Racing Against the Clock: Time-Saving Tips for Blogging

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As every serious blogger knows, creating and maintaining a popular, informative, entertaining, and often-visited blog takes a lot of work—and time. Unfortunately, most of us are short on that particular precious commodity. We all have lives outside the blogosphere, and it’s hard to squeeze in enough time to write, format, post, and respond to a steady stream of content.

How can you balance blogging with the rest of your life? Here are some time-saving tips to help you maintain your blog with regular, quality content, when you’re out of ideas and short on time.

Focus, Grasshopper

One of the best ways for a blogger to save time is to know what you’re doing, and why you’re doing it. Chances are you’re blogging about a topic that you have a true passion for—that for some reason is important to you.

Knowing the exact reasons why you created your blog, and why you want to share what you’re writing with other people, will help you focus. This way, you can pick out the topics that are most important to you, and concentrate on those topics for your post.

Though it may not seem time-saving at first, you can also set some time aside and create a year-long plan, with smart and achievable goals. For example, you may want to double your monthly page views, or have a certain number of subscribers/followers. Then, decide whether your blogging activities are helping you work toward your goals—or wasting your time. Cut out the activities that don’t advance your goals.

Most of all, make blogging a priority in your life – and you’ll often find that the time you need creates itself.

Timing is Everything

blogging productivityEveryone has their own rhythm when it comes to life’s activities, and that includes writing and blogging. Spend a few days paying attention to when writing for your blog seems to flow the best. You might be more productive in the morning, when the day hasn’t piled up on you yet, or maybe you can concentrate better in the evenings, after you’ve taken care of business.

Once you know your rhythm, choose a time frame within your most productive hours and dedicate that time to writing. You may want to get your family involved in this and ask not to be disturbed during your writing time. You can give yourself an hour, and keep going if you’re almost finished—or schedule shorter chunks of time to work on big projects gradually.

Ditch the Distractions

You can save a lot of time by removing as many distractions as possible while you’re working on your blog. Power down your cell phone, switch the background TV off, close Twitter and Facebook, and resist the temptation to check your email every ten minutes. If you just can’t stay away from the online siren song, try disabling your Internet and setting a timer for when you can turn it back on.

Another time-saver is to reduce the time you spend watching TV or catching up with other blogs. Think about it—do you really need to follow 200 other blogs in the hopes that some of them will return the favor and visit you? Stick to the handful you truly enjoy, and use other, less time-consuming strategies to increase your reader base.

Seize Your Ideas

Have you ever thought of a great idea for a blog post—only to completely forget it by the time you get a chance to write it down? It happens to everyone. You can save time by making sure you always have something handy to capture those brilliant ideas.

You might want to use a note app on your phone, or just carry around a small notebook and a pen if you can’t phone-type fast enough. If you’re on the computer when inspiration strikes, skip the note-taking and jot it down directly in your blog drafts (you can also set things up so you can take direct-to-draft notes from your phone).

Another alternative is to use a voice recorder or app. This is handy during a commute, or when you’re out and about, to archive flash ideas that you’re likely to forget while you’re engaged in other activities.

Give Yourself a Break

It’s great to be dedicated to your blog, but don’t forget to take occasional breaks. Even if you’ve set yourself a strict posting schedule, whether it’s daily or on particular days of the week, keep in mind that it’s okay not to post when life gets in the way. Beating yourself up over a missed schedule will only slow you down when you return, because you’ll be in panic mode.

You should also schedule yourself the occasional blogging vacation, and take a complete break from it all—if possible, stay offline entirely for a few days. When you come back, you’ll be refreshed, recharged, and ready to pump out more great material for your blog.

Blogging consistently may take a lot of work but if you follow these tip-saving writing tips you’ll be fine.

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Megan Totka

Megan Totka is a freelance writer, business expert and consultant. She was the marketing & editorial director at ChamberofCommerce.com for over a decade. As a business expert, she specializes in reporting the latest business news, helpful tips and reliable resources, as well as providing business advice. She has significant experience with the topic of business marketing, and has spent several years exploring topics like copywriting, content marketing, list building, social media and any hot topics to help businesses run their business successfully.

22 thoughts on “Racing Against the Clock: Time-Saving Tips for Blogging”

  • Thanks for the great tips. I have enjoyed reading through your “Time is Everything” posts. When you are working at home and you also have a family to look after it can get hard to find time for blogging. I especially like the idea of using a timer to get specific tasks done.

    • Thanks, Cilly! It can sometimes seem impossible to juggle the demands of home and work — especially when they’re both in the same place! But when I incorporate these strategies, it’s almost like I can “trick” myself into better managing my time. 😉

  • Take short, frequent breaks to write a TON….one of the secrets to my prolific nature. I break, and write, break, and write, and never get burned out, or feel writer’s block.

    Thanks Megan!

    • Great tip, Ryan! I’m sure many bloggers out there have experienced “blogging burnout” — frequent breaks is a simple but very effective way to keep the words flowing.

  • This is really a great post its very useful to me im newbie to this, thanks for tips advices and guidelines, im looking forwards more tips from you 🙂

    • Thanks, Gopinath! I appreciate the feedback. It’s always rewarding to help new e-marketers get on the path to success. Check back often for new posts!

    • Thanks for reading, Tarkan! You’re not alone – it’s a huge challenge to stay off-line for extended periods of time. But I’ve found that when I do force myself to do it, I’m more prolific and productive. Best of luck to you!

  • Hi,
    Using my phone clock as a timer works great for me. That goes for my whole workday. I do 30 min. here, 30 min. there, but, my blog always takes the longest. I like to blog in the morning or early afternoon. Blogging can be stressful if you are always looking for some subject to blog about. I look at other Internet Marketing blogs and get lots of ideas from them. Usually, that takes care of it. Thanks for all the tips. Never thought of taking a few days off from blogging. Maybe I’ll try it.

    • Hi, Geri! Great tip. Congrats on finding a time management tool that works well for you! You’re right, generating topic ideas can sometimes take just as long as developing the post itself. Best of luck to you!

  • Hi, This is really something unique to learn about Blogging. Time is really important & I understand Bloging takes to much time ! A Blog really need to much to get stand up ! This is really amazing tips to save time via blogging.

  • thanks for providing those great ideas to save time. However, writing something you are really passionate about is no difficult. What is actually a tough deal is to ditch the social distractions as Facebook and twitter.

    • Hi, Yogesh. I completely agree, social media can be a big distraction… for me, the key is scheduling my social media time, and using it as an e-marketing tool rather than just for socializing. And finding topics that resonate with me is key, too.

  • Informative and really helpful article. Those were really great advices and I hope they would definitely help me lot to save my time.

    • Thanks, Gurwinder! I’m happy to share the strategies I’ve learned. As you know, time is the most precious tool of a blogger and e-marketer. Best of luck to you!

  • Great advice. I found out about these auto blog tools for things like wordpress recently, where it grabs content from other sites and reposts it automatically. That cannot be adding value to the internet. With google’ constant steps forward, the focus has to be on adding quality content that adds to things around it. thanks

  • This is the kind of concrete information that really helps me and I’m sure plenty of others who don’t have a lot of time to figure out the technology.

    • Thanks so much, Martin! Always happy to help other e-marketers find ways to work more productively (and profitably)! Best of luck to you.

  • I prefer writing 2-3 articles on weekdays and schedule them to for future so that I don’t face crisis when some unexpected situation like dinner, party or something arrives, then I won’t have problems.

    Well written post Megan 🙂

    • That’s a great strategy, AMaan! It’s always a good feeling to have a stockpile of future posts ready to go, so there’s no scrambling to come up with content at the last minute. Thanks for reading and posting!

  • So often I come up with an idea, and an opening paragraph, and my computer is nowhere to be seen. I use the task app on my phone (which is always with me) to put my thoughts to “paper”.

    When I am in a fantastic writing mood – where I can crank out three or four posts in an afternoon – I schedule them for upcoming weeks, knowing that my writing moods don’t last long. My non-writing moods produce one post, if I’m lucky.

  • Hey Megan,

    Thank you for sharing your thoughts. I also used to be distracted while writing my blogs every often. I had this tendency to tab from one site to another. However, I found a solution by switching off my monitor. I switch off the monitor while I write and on them when I am done to edit it.
    As of now this technique is helping me to save a lot of time.

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