Whether your blog is your new side hustle or your passion project, becoming a successful blogger is no easy feat. Add all of the pressures of a 9-5 career or being a full-time student, and you’ve got a real challenge on your hands.
Mastering the balancing act of working life and trying to get your blog up and running doesn’t come without its challenges, but with these few simple tips and tricks up your sleeve, you’ll be well on your way.
Create a Realistic Schedule
If you’re working full time and hustling to get your blog off the ground the first thing you’ll want to create is a realistic posting schedule. Have a think about how often you could publish new content that’s high quality and stick to it. Some blogs publish new content every week, others post twice a day so it’s important to find a posting consistency that works for you and your other commitments.
If you’re already juggling a full-time career and other things in life, it’s important not to overload yourself and be overly ambitious at the start. Remember, even if you start with one post per week you can always gradually increase your pace once you’ve wrapped your head around this whole blogging thing.
If you overload yourself you’ll always feel like you’re chasing yourself and soon enough you’ll get pretty stressed out. Having a realistic posting schedule will help you avoid your blog becoming just another chore and keep you motivated to continue creating. There are lots of great online tools out there that can help you manage your workload and organize your editorial calendar like Clickup and Monday, or if you’re a visual person, using a physical calendar or planner might be helpful.
Store Your Ideas
As a blogger, there’ll always be content ideas swimming around in your head, whether you’re at work or doing chores around the house. Sometimes they’ll be great ones, and sometimes not so much. Either way, it’s important to store all of your ideas in one place so that you don’t forget and can come back to reference them later if you need.
This is extremely important because, on the days where you’re stumped for ideas on what to write about, you can always just jump into your treasure trove of epic ideas and go from there. When you’re just starting to build out your content or create your editorial calendar, start writing down any ideas that come to mind, you can always refine them later. Having an idea bank will also help you stay consistent with your publishing schedule (winning!).
Again, there are lots of great online tools you can use like Asana or Evernote to store all of your ideas and plan your content strategy.
Backlog
So you’ve got your posting schedule all sorted and a flourishing bank of great ideas ready to be written, but what happens if you find yourself with some extra time up your sleeve one week or all of a sudden feel inspired to write? Backlogging allows you to get ahead of your posting schedule so that if something comes up or you can’t find the time to write a post one week, you’ll have a backlog of content ready to go. So, start getting in the habit of preparing filler posts when you’ve got the free time. Trust me, your future self will thank you for it.
Time Block
Despite what many people might think, bloggers really do have a lot on their plate – and it’s not just writing the posts. When you consider everything you’ve got to do from editing photos, to researching articles, website updates, graphic design, and managing social media it can seem overwhelming. Time blocking is a tried and tested strategy to becoming more productive, saving time, and using the time you commit to more efficiently.
Set aside a block of time when it suits you, it could be daily after dinner or for a few hours one day a week, whatever works for you. During your time block sessions dedicate all of your attention to getting each of these tasks done. You could have an hour-long block and dedicate 30 minutes to drafting social media, 10 minutes to checking your inbox, and 20 minutes to editing pictures for an upcoming article. Don’t continually jump from task to task, start at the top of your list and work your way to the bottom (without getting distracted on Instagram, please!).
Batch Social Media Content
Content batching is another one of those life-changing hacks that will allow you to save a crazy amount of time. If you run any social media accounts for your blog then you should definitely be batching your posts. Batching involves regularly allocating time to complete every aspect of your social media schedule in one sitting, from curating images, designing graphics, writing captions, and getting hashtags together (oh hey, time blocking).
By focusing on batching everything all at once, you’ll become a lot more efficient and creative – plus you’ll avoid that last-minute scramble every day to come up with a new post. Think about the difference in your work when you can sit and focus for an extended time, and compare it to your work when you spend two minutes smashing something out, with batching you can be sure that your content is always going to be at the top of your game.