Do you have hardly any time to write for your blog? Most people feel as you, so at least you’re not alone. But let me tell you something which may surprise you.
For a new project I’m doing with Grant Griffiths (sorry, can’t tell you what it is, yet), we recently conducted a blogging survey in which people gave some puzzling and conflicting answers. One question on the survey asked: why do you have a blog? Out of the possible choices, the number one answer was: to get more customers for my business.
Another question was: what’s the biggest problem you have with blogging? This question wasn’t multiple choice, it was a short answer essay. People could’ve written anything they wanted; there were no choices to influence their answers one way or another. And do you know what the most common answer was? I’m sure you’ve guessed based on the headline for this post. Most of the respondents said their biggest problem with blog marketing was not having enough time to devote to it.
Let me see if I have this straight:
- Method for acquiring customers: blog marketing.
- Activity there’s no time for: blog marketing!
So, um, yeah: that’s a problem.
If you don’t take the time to market your business, you will eventually no longer have a business to market.
Feast-or-famine is no way to run a business. Since without customers you have no business in the first place, it’s a little disingenuous to say you have no time for activities which generate leads and convert them into customers (marketing and selling). If you have no time to blog and use email and social media to acquire new customers and stay in touch with existing ones, then your activities are critically unbalanced and unsustainable. You need to steady things out. Here’s how you can make your wobbly life a little more even:
Create an Editorial Calendar for Your Blog
A blog editorial calendar is when you plan out your post topics in advance, even specifying the dates your posts will be published. This gives you plenty of time to plan ahead and get good posts written on time. You won’t have to waste time just sitting there racking your brains for a post topic, because you already figured that out and all you have to do is write the post (or, better yet, finish writing it if you’ve already started).
You cannot create and work with an editorial calendar unless you regularly set aside time to work on it. By definition, you cannot “wing” a preplanned calendar. Preparing in advance, rather than hurriedly putting out flames which suddenly sprang up (ZOMG, I forgot to write a blog post today! Quick: what can I write about?) is much calmer and leads to far better content. Better content has incredibly better long-term benefits all-around for your business.
Batch Your Blogging Tasks for Greater Efficiency and Less Gear-Shifting
Batching is when you perform related tasks in one block of time, rather than dealing them as they come up or as the mood strikes you. It takes time to mentally “shift gears” when we have to move from one kind of task to another. If you’ve ever been in the middle of a writing a blog post and allowed yourself to be distracted by television, Twitter, Facebook, or whatever, and then tried to get back in your writing groove, you know what I mean.
Back when I was posting here every day (more on that below), I would write as many posts as I could during the weekends, and I would write them all in one sitting. This was tremendously productive and efficient, because I didn’t have to keep mentally shifting gears. I closed my email, closed TweetDeck, turned off my phone, and wrote, wrote, wrote.
Batching your blog tasks is a sure-fire way to make more time out of thin air.
Share the Burden of Content Creation
One way to quickly create content for your blog with less effort is to not do it all yourself. And one way to not do it all yourself is to team up with someone else:
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Guest posts: You can solicit guest posts for your blog, especially from bloggers looking to establish themselves. Guest posts from experienced, more well-known bloggers are easier to get than you might think (simply ask).
In addition to saving you time, guest posts get you more traffic and strengthen your relationship with the guest poster, which is always good for business down the road.
- Interviews: A fantastic way to distribute the burden of content creation is interviewing another expert. What’s really super time-efficient about this is that you can do it by email. You make contact with an expert and present your case for an interview. Most people will grant an interview for the sheer ego boost of it, but you can always indicate what the benefits will be for the interviewee. Then you send your interview questions via email. Politely ask for the answers to be sent back by a specific date. Take the questions and answers and copy & paste them into a blog post. Interviews have the added benefit of also sending you more traffic, because the person you interview will link to it and spread it around.
- Open mic style posts: Liz Strauss does this very effectively with her “open mic night” posts, and it’s a great example of community-building as well. An open mic post is where you don’t write a big post yourself, you present a question or a topic for discussion and your readers add their thoughts or ask their questions in the comments. Don’t think for a moment this is a technique which can be used by the lazy. You have to be hanging in their with your readers, responding to their comments. But the cool thing is that you don’t have to spend a large chunk of continuous time on this. You can check in on it from time to time.
- Use different media: Writing takes a lot of time, but popping off a quick video or audio often does not take too long. Just keep in mind that when you do this, you can’t really do any editing or you’re not saving time. You just spit it out and go. You can use services like YouTube and Utterli. YouTube lets you record videos directly from your computer’s webcam, and Utterli lets you post audio right from your phone. By just chatting for a couple minutes into your camera or phone, you don’t have to spend huge amounts of time writing.
Blog Less
Despite the fact that nearly every blog-advice blogger on the planet says you should blog every day, quality is much more important than quantity when it comes to blogging (most people aren’t successful, so why is doing everything they do a good idea? Hmm?). I’ve seen this first hand for myself, ever since I dropped down from seven posts a week to 5, and now I’m down to a whopping single post per week. Did I kill my business? No! In fact, my subscriber count and my income are up, up, up! (Some of you are aware of FeedBurner recently adding FriendFeed subscribers in with feed counts, which raised everyone’s feed subscriber counts overnight—I’m talking about an increase I saw before FeedBurner made this change.)
It’s true that in some ways, posting every day or even more than once a day can grow your blog’s audience. Certainly it will help with blog SEO, but maybe not as much as you might think. In my own example, I’m writing bigger, meatier blog posts that are absolutely my best writing. The result is that each post gets more trackbacks and more traffic. The more backlinks a webpage gets, the more authority it has in Google’s eyes, which is ultimately better for SEO.
Having more posts indexed by Google but getting fewer trackbacks or less influence & reach is not an even trade. Quality is better than quantity. If you make people happy, you’ll also make Google happy. And if you make Google happy, Google will make you happy when you see your PageRank numbers and search engine rankings.
Blogging less leaves me more time to do important stuff like spend time with my granddaughter and really be there for her in her life as she grows up (I just got her her first kite, and now we’re waiting for a day with some breeze in it—I can’t wait!). Blogging less also allows me to make more money, because I have more time to create and promote information products or maintain my network.
You just don’t need to blog everyday (but you do need to be consistent). What you need is to blog about stuff your audience can’t live without. You need to blog about stuff they want to spread to their friends and link to in their own blogs and on social media.
Thanks for Your Time
One last thought: it’s been my observation (of both others and in myself) that no matter what anyone says about being pressed for time, people always take time for what’s truly important to them. If you say your family’s important to you, but you never spend time with them, you’re sending mixed messages. Your real priorities are revealed by how you spend your time, not by what you say. If you say blogging is the way to get customers, but you choose not to take the time to do it (how we spend our time is always a choice), then what are your actions really saying?