November 19, 2020

Three Time Saving Tips for Blogging

Is blogging taking you too long? Here are my 3 best tips to save you time!

Blogging takes time. Let’s cut that time down!

When I recently polled my Instagram audience about what stops them from blogging, their number one answer was that it takes too much time.

Having a blog myself, I definitely have to agree that it is a big time commitment.

However, the short and long term benefits of having a blog outweigh everything else.

With these three time saving blogging tips I’m sharing with you today, hopefully blogging will take you much less time and you’ll begin to get excited about all the possibilities a blog can bring you.

Tip #1: Plan in Advance

It’s a lot harder when you walk up to the plate on a Tuesday morning knowing that you have to post a blog that day but you have no idea what you’re going to write about. Instead, if you plan ahead it’s much easier and way less stressful to hit that publish button on time. I use a content calendar to work ahead and create a workflow that is best for me.

My content calendar includes all my blog posts, when they’re going to be published, and columns for each step to get it to its final result. Having a consistent and easily viewable workflow allows me to quickly see what blog posts I have coming up and what I have to do to get them ready. I also like to separate the rows by month so I can plan four to six weeks in advance and get a full understanding of a month at one time.

The best thing you can do for yourself is to plan your posts and workflow so you can get ahead and not end up scrambling the day of. So plan in advance, use a content calendar, think about your posts, and schedule them so everything can go smoothly.

Get a full year’s worth of blog posts planned for you here (for free!).

Tip #2: Outline Your Blog Post

Even if you have a blog idea or title ready to go, the actual writing of the post can be daunting. Consider outlining your post before writing! I like to get out a piece of paper, write the title, write any subheadings I want, and write down my ideas about those subheadings.

For example, take this post where I have three time saving tips for blogging. By brainstorming first about everything I wanted to include in this post and creating subheadings, it was much easier to come up with talking points about each one. I was also able to reorder, condense, and change topics so the post flowed better and was the most concise I could make it. Instead of going to the blog post and having an intimidating blank screen in front of you, begin with your outline to make it easier.

By having my outline and subheadings planned out, I can write about my first, second, and third bullet points very easily because I broke them down into the topics I knew I wanted to talk about. This makes the writing of it way less stressful and overwhelming and it goes by much faster. I know it seems like an English teacher thing to do, but they were right. Truly, outlining your blog posts helps writing them 1000 times easier and faster.

Need help writing about your clients? Check out this blog post for some tips!

Tip #3: Batch Work to Save More Time

The definition of batch work is doing the same kind of task over and over again so that you get all of them done at the same time. When we batch work, we are doing one task repeatedly such as writing, outlining, gathering images, scheduling your blog posts, or anything like that. Compare that to when you create a blog post, outline, write, add images, do the SEO, then publish; every time you switch from task to task, you have to sit and think about things a little more which isn’t as time efficient as batch working.

By doing the same task repeatedly and planning your blog posts in advance, not only will you be way ahead of your content calendar, but you are going to be so much faster.

For example if you can sit down four days out of the week and dedicate each day to something different, you will come out way ahead of schedule. One day you outline, the next you write, then add images, and then do the SEO. After those four days you will have a month’s worth of content and it will take way less time than before. Batch working does take some planning ahead so if you follow my first tip, you should be able to flow through batch working without a hitch.