Save Time By Finding Your Perfect Topic Schedule
The other day I posted my personal biggest time wasters while blogging. First I posted some possible time-saving email solutions and today I’m posting some solutions related to my issue of not knowing what to blog about first.
Notice I did not say “I have no idea what to blog about” - it’s actually very rare that I have no clue what to blog about. My brain is always on idea overload. However, too many ideas, can be just as bad as not enough.
I actually realized I had this issue a few weeks ago, and started a plan that has helped immensely. I made a darn editorial calender.
For a long time, at numerous blogging blogs, I’d see the following tip,“Make an editorial calender for your blog to speed things up.” I never listened because I’ve always been more a spur of the moment blogger. Free to blog what I want, no topic or editorial schedule to speak of. I thought an editorial calender sounded sort of lame. But, with no topic schedule, my brain is always hopping, “What to blog first! I’ve got 100 topics in mind! Hmmm….”
Waste. Of. Time.
I decided to make a weekly editorial calendar. I already have a normal weekly schedule so I simply added topics to it. For example, on my schedule I always list all my blogs plus the numbers of posts needed per day. Now with topics added my schedule looks like this:
Above is a clip of my schedule - this is part of my week-long schedule for Tree Hugging Family, but all the rest look the same. The post topics in non-bold font never change from week to week. The items in bold do. When I first tried an editorial schedule I made it too rigid. It had no free post times and I felt overly confined (what if a news story pops up?). That said, I now leave 2-3 free spots per day. If I have a special feature going on I add it in bold. As you can see we’re doing a weekly special on green feminine products and a month long green wedding event.
I do detour sometimes from a topic, but overall, just having to look down and see a topic is way easier. Now I just glance and think, “Oh, it’s time to blog about natural gardening.” I can blog anything about natural gardening I want, but knowing my goal is to get a post on this exact topic done helps.
But my blog’s not so diverse. I can’t have all these topics…
It doesn’t matter. With the green blog, I can have a lot of variety but with say, my organizing blog, I don’t go by topic so much as space. Take a look:
If you had a baking blog, you could do topics by item; cookie, cake, muffins, etc. Or if you have a blogging blog you could do it by tips; traffic, how-to, comments, etc. This sort of editorial schedule works for any blog. One last thing. What you see above is from this week’s schedule (no holidays) on a week with a holiday, I’d add that for the week on whatever day. I also add contest announcements, theme days, and general issues like that.
By the way, if you have no clue where to start when developing topic themes, I’ll tell you how I got mine. One from stats. The topics you see in my schedule are the most popular I write on. Two, at both these blogs I had polls up that asked readers what they wanted to read more of. The winning topics are also included on my schedule.
In any case, I’m kicking myself for not listening to everyone sooner. This has saved me more time than any other time management trick I’ve tried so far, because I’m not always wavering about trying to focus on a topic theme.
Give it a try, I bet you’ll save time too. Just don’t forget to leave a little flex room.
Have you tried a blogging editorial calender? What did you think?
Spend Less Time On Email & More Time Blogging
The other day I posted my personal biggest time wasters while blogging. Today I’m posting some solutions I’m considering for email and moderating blog comments. I’m tacking these two time wasters together, because blog comments are one major source of email for me.
How I already save time on email:
Have decent email: I use Gmail for my major email account. I.e. anyone that matters gets my Gmail account. Gmail is very good about clearing spam (knock on wood) and so far I’ve never had an issue with them, like I have with other email providers. At first it was tough for me to get used to the whole forum-like thread on Gmail, but now, I really like it. If you have an email account that passes too much spam through, consider changing providers.
I don’t respond to everyone: I used to respond to everyone, even if it wasen’t that useful to me personally, like a PR person with a tip I couldn’t use. I’d email to say thanks anyhow, but no thanks. Now I’ve pulled back a bit on email etiquette. I respond if it’s important, if you’re a friend, and often if it’s someone with a question about blogging, but that’s it.
New ideas I have to save time on email:
Don’t answer every email right away: There are some people who say that you should only check your email if you’re ready to respond. I used to do that. Problem was I’d check my email 3+ times a day. Now I don’t answer all my emails right away. I’ve been saving them up. I still do check my email maybe 3 times a day, in case there’s some sort of client emergency, but I’ve been trying to answer the bulk of them at night.
Check your email once a day only: This is too hard for me to do, but I’ve been considering bucking up and trying it. The issue is that on weekdays I’d have 100s by nighttime if I didn’t do a sweep a couple of times a day. What I do currently is fly in, and scan for unimportant emails , which I delete, and toss everything else into labeled folders.
Delete all blog comments right away: It’s not always up to me whether I get comments emailed or not; sometimes my clients or networks have them sent to me. However, what I’ve found is that if I read and respond to comments when I see them in my inbox, it wastes a lot of time. My new system that I’m working on is simply reading my comment panels once a day at all my blogs. I’m not too good at this yet. I like to read comments as they arrive, but it does waste more time than dealing with them all at once.
Deal with special groups of emails once a week only: I get lots of emails from people asking me to do product reviews or giving me tips on topics. I’m saving all these in a PR folder that I sort, read, and answer once weekly. I’m also part of a stumble email group, so I’ve been labeling and saving these as well.
I started working on my email problems last week and so far it’s been better. It takes time to develop new habits though, and most days I really want to go comment at my blogs right away, or respond to stuff that’s not a dire emergency. If I follow through, I think the above ideas are really going to help me.
Obviously I’m not the best person to be giving email advice (it is one of my issues) so I decided to search out a few links you can read that address email nightmares:
12 Rules for Getting a Grip on Massive ProBlogger Email - great tips, some I’ll be trying out.
Tips for Mastering E-mail Overload - an older article, but had some nice tips surrounding how to send better emails, and how to let people know that you’re not an email slave.
10 Tips for Managing Email Effectively - excellent pointers about all areas of email management.
20+ Firefox Plugins For Managing Email - extra plugins tend to make my world more difficult, not easier, but these may work well for you.
What’s your best tip for managing email overload?
Wasting Time While Blogging
We all waste time at work sometimes, and usually a little time wasted does no harm. However, I literally have no time to waste. I get two full days to work, period, each week. I’m a single work-at-home mama, who homeschools, so time is tight. My son’s dad has our son Friday evenings through Sunday evenings which is when I do the bulk of my work – that by the way means; I try to get everything done for the upcoming week (currently about 3 articles and enough posts for around 10 blogs). It’s near impossible. Actually it is impossible. I’ve never, not once, had a week where I get it all done on the weekend.
Partly, this is because I’m working with a small amount of time, but also I waste some of my time. Last week I made a list of all the ways I waste time.
- Not knowing what to blog about first.
- Email, or should I say EMAIL!
- Moderating and responding to blog comments.
- Breaks during work hours.
- Getting side tracked while posting.
- Forums.
- Sleep, meals, and exercise.
- Twitter.
Some of these problems are larger than others. I also jotted down some solutions, including some solutions directly related me only having two days to work in the first place.
Over the next couple of days I’ll be posting my solutions – and how they’re working. I put some into motion this weekend. If you’re wasting time in the same ways that I do, or if you’re a single work-at-home parent maybe my solutions will help you to improve your productivity too.
What ways are you wasting time during work hours?
Why I’m a Lazy Blogger - And How I Can Improve
I have a confession to make. I’m a lazy blogger. There are so many things I can do to make my blogs more successful, but I don’t. It seems funny to contribute to a blog where I tell others how to be a success, and then not practice what I preach. Hopefully by listing my faults and ways I can improve, I’ll show you how not to blog. If you have solutions to ways I can improve on any of these issues, do feel free to add your two cents.
Problem: I’m bad about the blogroll. I rarely look at it. I don’t add links or remove old links. Every now and then I look at my blogroll and think "Oh yeah…I need to find time to take care of that." While I do like to offer lots of link love in my blog posts, I need to improve my blogroll.
Solution: Schedule time on my editorial calendar once a month for blogroll updating.
Problem: I don’t post often enough. While I do my best to meet quotas, some of my blogs would have HUGE traffic if I posted more than the network minimum.
Solution: Instead of scheduling in one post a day , make time for at least two - even if the second post isn’t very long.
Problem: I don’t spend enough time visiting other blogs. Visiting other blogs is one of the most important tasks of blogging. It’s how to know what’s going on and meet others in the niche.
Solution: Make time at least once or twice a week for bloghopping.
There are a lot more issues than this, and they’re all time management issues. I need to make time to promote my blogs more, catch up on my RSS feeds and more. I especially need to get control of my email.
In a perfect world I’d be on top of all this, but the truth is, I’m not. I know there will be at least two more hours to work each day beginning at the end of June and this will help a lot. In the meantime I have to work harder at staying on task and not letting distractions such as Twitter get the best of me. They say the first step is admitting you have a problem so here it is, I’m a lazy blogger because I’m not using my time wisely.
Are there any areas of blogging in which you feel you’re lazy? How do you think you can improve?
It’s not too late for blog spring cleaning
At one of my blog networks my channel editor decided that all of the bloggers in the channel should complete some blog spring cleaning. It’s a good plan. I completely cleaned up one blog, and it looks (and feels) much better, and posting runs a little smoother now.
My editor’s suggestions included items like:
- Clearing out your spam cache.
- Checking said spam for any comments that passed though and vice vs. checking comments for spam.
- Being sure to have an “About” page in place.
- Picking up your blogroll - or maybe creating one if you don’t already have one.
- Adding a new poll (at this network we do use polls often - and some are fairly old).
All good stuff to do.
There’s more you can do to spiffy up your blog and post content. Such as…
Set a blog clean-up schedule. Once a year is not usually good enough, especially if you have an intense blogroll. I add basic blog clean-up tasks to my schedule at least once every four months. Personally, I alternate blogs so that I’m not cleaning eight plus blogs at once.
Clean up your categories. Push like topics together, such as combine eco books, coloring books, and green books into one category - books. I tend to gage my categories on how difficult it is for me to find the right slug, quickly, when I need it. If I can’t find what I need fast, there’s a good chance my readers can’t either. Some people think you should have no more than 10 blog categories. I think that’s pushing it. At some of my blogs it would make no sense to have just 10 categories, it would be too vague.
Make sure you have some other pages as well, besides the “About” page. A “Contact me” page is good, and it’s also nice to make pages that highlight popular posts.
Do some back reading. Then read your “About” page or what was written into your contract regarding topic. If your current posts seem to be swaying off track from the original intent of the blog, you may need to jump back on track. One good way to do this is to make a list of keywords and phrases for you topic. You don’t have to fill your posts with keywords, but I’ve found that keeping a short list by my desk can keep me focused and help me work faster.
Do an, “Ask the readers” post or poll. Over time your readers change; their minds change, you get new readers, and it’s hard to tell what everyone is interested in. You could pull some of this info from stats, but it’s not the whole story, especially if you have some posts that have hit it big on Stumble Upon or another social media site. The best thing to do is ask your readers what they’d like to see more of from now on. I’ve asked readers what they’re interested in reading in posts, but currently I’m running a poll about this at one blog, and getting way more responses. If you go with the poll option, I’d set it up so that the poll contains some basic topics relevant to your blog and also set it up so that readers can fill in an answer.
What other spring cleaning blog tasks do you do to keep your blog in top notch shape?
Being A Team Player at A Blog Network
As a blogger at a blog network, what’s typical is to be split into sections (or niches or channels). It could be by blog topic (such as all the pregnancy and parenting blogs are grouped together), it could be that your blog is simply one of many assigned to a particular managing editor, or it might be that the network is small enough that everyone falls under one main managing editor, or whatever the boss likes to be called.
What’s true of all networks is that within your section, the bloggers and editors can work as a team or not as a team. Having blogged on teams that actually are a team, and teams where you don’t even know each other’s names, I can tell you that the, “Let’s work as a team situation” is absolutely better.
When the editors and bloggers in a channel or niche are on board with teamwork, it’s great. If not, well, it can be frustrating.
It’s frustrating because perks of working as a team can be really nice. Perks of teamwork can include higher page views for your blog, the channel, and the network as a whole, better communication when something goes wrong, or even better when something goes right, overall happiness with your job, more friends, and a more flowing feeling.
Honestly, what’s the point of being part of a specific channel, if you’re really not part of that channel? Many bloggers come to a network after having blogged on their own, so maybe the switch to team player is tough. But that’s a network. If you sign on, you’re signing onto a team, not simply your own blog.
Team components:
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Stop Obsessing Over Your Stats
You’re halfway through writing a blog post and get stuck on a thought. You look around a bit, check Twitter, stare into space a bit and when no words come to you, you check your stats. You fool around a bit, checking out keywords and page views and then return to your work. 30 minutes later you check your stats again. This process is repeated throughout the day.
Does this sound like you?
You must stop that this instant! Yes, stats are important. Yes, stats need to be analyzed regularly in order to learn more about your traffic and community but they shouldn’t be a distraction. The best way to bring in the masses is to offer pages and pages of useful content. Don’t be so driven by your stats they prove to be a distraction. Unless you hit a major Digg or Stumble, your traffic isn’t going to change much in 30 minutes. Set aside a couple of times a day for checking your stats and leave it at that. You have more important things to do.
I know what you’re thinking. “But Deb, last week you told us it’s important to check stats.” Indeed I did, but not to the point where you’re consumed. Don’t let your stats become an obsession. Worry more about content and building your community.
It’s time for another poll…
Is Blogging Really This Dangerous?
My pal Kori sent me this piece from the New York Times a couple of hours ago. Scary stuff - go read it, then come back and we’ll chat.
Honestly, this article sort of freaked me out. While I do love blogging, this article covered a lot of the negatives. Long hours, the constant story hunt, links, networking, no time to eat when I’m in full on work mode, and more. Some of this stuff is scarily true.
It’s worse when you’re on someone else’s dime too. I remember blogging just for me, back in the day. The big difference was that if I felt like stopping, taking a break, I could. I did. I do remember blog breaks. Now, blogging for others, supporting my son with blogging, I rarely have time to breathe when it’s work time. I just don’t stop.
Recently (last month) I realized that something had to give. I sat down with my schedule to think things over. Among other things I went down to part-time at one position and dropped another gig altogether. We’ll have less money immediately, but in the long run, I’ll be more productive at the blogs I’m keeping.
I have some other ideas as well. If you’re a frazzled blogger here are some things that may work:
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Why You Need Stats
I used to have a client who refused to let me know my blog’s stats. She was all about traffic and community building but wouldn’t let me in on too many details. This can be a problem. If you’re not privy to your stats you have no clue what is driving people to your blog. Clueless bloggers don’t do well. Here’s why stats are important:
Keywords: How will you know if your keywords are driving in traffic if you can’t see your stats? When you have regular stat access you can experiment more and find a formula that works. Your stats tell you your highest ranking keywords and also, what other keywords are being used. For instance, through my stats with my blog Freelance Writing Jobs I learned teachers use my blog as a way to find summer work. Now I know to include writing jobs for teachers’ resources and educational materials.
Traffic: Wouldn’t it be nice to know how many people read your blog? It would suck if you were doing all that work and had no visitors. It would equally suck if you have huge mega traffic and no one is telling you. Knowing the days people visit most and least can help you plan your editorial calendar or posting schedule. You’ll also want to know where your traffic comes from. Is another blog or forum discussing one of your posts? If so you’ll want to join in. Did you make Digg or a newspaper? How will you know without your stats?
Content: Knowing what posts performed the bests and which were the clunkers is important. No one is going to want to visit you if you talk about the same lame subject all the time.
Info for Publicists: One thing my former client didn’t understand is that in order to get press releases, product info and even products to review or give away, I needed to give publicists numbers. Telling them, "I’m sorry but my employer won’t let me know stats" doesn’t give them a reason to have confidence in you. They want to know their products and news are going to reach a lot of people.
Payment Info: If you receive bonuses based on traffic, you’ll want to know how many page views you’re receiving. Not that you don’t trust your client of course, but mistakes happen.
I don’t believe any blogger can truly be a success without knowing stats. If your employer isn’t allowing you to receive this information, convince her of why they’re necessary and make sure she knows you can’t do your job properly without them.
10 Reasons Bloggers Need an Administrative Day
I woke up this morning to over 2,000 emails in my inbox. This is a few day’s worth, actually. I only answered the most pressing stuff from the past few days. I think it would take the better part of the day to go through all the mail coming in and handle other tasks. That’s why I’ve decided to implement a weekly administrative day.
I hear what you’re saying, I’m busy too. So busy, a monthly administrative day is no longer adequate. This week I’ve been working with a schedule that’s going so well, I can take Sunday and make it an administrative day. At this stage in my career it’s a necessity.
Let me explain…
- Email: My email is totally out of control. I know there are people waiting for me to respond to their emails just as I know there’s mail I haven’t gotten to yet. I need a few hours at a time to sort through it all and respond.
- Product Reviews: I receive products to review on a daily basis. These are all piling up in my office. On administrative day, I can at least go through some of the stuff and schedule the reviews on my editorial calendar. Which brings me to…
- Editorial Calendar - I already take one day each week to plan my blogging. I have a large wall calendar and once a week I write in daily topics for all my blogs. With over a dozen blogs, an editorial calendar helps to keep things flowing.
- Comments - I like to respond to the comments on my blogs. Administrative day is a good day to catch up.
- Accounting - We should all go through the books on a weekly basis to make sure we’re being paid in a timely manner, and send a gentle reminder to clients who strayed from the schedule.
- Feeds - I subscribe to over 300 RSS feeds. It would be nice to be able to take a day to catch up on them all.
- Bookmarks - I don’t even want to tell you about my bookmarks. It’s embarrassing really.
- Stats - I check my stats each day. Several times a day, in fact. What I’d really like to do is set aside some time each week to truly analyze my traffic.
- Revenue - The problem with being so busy is that I don’t have the time I need to really explore revenue possibilities for the blogs i own.
- Office Clean Up - My family would thank me if I worked a simple office organization into administrative day. By the end of the week press releases, product sheets and personal notes litter the area.
As you can see, I need at least one day each week to go through everything from email to bookmarks. To let it go is only asking for a bigger headache further down the line. Plus I want to look into other things. I want to learn more about the technical aspects of blogging and using video in my blogs, for instance. When else would I have time for this? Maybe I need a whole weekend…
Do you have an administrative day? What takes do you complete these days?
