This post contains affiliate links.
Here is a question for my readers and fellow bloggers. If you only had one your to spend today blogging, how would you spend it? What activities would you do and what would you prioritize?
This assumes that you have no posts queued or scheduled and you haven’t caught up on your email, comments or Twitter mentions yet.
Break up our hour and let me know how you prioritize an hour? Now that you have done that, follow your routine for each hour you spend blogging per day. This is the best way to maximize your time and efficiency blogging and ensures that you account for each minute so you don’t waste any time doing frivolous activity that is not a priority. It is far too easy to say you are going to sit down and write some blog posts, but get distracted by comments, reading other blogs and responding or socializing on Twitter. These distractions will lead to poor time management and reduce your efficiency, forcing you to spend more time “blogging” than you had intended and than you really need to.
If I had only one hour with no posts written, here is how I would spend it. (Note: This is assuming 1 blog, I run 3 so would just write 3 blog posts for my three).
- Spend 20 minutes writing a quality blog post of no less than 200-300 words.
- Spend 5 minutes finding best keywords to SEO optimize the blog post
- Spend 15 minutes responding to blog comments and comment back on other blogs after reading some articles or skimming.
- Spend 10 minutes catching up on social media messages and doing some promotion for my blog posts
- Spend 10 minutes reading other posts, news and writing down topics and idea’s for new blog posts (try to get 3-4 blog post titles/ideas)
That is my most efficient way to spend a single hour blogging, and here is a break down of what each activity buys you.
By writing a quality post instead of a shorter one, you are helping keep a user on your site longer (lower bounce rate) providing more valuable information than a simple message update or tiny verbiage that is nothing but a filler. By spending some extra time finding appropriate keywords, you are going to make sure that your blog post gets more traffic and better placement on Google search and other search engines. This will increase overall organic search traffic if you have a good niche topic and have some luck and good keyword choices selected.
By responding to your comments, you are engaging your readers. By visiting their blogs and commenting back you are returning the favor, and you may get other idea’s about future blog posts and learn some helpful information as well.
By engaging in some social media, you are garnering interest to your site and also keeping readers and users engaged. Show them you are a living person, have two way conversations and that you are not just another RSS or Twitter Feed sending out articles without any active engagement.
Lastly, collect idea’s and document them for your next blog posts, even if its just writing some titles and saving some drafts. Sometimes having good post titles can inspire you to think of posts to surround the title.
So how would you spend your blogging hour?
-Justin Germino
WPX Support
Latest posts by WPX Support (see all)
- What Posts and Videos Will Get Popular is Still a Mystery - December 16, 2016
- Poem: Weeping Priest - October 30, 2016
- Reflecting on 8 Years of Dragon Blogger - September 29, 2016