Welcome to Day 4 of my series Tools & Tips for Profitable Productive Blogging. Today I am going to talk about posting and a few ways to post in a more productive manner. This is something that I have struggled and I believe that the tips and tools in this post will help you avoid some of the pitfalls I and other bloggers have fallen into.
I have talked with quite a few bloggers over the course of the last several weeks and asked them lots of questions on their posting practices. I have tried to take some of the knowledge gleaned from these "pro" bloggers and meld it with my own practices. Here are my tips on how be productive in posting. I have implemented these practices and it has been a tremendous help.
Have A Specific Time For Writing & A Specific Output Goal
This is very key to being productive in your posting. I know when I started blogging, and really up until recently, I just posted whenever the time presented itself. I would find myself interrupted many times and it would end up taking longer to post than was really necessary.
Pick a time, say 1 hour or 1 1/2 hours, and put it aside for nothing but article writing. Try to pick a time where you will be able to work without interruption and distraction. You want to be able to focus totally on writing. Get a drink and a snack or whatever so that you are not getting up constantly during your time. Do whatever you can to eliminate distractions and things that will interrupt and steal your time. I also include article research in my writing time, as the time constraint will make you more efficient in that area as well. I will talk a bit more in a bit on how to streamline your research.
This practice allows you to write several days or a weeks worth of posts at one shot. Having posts written in advance is great when you are busy and don't have time to write. It is also nice that you can go back and proofread your posts several times and make small changes if necessary. This was one that I struggled with, and still do. I have started doing this much more consistently and have found that I can write more articles in less time by simple setting aside a specific time and set a specific goal on output.
The Importance of Post Tagging
If you look at the top blogs in your niche you will probably notice a pattern in the tags or categories they use for their posts. Also check Technorati and see which tags overlap with the popular tags at the popular blogs for your niche. Try and model your categories after the most common and popular ones. Obviously you will need to take into account your own posting style and topic selection but for the most part the categories are pretty much the same within a niche. This is a practice that I am still implementing as I am having to rename and reorganize some of my categories. The benefits of doing this go beyond the simple organization and navigation benefits for you and your readers, and extend into posting practices. Let me explain a bit more.
Use Blogrovr
Once again let me state that no links here are paid or affiliate links. This is all free and I am making no personal gain from this. What
BlogRovr does for you is bring up, in a little bar on the side of your browser, posts from your favorite blogs on the topics you are browsing. For example, you are wanting to post on SEO, so you are browsing around your favorite blogs looking for information and inspiration for your article.
BlogRovr will pop-up articles that pertain to the category of what you are reading and surfing.
Now if you have added your own blog as one of your favorites in BlogRovr, when you are beginning to write a post on a particular subject, BlogRovr will bring up previous articles from your blog on the same subject. This is nice for folks that have started to accumulate a lot of content. You can now see what other folks are saying about your topic, and also what you have said in the past about the topic. This allows you to link internally to your own relevant work, and link externally to other bloggers relevant work. This makes the process of researching for a post much faster and much more efficient. It also makes linking to other blog articles relevant to your topic much quicker and easier. BlogRovr uses tags as one way that it brings you content so that is why my first tip was important.
Schedule Your Posts For A Later Date
Now that you have streamlined your categories, cut your research time, and increased your writing productivity you need a productive way to get the posts on your blog without having to manually go in and post each day. You have written your articles in advance now you need to schedule the posting of those articles in advance.
For those of you using wordpress you simply check the box to edit the timestamp and then set the date and time you want the post to go live. For those of you using Blogger the process is just a bit more involved. Although it is easy to set up and once you do it is very to use. First things first. You will need to go into your blog's dashboard select the settings tab, then select email. Now you need to enter what you want for your Mail-to-blogger address and click save settings. See the picture below.
Now that you have set up your mail-to-blogger email address you will need to have a way to set up your posts to be emailed at specific times to that address. Now if your email program already allows you to do this then you are set. I use gmail which does not allow for email scheduling. I use a site called
LetterMeLater.com. It is free to use and very easy. It allows you to use your current email address, great feature, and has a html editor. Thanks to Lori @
Blogging With Cents for first cluing me in on this.
Conclusion
Once you start following a practice like what I have outlined you can really cut down your blogging time. In about 1 to 2 hours you can write a weeks worth of posts, schedule those posts for set times throughout the week and you are pretty much done for the week. Obviously you can always throw in a current events posts or a post on a new development if you would like, but if not you can pretty much go a week hands off blogging. What are your article research practices. Do you write multiple posts at a time? Do you schedule your posts for a later date? What is your procedure when it comes to article writing. Do you already practice some of these tips? Did you find this article helpful? Get more profitable and productive information by
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Now go be a more productive blogger.
Related Posts:5 Days of Tools & Tips For More Productive Blogging - Day 35 Days of Tools & Tips For More Productive Blogging - Day 25 Days of Tools & Tips For More Productive Blogging - Day 1later all and have a
profitable and productive blogging day
