Managing Time is the Most Important Lesson in Blogging

Bloggers that are new to the game can easily get excited with the prospects of huge online earnings and quitting their day jobs. This mentality can be dangerous though. As you work harder and harder on your blog in the initial stages it takes over more and more of your life. Without goals and time management you and your blog will crash and burn before anyone even knows about your blog.

I speak from personal experience in blogging. My blog has only been running for two months now and I have taken a great notice in how much time I am spending on it, without actually benefiting from that time. It does not matter if I am continually checking my StumbleUpon, Twitter, or Facebook accounts each hour or continually commenting on relevant blogs for hours on end, building those precious backlinks. Perhaps I am reading about more of the secrets to SEO. At the end of the day I am just wasting my time.

Here are five tips for you to make better use of your blogging time management:

1. Define Your Realistic Goals- Goals are important and maintaining realistic ones even more so. Ask yourself how often can you afford to update your blog and stick to it. You may say daily but even posting a few times a week, quality content can be difficult and time consuming. Focus on what you want out of the blog. Develop a realistic understanding of how much traffic you hope to receive and in how much time. It is common for a successful blog to take 6 months – 1 year before becoming profitable and receiving regular, consistent traffic.
2. Schedule Your Daily Necessary Tasks– Is it really necessary to social bookmark every post to all of the social bookmarking sites you are a member of? Of course not! Leave that to your readers. If it is quality content they will help you. Your first task each day should be to improve the quality of the blog, working on posts and content. During your blogs early stages (first 2-3 months) take your time to develop something you are proud of. If you have the insight, write articles when you are inspired and save them for later. Unexpected events will always occur in your life and it is nice to have some things ready so you can take a blogging vacation.
3. Focus on Content, Not Trying to Cheat on SEO– Don’t waste your money on backlinks services and directory submissions that may look unnatural to Google if you do not have quality content first. You can get all the backlinks in the world but if you have nothing of value on your website, will anyone visit and how bad will your bounce rate be? Quality content is what Google and your potential readers want. Give it to them!
4. Maintain Relevancy to Your Topic– Do not try to venture off too far from your topic in order to target keywords that you like or receive higher traffic. Avoid trends and focus on relevant and pertinent posts. These posts will become the pillar of your blog once it picks up in rankings and will receive the most traffic. This also includes not having too many categories for your posts. If a topic makes the news that you feel to write on go a head, but do not shift gears of your blog to target that audience. Consider using your Twritter or Facebook page to address these links. That way you give them a reason to visit those social media for something not available on the blog, not repeat content.
5. Outsource What you Can – If you are really set on social bookmarking pay a service to do it for literally $2 for hundreds of bookmarks. This will save you hours of time to focus on all of the previous four steps and your real life outside of blogging. Give your readers and other bloggers the same incentive and offer guest posting. These things will save you time, money, and likely generate more traffic. Spending some money is inevitable but this is a way to save some and your time.

Tagged Blogging, SEO, Social Media, Time Management