If you are here, I am sure you know how much time demanding running a blog can be. Writing a blog is just a single part of the job. There are loads of other things that you need to give time to make your blog work.
This becomes problematic mostly to the users who have taken up blogging as their part-time gig, and now they are having a hard time giving enough efforts and time in their day to day activities. Also, for those who took up blogging as a full-time career option, may find it hard to give enough time to their blog and this is something that needs to be sorted out before it starts hampering your daily routine and your end goal towards blogging.
So, how can you save time while blogging? There is no secret formula to it.
You just need to cut out some bad habits and time-wasting activities. These activities can add a lot of free time in your schedule, and you can utilize that time to do your personal work or just give more time towards your blog.
There are numerous blogs out there who claim to have the best “Techniques” to add more time in your blogging schedule, but they mostly do not work because they are not well tested and are just a product of the guesswork and you cannot rely on such information.
So, for your ease, I have listed down ways with which you can speed up your blogging and can find more time in your daily schedule.
Let’s check out the ways you can save more time while blogging.
1. Keep a Tab on Your Ideas
The most common rookie mistake that bloggers make is to pin down their ideas and thoughts in different places. This does eat up your time a lot as when you want to recollect your thoughts and work more on the ideas that you have; you spend half of the time looking at the places where you usually store your ideas.
I am sure you have done this yourself as well. You had an idea, you wrote it down on a piece of paper and then *poof!*. Next thing you know is that you are spending half of your precious day in just looking for the thought you had. This is not efficient at all.
The trivial thing about this is that ideas can come to you anytime and anywhere.
Whether you are taking a dump, or playing video games or simply going to sleep. You cannot blame them, but the only thing you can do productively is that you can streamline your ideas and organize them in a single place so that you can have a look at them later. In simple words, I’d say is that
You need to have a place to store your ideas.
You can carry a little notebook with you, or if you think you are mostly around your laptop or mobile, you can use a note taking app, you can jot down your ideas there as well. One thing that you need to consider here is that you only follow a single medium to take your ideas for later processing. If you go with multiple apps or notebooks, you will again end up having your ideas scattered in places that you will have trouble finding.
2. Use Grammarly for Proofreading
Proofreading is one of the most tedious processes that every blogger goes through, and you cannot skip that. The last thing you want on your blog is having articles with silly grammatical and spelling errors. This will only bring down your blog’s credibility.
One of the best ways to do it is with using Grammarly. It is a freemium tool that helps you by picking out common errors like spelling and sentence framing in your writing and content.
If English is your second language, this tool is a must for you, and you will find it using almost everywhere. It comes with a chrome extension that integrates with your website and gives you a suggestion for better writing wherever possible.
The service is free of cost, but if you are serious about it, you can get the premium version which is capable of detecting more complex writing issues and errors that even the human eye can skip. If you are serious about blogging and wants to make blogging your career option, I’d say premium version is a must.
Even I used to waste much time proofreading my blogs. Most of the time I used to spend more time proofreading than actually writing but the moment I started using Grammarly, I was able to see through the errors and mistakes at the time of writing my blog. This helped me make the most of my time and fix the common errors that I was not able to see.
Do check out Grammarly and add it to your armory of tools that you will use from now on for your blogging journey.
3. Create a Content Plan
Writing down ideas is one thing and having a plan that you can use to ease out your schedule is a totally different thing. You need to have a proper schedule so that you can keep yourself on track and you can hold yourself accountable at times when you feel like you are running behind and not giving the necessary time it needs.
Having a content plan will tell you exactly how much work you need to put in. So, the very first thing you need to do for your time-saving hack is to create a plan. Another thing that you must consider is that you should not set unrealistic expectations for yourself. You need to understand how much time you have and how much time you are willing to give towards your blog.
Also Read: How to Write a Blog Post that Converts: Seven Modern Rules for Sales!
Once you have the plan ready, you will find it rather easy to start working towards your blogging goal. You will be able to see how well you are doing by your expectations and how more work you need to put in.
4. Spend Time on Social Media Wisely
Social media is something that no serious blogger can forget. You can get so much done, and you can attract really good traffic from there but most of the time bloggers end up spending most of the time on social media and usually more time than one should be giving.
Well, social media websites are designed like that. You need to see the engagements, post regularly and see how well your posts are doing and also forecasting what all you can do in future and what your followers are expecting.
But if you are spending a lot of time posting, engaging, you are doing it wrong. One of the smart ways to handle your social media postings is by using SMM tools like Hootsuite or Buffer. They offer great features that can help you schedule your posts on social media accounts like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and what not.
You can schedule your posts by date and time and can also customize the whole content as per the way you want to publish your blog. You can even go with multiple posts sharing at the same time and can see the analytics for your posts as well regarding how well your posts are doing in terms of likes, shares, comments, engagement and reach.
Also, you can split your time into slots in which you will be scheduling your posts. You will only handle the posting and sharing of your data in these time slots.
5. Create a FAQ Page.
Sometimes we do not even realize that we are spending most of our time getting back to emails and replying to your readers. This can bring quite a toll on your work and the things you intend to do.
Sometimes, when you are going through the queries, you can see the repetition in some of the requests and these requests are the ones who eat up your time. So, what can you do for such repetitive and redundant queries?
The best solution to this is to create a FAQ page. An FAQ page can save you a lot of time more than you think, but still, most of us do not add that to our Blogs. But if you wish to find more time in your blogging schedule, you need to work on your FAQ page.
To begin with, start listing out the most common questions that people are asking. Once you do that, you can go ahead and start working on the FAQ page. List down all the important stuff in there that you think people want to know and are always looking answers for.
Once you have the page ready, make sure that your visitors can find the FAQ Page and you can take care of this by adding it to the footer, and also, you can add a link in your contact page which says something like “Check our FAQ page” just to make sure that you are receiving most relevant queries.
6. Do Similar Tasks Together
When you blog, try to focus your energy on the same tasks at a time. This will help you to cover up more work in lesser time.
Take the example from assembly lines of cars. Each mechanic or the machine has a single task to take care of, and then the car body moves forward to the next mechanic. The same mechanic or the machine takes care of just a single job and that way the mechanic becomes more fluent in its task and takes lesser time to do it.
You too can go about it in the same way. You just need to bifurcate your work in separate timeframes. This way, when you are doing a specific task, you are giving all the attention to that only.
You won’t be able to do all the parts of some tasks together, but some tasks can be done rather easily You can start by giving time for brainstorming at the beginning of the week and setting a schedule for the whole week. If you rather go with brainstorming every time you sit down to write a blog, you will end up spoiling a lot of time.
For this, just focus on a single task at a time. You do not need to complete everything at a time but try to do the work and complete the tasks then and there only so you can later focus your energy in other tasks completely.
7. Don’t Stress a Lot When Writing
When you begin to write your article, do not stress over too much on your first go. Of course, you do not want your blog to look mediocre, but if you wish to complete the blog and save some time as well, then the first thing you need to do is starting with your first draft and not paying too much attention to detail when you start out.
Most of the time blogger waste so much time in coming up with engaging opening or the introduction part and end up changing the whole intro once they are done with the article. This is something that needs to be fixed.
When you are writing, and you feel like you are stuck on some task, try to skip that part of the blog and start with another part of the blog. Do not force yourself to go with a linear flow; instead, try to fill the gaps and work your way around the blog accordingly.
Also Read: 7 Common Blogging Problems & How To Deal With Them
Also, when you are writing, do not try to come up with a perfect copy on your first go. Try to prepare the first draft as quickly as possible. Once you have your first draft ready, you can now reread the blog and see which parts need to be worked on which part you can improve. This strategy always works for me, and I find myself saving more time and writing killer blogs when I am following this pattern.
8. Delegate if Possible
Some bloggers do everything themselves. Some have a team to take care of the flow of work. But sometimes they hire a freelancer or delegate the tasks and jobs to co-bloggers.
If you are presented with the problem of the time crunch which is one of the most common problems in blogging, you can look into the option on how you can delegate some of your work to others. These can be freelancers, or you can build your own team.
Since you are just here to blog, it is not necessary that you know how to alter the design and look of your website. This can take a heck load of time if you start by finding out how you can design or code your way into the website. In this case, it is smart to hire a freelancer of a designer to do the visual tasks.
If you do not wish to delegate your blog designing task, you can use the Blog Designer WordPress plugin to create impressive layouts and designs for your website. The plugin has multiple designs which you can import directly on your website and can start customizing your website without touching a single line of code.
The plugin has a lite version as well which offers comparatively limited customization but still with that one; you can do redesign your blog’s design completely.
So, to summarize, you need to understand that you cannot do everything and you need not do everything too. You can delegate the processes that do not require your direct input or insights. This will save you a lot of time.
Also Read: Does Blogging Help SEO? Blogging SEO Tips!
9. Set Deadlines for Yourself or Use a Timer
One of the best tricks to keep you on time when you are writing your blog is using time and keeping a log of what all you are doing and how much time you are taking to achieve that task.
Once you start keeping a tab of your activities, you will be able to see how you can take make more time in your existing schedule.
If you are bad at keeping your time record, you can use a tool which can assist you in tracking your time and activities. The tool that I personally prefer is Toggl. It helps you track your time, group them in projects, and you can even try out the advanced features in their pro version. They also have a desktop version which can record your activities and generate reports for you.
When I started to use Toggl, I found out a lot about my blogging schedule. I was spending a lot of time on doing nothing like taking breaks, wasting time watching YouTube video a friend sent me and did not even get me started on the time I use to waste on social media.
When you see a timer ticking in front of you, automatically you start to pay more attention to your main activity and start to pay less attention to “Time wasting” activities I talked about earlier. So, to make the most of your time set deadlines for yourself and start tracking your performance so that you can compare how well you are doing.
10. Stop Guessing and Start Analysing
One of the most common and most neglected mistakes that bloggers make is guessing what to work on instead of doing market research. When brainstorming about what to write about, do an analytics check on what you should be writing about. When you start doing the analytics check of your blog, you get to see what kinds of blogs are working best and what your readers want to learn about.
You also get a chance to learn about what your readers are not interested in and how you can improve that. When you are analyzing, you can set your content by performance and this way, you can craft your content calendar more accurately.
On the other hand, when you are guessing, you are simply throwing in ideas which you came up with no analytical approach. These have a lesser chance of working as compared to the one using the analytics.
To use this approach, you first need access to your blog’s analytics. This can easily be done with Google Analytics. You just need to set it up, and once you are done with it, you can start accessing the performance of your website.
There you can check how you can use the data that you are collecting to project your future blogs. There are other tools as well in the market, but if you are just starting out and have not tried your hands on digital marketing, you can use the Google analytics to check your blog’s performance.
Summing it up!
I can assure if you follow even half of these techniques, you will see a significant jump in your time saving and you will have more time in your hands to do other work.
Moreover, it is not necessary that you have to implement all the techniques listed here all at once. Instead, start with the one you find the simplest and then step by step add the ones you find difficult to adapt in your schedule. This way, you will be able to implement more easily, and the shifting from the old schedule to the new one will be a lot easier.
Some of the tips you need to pay attention to once or twice in a long time like adding a FAQ page, start with those. On the other hand, there are things that you need to consider throughout your blogging journey like creating a content calendar. So, plan the best way in which you will be able to implement the techniques.
Is there a technique in the list that you are already using? What do you think about it? Is it helping you in saving time in your schedule?
Also, which technique are you going to implement next? Tell us everything by commenting down below!
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