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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