If you’re a new blogger, or even a seasoned one, you’ll want to check out these 7 tips to blog without it taking over your life.
Before you start blogging, it seems like such an easy way to make money, without having to work too hard. However, once you start, you’ll find that it quickly consumes your life.
There’s not only recipes to make, pictures to take, and posts to write. You also need to be interacting on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter, pinning and repinning (and repinning) content to Pinterest, answering emails, and more.
And the more content you create, the more content you need to remember to get back out to your followers at the appropriate time of year. Pretty soon you can find that blogging takes over your life, but that doesn’t have to be the case.
These 7 tips to blog without it taking over your life can help you so much! When I institute these tips, life runs much better for me, and I have more free time to spend with my family.
Have a Plan
Creating an editorial calendar and having a plan will definitely help you out. Trust me. I’ve gone through times where I had a plan, and times where I didn’t, and it was definitely better when I did. It can be as simple as using google calendar, or even a pencil and paper, and jotting down ideas for the posts you want to make.
When you know what you’re planning to make and when, you can be more prepared. Instead of making extra trips to the store for items you suddenly decide you want to use, you can have those prepared ahead of time.
I find that when I start putting ideas out there, I’m sometimes able to find common themes or ways in which I can overlap the work to cover more bases at once. Which leads to the next tip.
Work in Batches
Instead of doing each blog part separately, working in batches can save tons of time. When possible, cook multiple recipes on the same day (this goes back to having a plan). Instead of roasting a chicken on Monday and eating it for dinner, and then on Tuesday realizing you want to do a chicken salad recipe and having to cook chicken again, roast the chicken and take pics, chop up part of the chicken for one recipe, shred another part for another recipe, and make bone broth with the rest.
You can do this not only with cooking, but with other aspects as well. Sit down and edit dozens of pictures at a time. If you’re in the mood to write, write several posts. Once you get into the groove, it’s easier, and you actually get more accomplished than when you jump from task to task.
Create a Schedule
Beyond having a plan of what blog posts you want to post and when, a regular schedule should also be created. Set aside a certain time for specific tasks. Perhaps Monday from 9-11 you spend getting all of your social media scheduled for the week, and Tuesday from 9-1 is your cooking day.
Your schedule can be whatever works best for you, but it won’t work unless you have one.
Items you might want to include on your regular schedule are:
- Cooking and photographing new recipes
- Writing new posts
- Editing pictures
- Scheduling social media
- Recycling old content (new pins, new tweets, etc)
- Replying to roundup requests
- Contributing at link parties
Your list might look different than mine, and that’s okay. Figure out what tasks you need to do, and create a schedule that works for you.
Schedule Work Intensive Days
Every once in a while, it’s nice to do a Blog Day.
A blog day for me consists of just really digging in and getting a ton done in one day. This sometimes means batch cooking in insane amounts (thank God for freezers, and future dinners!). Sometimes it means getting every single scheduler scheduled for months. Sometimes it means digging in to the yucky back end tasks I’ve been putting off, or reading articles about things I need to learn about.
Having a blog day scheduled several times a year (or even once a month) will help your blog tremendously. When you’ve got those random tasks that come up that you don’t have time for, write them down to remember on blog day.
Utilize Schedulers when Possible
Most social media can be posted using schedulers. I recommend trying to implement as many schedulers as possible. Instead of visiting each social media account multiple times per day and posting, schedulers make it possible to spend an hour or so getting dozens of social media messages prepared.
Some great schedulers are CoSchedule, which we use to schedule Twitter and Facebook posts. We also schedule some pins using it (you could schedule all of your pins using it, if you want), as well as Instagram posts. The great thing about CoSchedule is that you can schedule all your social media at once, from within your blog post. Find out more about CoSchedule and how to use it here.
For pinning, we use Tailwind. While we could schedule pins using CoSchedule, we have found that Tailwind is so much better for getting pins scheduled quickly. You can find out more about Tailwind and how to use it here.
You can even schedule directly on some social media platforms. Facebook has a scheduler that’s fairly easy to use. Twitter offers a scheduler as well. Instagram doesn’t offer scheduling, but you can create drafts ahead of time, so that all you have to do is open the draft and publish.
Live in the Moment
The first year I blogged, my family really suffered for it. We were doing Christmas crafts in October, so I could get those posts getting traction by December. By the time Christmas came around, we were all done with it, and it wasn’t any fun.
After that first Christmas, I decided that I refused to live that way. You can still live in the moment, while taking advantage of the seasonal things you’re doing that would make good blog posts.
There are 2 easy ways to do this.
#1 Take pictures in the moment this year, and schedule them for next year.
I have done this before, and it was actually really awesome. I got the posts completely ready, and then scheduled them for the following year. I was already ahead on next year’s editorial calendar! Then as next year came, I was creating the following year’s posts. Always a year ahead!
#2 Be in the moment, and realize your posts will be too late for current traffic.
There’s also nothing wrong with enjoying the holidays and posting about it while it’s happening. Though you probably won’t get much traffic on the 4th of July posts you blogged about on the 7th of July, they will sit there ready for next year’s searches.
Focus
I know one of the biggest struggles to getting blogging tasks done in a timely matter is focus. Because so much of what we do as bloggers involves social media, it can be easy to get sucked down a rabbit hole and not get our blogging done.
In order to stay focused, try to stay away from the areas that distract you. If Facebook is a distraction, make sure it doesn’t get opened until you’ve finished your tasks for the day.
If you find yourself scrolling through Pinterest instead of blogging, use a scheduler that allows you to stay off of Pinterest altogether (we recommend Tailwind for this. You can schedule all of your pins without ever getting on Pinterest. Feel free to use this link to get $15 towards your subscription.)
Hopefully these 7 tips will help you blog without it taking over your life, so you can spend more of your time doing what you love!
If you’ve got a tip that’s helped your blogging run more efficiently, drop a comment below and share it with us! We love to help support others bloggers, and we appreciate you helping others as well!
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