7 Ways to Save Time Finding and Creating Blog Content

Successful blogging requires commitment and consistency. Anyone can start a blog. The bigger challenge is starting it, getting frustrated and losing interest, ultimately forgetting or abandoning your blog. If you want to achieve whatever blogging goals you have set, you can't adopt that attitude.

Since blogs are all about engagement, you have to constantly be "out there", engaging in a conversation with your target audience.

Think about what the following blogging tasks have in common:

? Writing, editing and publishing posts

? Finding royalty free images for your blog

? Spending time on Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram,Twitter and other social media sites

? Writing guest blog posts

? Recording and uploading videos to YouTube and your blog

? Managing your blog comments

Do you recognize the constant theme in all of the above necessary blogging activities? If you have been blogging for any time at all you understand that all of the above tasks are recurring.

They are necessarily repetitive. Google and the other major search engines reward constant and frequent delivery of fresh, original content that is relevant to your blog's theme. When you first started your blog, this was not a problem.

You were so fired up about starting your own online business, or piece of virtual real estate where you could engage with others, that you didn't mind these weekly and daily tasks. You actually looked forward to them.

The first week you had no problem adding 2 or 3 blog posts, communicating with those people who commented on your blog, and keeping busy with social media. This may have gone for a few weeks.

Then something inevitable happened.

Instead of "wanting" to work on your blog, you began to feel "forced" to handle your blog tasks. You should love blogging. You should not despise working on the blog you created.

Put into practice the following 7 tips, techniques and strategies, and you will save valuable time from blogging that can be used elsewhere in your life.

1 – Hire a virtual assistant to handle menial, recurring tasks for you.

2 – Use the auto-schedule feature for publishing your posts in the future.

3 – Develop a schedule, and stick to it. This saves time by automating your tasks, and keeping you on point.

4 – Instead of straining your brain, spending hours to create a blog post, interview someone in your field. You end up spending 15 to 30 minutes interviewing, rather than several hours researching and writing.

5 - Ask your audience to write for you. Ask your readers to send in real-life scenarios relative to your blog. This makes them feel important, it drives engagement, and gives you plenty of content for a blog post.

6 – Put a timer on all your blogging tasks. It is easy to get caught up responding to comments, writing a new post or interacting on social media. Set a timer for each task, and when it goes off, move to the next task.

7 – Schedule your blogging activities for just 1 or 2 days each week. This forces you to be productive with your blogging time, keeps you from getting burned out working every day on your blog, and leaves plenty of time in your life for non-blog living.

8 - Record your thoughts. I have found doing this helps me to come up with tangible, interesting, shareable content.  People like reading our thoughts, our streams of consciousness ... Try it.

Like many of you, I get in a slump, trying to come up with content. This system has helped me to stay more focused and attentive to my blogs.  I made a commitment to write a post a minimum of every 2 weeks and often find myself writing a post a day.  Even if you don't love writing, you can find things to say. 

If you really don't have time to blog and could use some help, message me. My team and I write posts for several blogs (ecommerce, retail, business and service providers).  If your  blog fits one of these topics and you would like a quote on writing for your blog, send me a direct message on LinkedIn.  Let my team and I help you plan, create and schedule relevant blog posts for your target audience.