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Wednesday, January 21, 2015

How to Blog When You're Busy

Busy City Street
Photo Credit: Matthias Rhomberg on Flickr
As someone with a full-time job and a lot of errands to run, I understand how difficult it can be to blog when you're busy.

If blogging is important to you, a loaded schedule can be frustrating. You want to post consistently (the most important part of blogging), but you just don't have the time. "If only there were a few more hours in a day," I can almost hear you say. Well, that's where I might be able to help.

Based on my personal experience, I've compiled a list of tips on how to blog when you're busy.

  • Go for quality over quantity. When you're busy, remind yourself it's okay to keep blog posts short. After all, the average person isn't going to want to invest more than ten minutes reading any given article. People like short and sweet. As long as you're posting regularly, you can get away with writing articles between 250 and 500 words. Save the long posts for weekend writing... which brings me to my next point.
  • Write your posts ahead of time. Regardless of your posting frequency (I do three blog entries per week), the easiest way to update your blog every week is to compose your posts on the weekends and schedule them to go live while you're at school or work. That's what I do with about 80% of my posts. If you want to interact and share your blogs on social media, do that in real time. But schedule the posting. It helps more than you think.
  • Focus on being helpful and informative, not on crafting viral content. If you set out to write the *perfect* blog post, you're going to let yourself down. Instead of getting discouraged, be careful not to let the perfect be the enemy of the good. As a blogger, you should strive to educate or help other people in some way, not to create something gimmicky that might just go viral (spoiler: you can't make something go viral; it happens organically). People reading your blog want to gain some kind of insight from it. That's why they're there.

Running a blog when you've already got a full plate may seem daunting, but it can be done. I've managed to keep this blog active through college, retail jobs, and my current full-time work. It hasn't always been easy, but it has been rewarding. Give these tips a try and see what happens.

What tips do you have for blogging on a busy schedule?

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10 comments:

  1. I definitely agree with writing them ahead of time. I've been doing that and not only does it save time, it gives me a chance to look at the post a second time before publishing. The other thing I do is outline the different topics I want to focus on. Great post!! :D

    http://whatrachelwrote.blogspot.com/

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    1. I'd be interested to hear more about the outlining. I've been meaning to keep an editorial calendar, but haven't been able to find a method that works for me yet.

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    2. I tend to write a list of ideas under categories. For example, I have a list per topic, "characters," "reviews," "plotting," "pitching" etc. And I write underneath each all the posts I could write on those topics. After that I organize each post idea into an order that makes some sense, figuring out which could be series and which would be individual posts. Not extremely organized, but helpful :D

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    3. More organized than nothing, which is the system I have! :P I'm going to give that a try! Thanks!

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  2. I am THE WORST at writing/scheduling posts ahead of time, but I do think it's the key to consistency! I also think that posting ONLY what is interesting to you as a writer is important, because even if you're busy, if you're interested in a topic you'll want to write about it and then it won't feel like a chore.

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    1. Definitely! I've scrapped post ideas before because I realized I didn't want to write them. I try to only write about things I'm interested in, and that helps. Thanks for stopping by!

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  3. Yes! No matter what, I always compose my posts on the weekend. Since this semester I have Fridays free as well, I usually get one post done then, but everything else is done on the weekend and scheduled to go. I wouldn't have time other wise!

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  4. Exactly! I have a post going live tomorrow (Monday) that I wrote yesterday. I'd never get them out if I tried to write them the night before or the day of.

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  5. I honestly need to be better about managing my time! Sometimes I find myself typing something up an hour before it's supposed to go live...a very bad habit. Very informative! :D
    -Zoe
    thepeculiarprep.blogspot.com

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  6. Thanks for stopping by! It takes a little more work to write posts during the weekend, but it helps immensely. :)

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