your blogging career. There could be a target that keeps you going or a target that may help out in decision making. But what many fail to grasp is that your goals must be in accordance with your current condition and circumstances.
You cannot use goals to push yourself over your limits thinking that you are growing and changing. Unreasonable goals are one of the main reasons why many fail at blogging while working their 9 to 5 jobs. Your job, like any other job, will show you days of extreme workload. Therefore, the building of the goals should be such that these circumstances are taken into consideration.
For instance, you could have a weekly goal that will contribute to your monthly goal. A weekly goal of publishing 2-3 blogs while also managing your job is a good start to becoming a successful blogger. The monthly goal could be that you want to get a specific number of people to your blog site. Therefore, you will also work on marketing in the time you are not publishing. This will keep you busy and engaged. Moreover, it will give you the feeling of accomplishing something major one piece at a time.
Also, you must know that your personal growth also counts as an investment toward your blog site. So, set personal goals that may help you become a better writer or editor or a more active person who can handle more workload with ease.
Remember to keep updating your goals when you find that you have started to become more efficient. This will help you keep a self check on yourself.
Find Pockets of Time
Your daily life has several small pockets of time that go unutilized. Blogging with a job could use some of that time in ways that could help you do wonders. For instance, your time waiting for the bus or cab could be used for deciding a catchy headline of the blog. A headline is a very essential part of writing a blog as it is one of the first few things a reader sees before deciding to click on your blog.
Similarly, you can save a lot of time bringing your food for lunch instead of ordering from a store. You can use the excess of your lunchtime to go through the points that you will cover. The time you spend on checking your social sites could also be used to market your recent blog. A minute of checking your notifications could be given to the reader’s comments, and you could reply to them.
As a result, the readers will appreciate your interaction, and it will help you in building a healthy community. You can work on keyword searching, which is an essential part of blogging in such pockets of time. Anything that works as a utility for your writing work can be done in small chunks.
Make use of unutilized time gaps and include this in your blogging schedule.
Make a Schedule
It is very essential for you to make a blogging schedule to manage your daily contributions to your blogs. A job usually takes a lot of time from your schedule, so it becomes a priority to find time either during the day or at night.
You may be tempted to relax the whole time after returning from work, but this will become a huge hurdle in becoming a successful blogger. Find time to prepare for the blog throughout the day. For example, search for keywords, decide on the headline, find some content that will benefit the reader, etc. This way, you can concentrate on writing at your scheduled time.
It is very important that you have all the tools and info at your disposal when you sit down to write. It will save you time, and you will become more efficient after getting used to the blogging schedule.
The schedule does not only include parts about blogging but also about your daily routine. Therefore, each part of your life should be running like a well-oiled machine after the correct execution of your schedule.
Analyze your whole day and see for yourself which unproductive activities take away your time. Firstly, try to shorten the time spent on such activities and then, after some time, try to become as productive as possible throughout the day. Blogging is a business, and treating it any lower than that will only give unsatisfying results. However, do not overburden yourself and tire yourself out as it will only decrease your efficiency.
Organize Work
There should always be a structure while managing anything in life. Without any structure and organized work, you may lose efficiency, or you may start to become counter-productive.
Firstly, plan and analyze how your job and blogging work out each day. Secondly, find out parts that may look clumsy or cause confusion. You will be able to find such tasks, and you can bring a structure to the whole process by clearing out the confusion from such tasks.
For instance, if you have a presentation to make on a regular basis, you would not want it to collide with your blogging schedule. It is beneficial to keep tasks of a similar nature together. Similarly, you must have all the content that you may need to start writing before the time of writing so that you do not lose time.
If you use the free time slots of the day to prepare for the blog, then your writing could start on time. This little organized work makes your life easier, and you do not stress out from managing your work as well as your blog.
It is very helpful to make a roadmap of the process of blogging. You can start from:
- Deciding the next blog topic
- Finding keywords related to the topic
- Deciding a headline
- Make an outline of the whole content
- Start writing
- Add images to the blog
- Proofread the blog
- Publish the blog
- Promote the blog on all social media sites
- Send out notification of your blog to your email list
- Respond to your audience
- Get feedback
- Repeat the process
This is just an outline of how organized a blogger should be and how he should make plans for each set of tasks he is going to perform.
Use Blogging Tools
Blogging tools are very helpful as they help save your time, money, and efforts. There are several types of blogging tools that can benefit you in maintaining an efficient blogging schedule.
As a blogger who also has a job, it becomes immensely important that his time after work is productive. You must analyze and see if you are being efficient in blogging.
Toggl is free software that helps to keep track of time when you are working on your blog. You can see how fast or how slow you are at writing a blog. Moreover, you can track how much time you require for each task you perform. Toggle is available for pc as well as for mobile phones so you can keep track of your entire day and find out the unproductive parts of the day.
Evernote is another tool that helps you to organize your work. It provides a proper data bank or content bank at your disposal. So, you can keep the blog’s content safe and you can access it anytime. Evernote can save images, videos, pdfs, etc. so you can save all the data related to your blog in one place and use it at the time of writing.
The Title generator is a tool that can help you to make catchy headlines for your blog. This saves a lot of time and effort in coming up with a title.
Trello is a project management tool that helps you keep track of all your projects. You can create a board for any of your projects and add lists on the board. You can put files, images, due dates, checklist, etc. in your cards inside each list. This is useful to keep track of all your work.
Blog Designer is another great tool for designing WordPress blog websites. If you are looking for a way to easily customize WordPress websites, then the Blog Designer plugin will make this task really easy for you. You get more than 50 design layouts that you can start using right away. You do not have to be a designer or developer to use this tool. The simple options and customization options make it really easy for anyone to make their blog’s layout like the way they want.
You can get this plugin here. If you wish to know more about it, you can check out our website.
Make a Habit of Reading
Reading is an essential element of blogging. You cannot create content out of thin air without any knowledge about the subject. Firstly, you must be passionate about your niche or else you will find blogging to be very boring. Assuming you are passionate about your niche, now you can dive into the sea of knowledge spread across the world.
Reading will help you grasp the topic in a better way. When you get more knowledge about the subject you will be able to convey the same to your readers in a better manner. Therefore, your efforts will start to bear fruit much quicker. Reading and learning will make you write quality content. Furthermore, your writing speed will increase immensely as you will take much lesser time in thinking about what to write.
Also, you will be more aware of the current trending topics of your niche. The ideas, tips, and blogs of other experts will make you more aware of the topic as well as about the community around the niche. Reading will aid to bring more traffic as you will write more on topics that people want to read about.
It is not necessary that you read only about your own niche, reading, in general, is a very useful habit and you can get inspiration from many books, blogs, magazines, and even from articles in newspapers.
One type of information could be helpful for another type. For instance, a government tax change on luxurious items can affect your reviews on luxurious items. A blogger who wants to succeed must cover all the available content especially the latest trendy topics.
As a blogger who has a job, you must get all the help you can to maximize your revenue from blogging.
Related Read: Effective Habits Of Successful Bloggers
Healthy Lifestyle
A healthy body is very important to manage a job as well as blogging. If you are sleepy or are sick then you will have to take rest, there is no other alternative to it. Even if you work in those conditions your productivity will be minimum. Therefore, if you want to be a successful blogger, you must take good care of yourself.
A healthy body and mind will keep you at your top game and you can handle all kinds of circumstances. Eat food that is rich in vitamins and minerals and avoid excess fat and sugar in your diet. There are several food items that will increase your productivity.
Leafy green vegetables are very rich in antioxidants that increase your brain power and help you concentrate. They also contain Vitamin-B which helps to improve memory.
Drink green tea as it makes you active and you are less likely to feel sleepy while doing work. Eat flax seeds as they have omega-3 fatty acids which help you to increase brain power.
Drink a lot of water daily, water is an essential element of the body and lack of it can decrease your performance.
While you concentrate on food do not forget to involve workout in your routine. Working out releases several hormones like dopamine and endorphin. These hormones are responsible for a happy mindset and an active body. They also help to maintain stress and anxiety as doing two jobs is no easy task. So, a daily workout is recommended to maintain good physical and mental health.
Meditation is also an activity that boosts concentration and calms you, giving you the ability to tackle any situation.
Be Consistent
Blogging takes time and to become a successful blogger you must be consistent in delivering your content. There will be situations where you will not want to be regular and you will feel like sidelining your blogging. This is a common occurrence as your blogging may not have started to yield revenue and we tend to concentrate on things that give us fast rewards.
Moreover, if your blog is not generating an adequate amount of revenue, your interest will go toward your job as it has a sure reward at the end of each month.
You need to start thinking of long-term and be patient with your blogging career. Keep on publishing blogs that help readers and communicate with your audience on a regular basis. The goal set by you will help you a lot in being consistent and your organized work with a blogging schedule will help you be an active blogger.
Do not tire yourself out just concentrate on achieving your goals one step at a time. It takes time to win the reader’s trust but when you keep at it you will be rewarded with an audience that is loyal to you.
Write to help the readers and have a sense of responsibility toward them, this way you will get a sense of accomplishment with every blog you publish. This will give you the power to be regular and consistent toward your blogging career.
Guest Posting
There are experts in every niche and you should take help from them. This will help you to manage your busy schedule and you can get to learn a lot from these experts. Guest posting has been a major element of blogging and every tier of blogger takes help from guest bloggers.
It also gives your readers a new style of writing. Moreover, you will catch the eye of the guest blogger’s audience thus increasing your traffic. There will come a situation where your job will require your full attention and getting a guest blogger at that time will be the best tactic for you.
Similarly, when you seem to have a lot of time at your disposal you can ask your fellow bloggers if you can guest post in their site.
Create Network
Networking is important in blogging. You need to be connected with people around your niche like the community, other bloggers, etc. You can attend events and take part in discussions on your niche. This will make you more aware of your niche and will bring you more audience.
Connecting with people lets you learn new things and get you new ideas to write on. You can start networking by commenting on other blogger’s blogs. Similarly, you can reply to emails and comments on social media sites. You can answer queries about your blogs and join in on conversations of the readers.
After some time other bloggers will start to notice your presence and you will get a response back from the experienced bloggers in your niche.
Interacting with people on events also help them know who you are and what are your opinions on specific topics. These networks also help you to get guest bloggers for your blog and you too get the opportunity to guest post in other’s blog sites.
You can also get tips from other people who also have a job and manage a blog site. Do not be afraid if you do not get time to travel to attend events as building networks can be done just by being active on social media and interacting with others. You can do all this while on a lunch break or on your way to the office.
A healthy relationship with all the people around your niche will help you in the long run and this is one of the key factors in becoming a successful blogger.
Conclusion
Working a 9-5 job is a tough task in itself and taking a challenge like starting a blog adds up to the difficulty. There are going to be tough times ahead of you. But when you start to address each issue with a logical approach then you will find time to manage both the things with equal dedication.
A job gives you the resources to manage your life and it also supports your passion to become a blogger. You will have a sense of security while trying to become a successful blogger. Furthermore, you will learn to work in extreme conditions. All professional bloggers must learn this skill at some point in their careers.
Remember consistency and time management are keys to achieving anything and blogging is no different. Make a blogging schedule and organize your work around the time you have left after the job hours. Be dedicated to blogging and have patience and soon you will reach the heights of others.
Please do give feedback on which points were most helpful to you and how you have started to implement the tips provided in this blog post.
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