How to Manage Your Time to Maximise your Blogging

Have you noticed how much blogging goes on nowadays? Everybody seems to be doing it!

To succeed in the competitive world of blogging, you need to establish your own unique voice and identity. You want to build your brand through good content and engagement on the blogging platform, both requiring time and effort. It’s important to create content that stands out and captures the attention of your audience in a saturated field. Or you just won’t get noticed!

If you don’t spend time on research and focus on the best quality and quantity of content, you’ll fall behind. You may be posting a zillion articles a month, but if the content is not worth reading, why bother?

As you spend your time blogging, you need to manage that time to create a balanced output, quantity and quality. You need both.

Here are some tips that will help you manage your time better, and ensure you can create more good quality content:

1. Understand how much time blogging needs

You can’t organize your schedule and create time for blogging without understanding how much time this entire process takes you. You don’t just need to account for the time you spend penning the article, but also the time spent on coming up with ideas, research, writing, editing, posting, and marketing or promoting the post.

Calculate how much time you take to accomplish all of these tasks so you can understand how to organize your schedule and make sure you have ample room to work on them carefully. The time you need is likely to be different to others, as we all have different skill sets. Maybe you can research better than someone else, but their method of idea creation results in more ideas faster than yours does.

If you rush through the blogging process, you’re more likely to make mistakes, which can compromise the quality of the content.

2. Determine how much you need to post

Consistency is very important in blogging because if you’re not posting good content regularly, your target audience will look elsewhere for information. People only subscribe to blogs if they know they’ll get consistent content. It’s important to choose a pace that fits in with your lifestyle and professional obligations.

For example, many professional bloggers tend to post three to five times a week in order to keep their audiences engaged. If you have other professional commitments, you can post anywhere between one to three times a week. Post on the same day and at the same time so your target audience knows your schedule, and can rely on you to post content at specific times.

3. Create time for blogging

The next step is to take a look at your daily and weekly schedule and create sufficient time for blogging. This is especially important for people who have other professional obligations and can’t spend too much time on this task. It’s also important to ensure you work on your content when you have energy and your mind isn’t burdened by fatigue. You’ll need more time to create content if you’re too tired or if your mind can’t be creative.

Multitask where you can in order to fit in some of the less time-consuming aspects of blogging. For example, you can respond to comments or promote your posts while you’re having breakfast in the morning. If you don’t create time or schedule your blogging time well, you will end up with poor quality results. That will compromise your reputation.

4. Keep Creating Content ideas

This is one of the most challenging aspects of blogging because it’s not easy to come up with unique and interesting ideas and topics consistently. Especially if you have a limited field in which you specialize.

Sometimes ideas can come naturally and something can inspire you enough to come up with a unique concept. But this is unpredictable and it’s important to establish consistency when you run a blogging platform. Set aside some time to think of ideas and flesh them out even if you don’t have to write content on those ideas any time soon.

For example, if you have enough content to post three times a week for the next 8 weeks, don’t fall back and stop thinking of ideas just because you have enough for two months. That will only cause problems down the time. This is one of the most time confusing aspects of blogging so it’s a good idea to create a record of all ideas and keep working on new ones for the future. This will save you a lot of time and make content creation faster.

A good idea for this is an idea journal. Record every idea you have. Maybe it’s not suitable now, but the idea may bubble away in your subconscious, and if you return to it in a few weeks, it may now be a much better time for it, and you have fresh perspectives on it.

5. Time for content creation

Once you have an idea and some notes on how to execute it, content creation is a little easier. However, it’s still important to focus and spend time on polishing it before you consider something fit for publication. Schedule this when you’re feeling creative and around the most productive time of the day.

For example, if you work best at night when everything is quiet and calm, that’s the time to put aside for content creation. This should help you focus on your work and get things done quickly. Rushing through the content creation process will compromise the quality of results and it’s always better to publish nothing or recycle an old idea than to publish badly-researched and poor-quality content.

6. Create a weekly blogging schedule

A weekly blogging schedule is customisable so you can adjust it according to your weekly requirements. For example, if you have an especially busy week in the future, you can adjust the schedule for the current week so you can work to compensate and free up some time. A blogging schedule will also help you stay on track and you won’t miss creating content.

It’s easier to lag behind on content creation if you don’t keep track of your schedule, especially if you’re doing different things at different times. If you intend to sketch blogging ideas out in the morning and pen them in the evening, schedule these activities in a planner so you can keep track of them.

7. Keep SMART Goals in mind

Promotion is an important aspect of blogging and will help you grow your audience. Set SMART goals for your content creation campaign and ensure your marketing and content creation strategy is Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-Bound (SMART). These goals help ensure you create content which provides results and reaches your target audience instead of something that just takes up space on your website’s hosting server.

By focusing on these goals, you can maintain a good schedule and create content for your blog consistently.

Ashley Andrews is an Inbound Marketing Strategist at Activia Training, a UK-based training provider specialising in improving delegates’ workplace performance in business skills, management development and IT applications. Ashley is passionate about sales and management issues, and regularly blogs about these – and many other topics – on the Activia blog.