4 Keys to a More Productive Blogging and Marketing Workday

December 10, 2013 by Daniel Sharkov|

Your main goal as a blogger probably comes down to marketing your blog and your content, building a community, converting visitors into readers and clients and making money as an end result.

Aside from that however, as a blogger you should also strive to save time!

Time is an important factor. The less of it you have to spend on your work, the more of it you will have at your disposal to do whatever you want.

but if we assume you are making thousands of dollars from your blog every month, what’s the point if you don’t actually have the time to spend them, right?

But then again when it comes to making a living by spending the least amount of time possible actually working, internet-related monetization models are a good idea.

And that most definitely also goes for blogging!

But even so, there are always things you could do to further minimize the time you spent on your day-to-day tasks.

That is exactly what I will focus on in today’s post!

In the below paragraphs I have gone through four simple steps I am taking to improve my all-round productivity or in other words get more work done in the least of time!

1. Have a Table with Your Stats and Plan Ahead

We’ve all heard that failing to plan is planning to fail. And there’s definitely some truth to this.

Well not in our case exactly, but still having a proper plan and knowing exactly what’s going on with your blog is an important part of the improving productivity process.

Here are some of the steps you should follow in order to stay on top of things:

Take a minute to
figure how many articles you need to complete PER month for your blog – that way you can track your progress at any time and compare it to that final number. Include
another table with the guest posts you want to write per month – guest bloggingas you probably know is one of the best ways to not only improve your SEO, but to also expand your community and draw new readers in. That is why you should include it in your plans. Create a
checklist with all the tasks you need to perform daily – the list might include things like engaging on Twitter, replying to comments, scheduling social media updates, etc. Make a list of your earnings
based on their type (if you have any that is) – for me the list includes affiliate sales, sponsored reviews and custom content that I’ve written. That way at the end of the month you will have an idea of which monetization strategies are working and which require improving.

NOTE:
You can use Excel or more sophisticated software to structure all that data, but if you prefer simplicity, I’d recommend you to go for Sticky Notes.

2. Don’t Procrastinate Your Tasks Even a Minute

That sounds like a really basic tip, I know…

The reality however is that procrastination is more often than not the reason why things aren’t working out and why you end up spending way to much time on things that could take only a few minutes.

You see, a few months back, I was the king of procrastination. I was constantly putting off my tasks and was like “that thing takes like 10 minutes, it can wait, I will get to it later”.

Quite obviously,
most of the times that “later” never came, which resulted in me posting less on networks like Facebook and Google Plus, forgetting to schedule Twitter tweets and writing one article or none when I had to complete two.

The result?

A huge dip in traffic.

My advice here is real simple.

There are no tools that can help you with that (except for your phone’s alarm maybe). It’s all up to you.

Just get up in the morning, drink your coffee, finish breakfast and don’t waste another second. Look at the list (from the previous paragraph) that you (should’ve) created
and start striking through your tasks (using CTRL+T if you decide to try Sticky Notes). By doing so you can better “feel” the progress you are making, which will keep you more motivated to keep going.

And don’t stop until you’ve crossed the last on the list. Otherwise you might just end up in that postpone-circle, which is almost impossible to get off of.

3. Complete Everything and Leave Writing Last

A lot of folks will probably start be telling you, you should do your writing first and then move on to the other less-important tasks. And there’s some logic to it when you think about it. You work on what matters most until you reach the task that aren’t that crucial.

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But…
by leaving those not-that-significant tasks last, you risk not finishing them at all (remember what I said about the tasks that take just a couple of minutes to complete?).

That is why I always start work from the smallest things that need to get done and make my way up to the more important ones with writing holding the last spot.

An additional benefit of doing so is that
once you reach the writing part, you know there is nothing else to do and that as long as you complete the whole post, you are free to go.

Wait… did I just say “complete the whole post”?!

4. Don’t Write Half an Article, Get it All Done

That has definitely got to be the most time-saving advice from this whole article!

A few weeks back I had the same writing schedule as I have now – I had to finish two full articles per week. There is just one small difference between how I was doing it then and how I am doing it now.

Previously…

I’d take the two articles, split them down to subheadings and write just one or two of those subheads PER day. The idea was to do as little writing per day by spreading it throughout the whole week.

Well you know, that wasn’t working really well.

I was often-times feeling just too overwhelmed from that everyday-writing schedule. In the end of the week I had finished just one article and had to get the other one than either on Saturday or on Sunday.
This meant that I didn’t really have free time – time when I didn’t have to think about blogging and writing articles.

The end result was a whole week of feeling stressed-out and thinking how I won’t be able to meet the deadline and sometimes not meeting it indeed.

Now…

I take the time to get my first article finished on Monday and the second one on Tuesday. That leaves my whole rest of the week free from any writing. I only have to work on my daily tasks, which don’t take more than an hour per day.

How I achieved this?

Firstly I installed the WordPress Editorial Calendar– a great plugin that changes the whole layout of your WordPress blog posts archive by turning it into what is essentially a calendar,
where you can easily manage your finished and unfinished content and get a better idea of what you have to publish next and what you have to write next. Secondly rather than simply writing an article idea when something came to my mind,
I also took the time to write a short bullet-pointed plan for the post that consists of all the paragraphs I am going to cover. Thirdly I created a sticky note with all the to-be-written articles
along with their subheadings. That way I always know what other articles there are in the queue, which gives me additional time to think of what to write in the subheadings.Final Words

Those four strategies have given me a huge helping hand in the battle to find more free time and make my day a little more productive. I really hope you liked the advice!

Now I’d like to hear your thoughts!

What are your ways to improve blogging and marketing productivity? Are you a Sticky Notes fan? How many articles do you finish per week?

Please take a minute to share!

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