If you’re anything like me, you’re constantly looking for ways to save time.
As a professional in the digital sphere, work is a 24/7 undertaking between office hours, networking events, social media participation, and ongoing education. For most digital professionals, one thing that often falls to the wayside is blogging. Blogging is generally a time consuming endeavor requiring research, multiple edits, and creativity. But blogging is one of the most important activities any of us can be doing online.
A blog that’s regularly updated can:
- Provide highly qualified search traffic
- Be a source of quality backlinks
- Prove thought leadership
- Demonstrate technical knowledge to potential clients
- Provide traffic from social media sites
- Become a source of leads for your business
- Increase customer satisfaction & brand retention
- Create brand evangelists
- Increase your digital footprint
But when you’re on a busy schedule, how do you keep it up?
1. Learn to Batch Process
Most elements of blogging can benefit from batch processing. I like to sit down for a few hours one day a month and brainstorm a couple dozen ideas for posts, mostly consisting of the title and a few sentences about the idea. I save all of these as draft posts. Then, on particularly productive days, I’ll sit down and write 2–3 posts at a time. On a once per week publishing schedule, that gets me pretty far.
2. Create an Editorial Calendar
Have problems coming up with ideas? Think of this as your road map to blogging. Take the batch processing idea above, and apply it to a 6 month, or even a full year’s schedule. Come up with one topic per week, or even a new theme to explore each month. This way you can deliver timely and seasonal content, and be prepared for it ahead of time.
3. Automate Your Promotion
While not a tactic I would always recommend, it can be a significant time saver. Use a service like HootSuite to automatically publish your new posts to your Twitter, Facebook & LinkedIn accounts. You can also use HootSuite to push out to Ping.FM, which can update any number of sites.
4. Become a Digital Collector
Inspiration can strike at any time, and anywhere. Capture that inspiration by becoming a digital collector. Anytime I see a piece of content online that inspires me — be that photo, video or blog post, I’ll save it to my Evernote Notebook. I then tag the clipping with “blog idea” for future reference. You can do the same with services like Instapaper, or even through your Posterous blog. This can also help when you need to find support material for a blog post that’s in the works.
5. Experiment with Other Formats
Maybe writing isn’t your thing. You might be a better public speaker then a writer. As Gary Vaynerchuk might say, “Find what fits your DNA.” Go ahead and experiment with video blogs or podcasts. Then, when you post to your blog, include a paragraph or two of text content that describes the video or podcast. This way you’ll get the benefit of search traffic for the content you created.
6. Recycle Your Content
Are you creating presentations, white papers, or other forms of content for your business? Many of these can be recycled into quality blog posts. If the content has been published online in other places, make sure you vary up the text to avoid pesky duplicate content penalties from the search engines.
7. Learn to Leverage Mobile
Create content while you’re on the go. The iPhone and other mobile devices include features like voice recorders and video cameras. Use these to capture your thoughts and ideas while you’re on the go. You can also draft entire blog posts through Gmail, and depending on your set-up, post through e-mail, or post when you’re able to access a computer.
What About You?
What tricks have you discovered for saving time while blogging?
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Sound, practical, immediately useful steps to take for all bloggers!
#4 is something I practice but I use ReadItLater’s bookmark and then I feed that into my Google Reader. I also throw my twitter favorites into Google Reader. If I’m reading something in Google Reader that I think might be useful, I take the time to tag it w/whatever might be applicable, “blog posts” “useful” “for work”. Just a small snippet of what I do.
I obviously have to automate a lot of my content too because of events/school/work. Automation isn’t the devil, it’s just the devil when it’s not original content or in the form of an Automatic Direct Message on twitter.
Another great way to become a digital collector is to use Delicious when you find an article or post that inspires you. You can tag it with “blogidea” as well as with categories for later posts.
#4 is huge for me too. There are a ton of different ways to do it, but we all parse through too much content in a given day to really be able to recall exactly what we need when we need it. If you’re smart with your digital habits, you can really use these tools to augment your brain. It’s exciting.
Also a very good idea. I did that for a little while, but then got into Evernote when I got the iPhone.
Thanks for dropping by! Glad you enjoyed.
Great stuff — just went through training last week on a similar topic and your post added some very practical ideas.
I’m glad you enjoyed! Thanks for commenting.
Great post! The recycle piece is huge. I actually revived something I wrote 11 years ago for a guest post on a client’s blog! Now that your recommendations highlight this as a best practice, I feel really good about it. (before hand I felt like I plagerized my 20’s version of me!)
I love all this practical advice. I have a blog that I haven’t been great about tending to as it is more of a lifestyle and sexual education blog. It makes it a little tricky when I am out at an event that I want to blog about to keep all the media straight for later. I now, go with a list of the performers and in order that they are to perform so when I take video/pictures it will make it much easier to share. I love the batch processing idea as I use this in my job technically all the time and that is hot on my priority list to do this coming weekend. I have tons of ideas that I have researched and tagged it is just finding the time. Thanks for your post.
Thanks Derick! The way I see it, if it hasn’t been published online yet — it’s fair game. And even if it has, posts and ideas need to be updated over time. As long as it still offers value, go for it.
Yes, batch processing is huge. Really amounts to a lot of saved time. I can’t wait to see the new posts!
Yes, batch processing is huge. Really amounts to a lot of saved time. I can’t wait to see the new posts!
Colin,
Check your use of then and than.“You might be a better public speaker then a writer.”
Great ideas. I like the idea of batching. I haven’t utilized that well enough in my blogs. If I worked on them together I think I would be better at implementing blog posts. Thanks.
Thanks for the feedback Shaune. Good luck experimenting with batching!
Good tips Colin. Batch processing is very useful, unless you need to write about breaking news and events. I find Google Reader and ReadLater/Instapaper to be useful to collect digital material. For iPhone, I use NewsRack.
Effective time management is the most important factor here. Unless you dedicate some quality time to blog on a regular basis, there are plenty of other digital distractions which can keep you away from blogging.
Good tips Colin. Batch processing is very useful, unless you need to write about breaking news and events. I find Google Reader and ReadLater/Instapaper to be useful to collect digital material. For iPhone, I use NewsRack.
Effective time management is the most important factor here. Unless you dedicate some quality time to blog on a regular basis, there are plenty of other digital distractions which can keep you away from blogging.
You know an odd feeling? Sitting on the toilet eating a chocolate candy bar.
Sent from my iPad 4G
I really like the document I’ll be relating back again.