8 tips to optimize your time for blog writing

I regularly hear statements like I just don’t have time to work on my blog, I am too busy to get out there and promote the blog, I have to do this, I have to do that, plus many other excuses. What these people really mean is I prioritize something else.

“Time is free, but it’s priceless. You can’t own it, but you can use it. You can’t keep it, but you can spend it. Once you’ve lost it you can never get it back.” – Harvey MacKay

Even though time is a limited resource, we still have 24 hours in a day, which is plenty of time, but it is a matter of reevaluating our priorities.

Most bloggers might have a job that takes some 9 hours daily, then you sleep some 7 hours and it leaves you with some 8 hours daily to do some house work, hang out with your friends and family or work on your hobbies.

That is why you have to learn to control your time, optimize it the best possible way and manage it wisely. There are the 8 ways that you can find more time to work on your blogging dreams.

1. Stop reading, take action

   Reading and learning is important, but only to a point. It is important to stop and implement some of the things you have read about. If you don’t take your time to use what you have learned, nothing will change and you will stand still. Be a blog producer.

2. Stop checking the stats

   If you are regularly stressing yourself checking your blog visitor stats, your RSS subscriber stats, your earning stats, stop. Checking them will not help, but actively working on things that will improve those stats will. Try not to check the stats more than once daily.

3. Focus on the tasks that have the highest impact

   You must focus your energy on the tasks that have the highest impact on your goals. For bloggers, the goal usually is to increase the readership, and the task that will bring you closer to that goal is creating remarkable content and pulling your target audience to your blog.

4. Don’t get distracted

   In the age of the Internet it is very easy to get distracted and waste several hours reading RSS, checking Facebook, sending tweets or reading Steve Pavlina’s blog (it happens to me every once in a while as Steve’s blog is so good). Shut out the distractions!

5. Throw away your television

   Most of the people that say that they are too busy to be able to work on their blogs regularly, still seem to have enough time to watch hours of television every day. TV watching might be entertaining, but it is not going to bring you closer to your blogging goals.

6. Forget your strict schedule

   Did you set yourself on a very strict schedule of having to produce regular blog posts? Forget about it. Your blog will not become extinct if you miss a day or two. The tight schedule just might strain you so much that you give up the blog. Writing one great post per week will have a much bigger impact than writing one average post daily.

7. Maximize your health

   Eat healthy. Do some exercise. Get enough sleep. Leading a healthy lifestyle will definitely make you more energetic, fresh and will improve your productivity and will win you time.

8. Your passion motivates you

   We always hear about the blog passion and it really is true. If your blog topic is something you really love, it is going to be so much easier to motivate yourself to work on it. You will not be able to fall asleep because you would want to blog, you would wake up very early energetic to get out of the bed and do even more blogging.

From passive viewing to active working

Majority of the “busy” bloggers are spending more time surfing the internet and watching TV than working on their blogs and at the end of another day they have nothing to show for. You must be disciplined and shift your focus from passive viewing into active working on your blogging targets and dreams. No one else but you can do it.

Image by Damon Garrett.

I'm nominated in top 100 online marketers of 2009 - Click here to vote for me now! - Thanks, Marko Saric

How to be a prolific blogger by Marko Saric

When I posted my plan for a guest posting blitz: 20 posts in 30 days, Marko actually replied saying that it was an aggressive goal and offered me an invite to post here.

So, I thought what better to write about than how I can continually generate massive amounts of content. Since starting my blog I’ve consistently published between 5-7 posts a week. So, I figured it’s time to answer the question, “How do you come up with so much content?”

• Write every day

Notice that I didn’t put post every day. I said “write” every day. Writing is like any other skill. The more you do it, the better you are going to get at it. I do a little bit of writing every single day on some idea I have for a blog post. At any one time I might have 10 or so different ideas for posts, and be working on 3-4.

• Consciously look for ideas

As I go through my life, I will often look for experiences that I could turn into a blog post. Sometimes simply asking myself the question “How can I turn this into a blog post?” will enable me to come up with the idea I need for my next post.

• Brainstorm

At all times, you should have either a notebook, text document, or just a simple list of of ideas for blog posts. Even if you don’t know what the content of the post will be and the idea seems half baked, write it down. I have ideas for blog posts that I came up with a month ago and I still haven’t written them.

• Psycho Cybernetics problem solving

I know that’s a mouthful. One thing I learned from Dr. Maxwell Maltz’s book is the idea of our subconscious problem solving mechanism. You can actually give your subconsciousness instructions to solve a problem before you go to sleep and in the morning you will wake up with the solution. It sounds nuts, but I’ve found it to be quite effective for coming up with blog post ideas.

So how do you do this? It’s pretty simple actually. Before you go to sleep, just tell yourself “I need an idea for a new blog post.” Do this right before you are about to fall asleep. Then when you wake up in the morning you’ll have an idea.

• Posts/Comments on other blogs

I come up with a lot of ideas for posts when I read people’s comments on other blogs. Sometimes a reader will make a comment or ask a question about the post I’m reading, so I just write a blog post about it. Again it comes down to asking yourself the question, “How can I make a blog post out of that?”

• Go off topic

Maybe you have a good story that has nothing do with the content of your blog? Turn it into a blog post. You’ll be surprised at how engaging people find your content.

If there’s anybody who actually does a great job of taking every day life experiences that seem completely ordinary and turnes them into awesome blog posts, it’s Kelly Diels. She managed to take a conversation about some t-shirt she bough her boyfriend, write a blog post about it, make a product out of it, and sell two t-shirts.

Developing momentum

All of this comes down to developing momentum. Once you hit your stride, you’ll see that coming up with posts is not all that difficult. Finding the time to write all of them is really about effective time management. If you want to know how I manage my time check out my post on how to put your Wordpress blog on autopilot and hang out at the beach and my 6 tips for efficient blogging.

A guest post by Srinivas Rao, a personal development blogger, at The Skool of Life.

Image by Ajawin

I'm nominated in top 100 online marketers of 2009 - Click here to vote for me now! - Thanks, Marko Saric