Creating a blog is a powerful way to create interest in your products or services. However, the trick to maintaining a successful blog is to get people to come back again and again. The best way to achieve repeat visits is to provide fresh, new content that engages visitors. If your blog gets stale, or your blog posts are uninteresting, visitors will stop visiting your page, which is unfortunate for your business. To avoid this, bloggers must learn to budget their time wisely, so they have time to blog, even if they have a busy, backed-up schedule. Below are seven tips to help even the busiest bloggers find time to create new and entertaining content.
Seven Tips to Budget Time for Blogging
1.) Schedule Your Blogging Time
Don’t think of blogging as something you just do when you have time. It is important, and like all other important things in your life, you need to make sure you have time to get it done. To do this, create a blogging schedule. Depending on how often you add new content, you may need just a few minutes a day. Instead of mentally scheduling blogging time, write it down in your schedule, and commit to doing it every day.
2.) Learn to Write Faster and Shorter
While you may love to write long, interesting blogs, it is essential to realize that short blogs will also keep your visitors returning. You can even write teaser blogs to build anticipation about a blog that you are working on. Remember not every blog you write has to be 800+ words. Sometimes all you need to keep visitors engaged is 100 words of awesome content.
3.) Use Other Media Options
If you are remarkably short on time, consider adding other media options to your blog to keep visitors entertained. Examples of other media options that you could use include videos, cartoons and pictures.
4.) Set Up Realistic Goals
Think about how many blogs you want to write every month. Instead of writing on a whim, plan out your blog articles a month at a time. For instance, if you want to write 20 blogs a month, set up a schedule that allows you to complete 20 blogs. Then decide what those 20 blogs will be, you don’t have to have all the content completed, just write down ideas.
5.) Capture Ideas During Downtime
Every blogger has downtime, whether you are cooking in the kitchen or picking up your daughter from dance class, you often have several minutes throughout the day where you could be thinking about blog ideas. When a brilliant idea comes to you, write it down in a creativity notebook. This way when you are scheduling your blog articles for the month, you have ideas ready to go.
6.) Outsource or Use Guest Bloggers
If your schedule gets really tight, consider outsourcing your work to another freelance writer, or invite a guest blogger to post on your blog. If the guest blog goes particularly well, you may even want to invite the person to blog for you on a regular basis.
7.) Practice Makes Perfect
When you post a new blog, especially if it is a new topic or style, pay attention to your visitors’ responses to the blog. You may be creating content that you love, but if your visitors don’t love it as well, you may be wasting valuable time. Instead, try to create content that your visitors truly love. Concentrating on the type of content that gets results will help you create better content in the future.
Finding time to blog can be difficult, especially if it is not your day job, but dedicating time and energy every day to your blog will help you find what works best for you.