How to Get More Time to Blog

Jun 30, 2009
46 Comments

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:

  • 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?

  • Great Post! Lots of useful information. I just make time to work on my blog. What I do sometimes is if I have a thought about something I want to blog about I start a new post and save it as a draft. Even if it is only a title. That way when I get stuck on something to write about I have these drafts that I can review and write a post about.

    Jim
  • Thanks for the tips! I like the idea of a calendar to plan your blogs (and set deadlines)...
  • Hi Michael – This is something we all need to think about. It’s almost impossible to keep up when you try to post every day.
  • Janilink, exactly: quality, not quantity gets the best results.
  • That goes for quality comments as well. Too many people dont take the "TIME" to write comments worth anything... the "great article" comment is worthless and note that you dont see one of those on this blog.

    Great article! <---jk
  • Great post and I think your closing paragraph really brings home an important message. You can always make time for the things that are important. If people are passionate about something, they make the time for it to work and if it isn't working, are they really that passionate about it? I think this is a point people can apply to everything, not just blogging.
  • Jenny, you're right: it does apply to things outside of blogging. Thanks for commenting!
  • I'll second those who said they love the idea of an editorial calendar.

    I do have a statement right in my about page, that says I write blog posts when I have something to say ... no schedule. That being said, I can definitely relate to that whole "yikes, I haven't written anything in a while, better come up with a topic" feeling.

    I also like the idea of turning everything else off, and just writing. That's my main impediment to writing more ... I like to read too much.

    Todd
  • Todd, nothing wrong with not having a schedule, but I think you'll find that if you can commit to something regular (not necessarily frequent) and write posts in advance so that you always have a few "spares," your blog will noticeably improve. Just a thought. :)

    Reading is definitely the other half of this. People who are the best in their field are nearly always widely read and up-to-date in their field.
  • I think it boils down to what you prioritize in life. I have chores to do at home and look after our kid but I have time to blog because I want to. Blogging has been part of my daily routine and I feel unaccomplished without it.

    If you really want to blog, make a time for it. Everything else is just excuses.
  • Fedhz, right on. Same sentiment, different words. :)
  • LOL! I had to laugh when I read this post. I go on this rant a lot with clients and students. When I ask the same question, I always get this answer - I don't have enough time. And I say practically word for word what you have so artfully articulated in this post. Thanks for sharing your wisdom.

    Blog on!
  • Denise, thanks for the solidarity! I think what this really goes to show is that at the heart of all business problems is a personal problem. I mean, you'd think this would be the obvious thing in the world, right? But people have so many little ways to sabotage themselves and they're blind to it.

    Blog on, indeed!
  • I am a journalist, and struggling to find my time to blog on something that's completely different from my media which is shipping and maritime related issues. but the core of the problem i think is scheduling posts, which i don't often follow. anyway, thanks Michael gonna work on this issue. i am contemplating on asking others to write for my blog which is new, by the way.
  • Thanks for your comment, Haris. You might want to try batching and write all your posts during the weekend. Set them to publish throughout the week.
  • I am so glad you've come back to blogging bigger, meatier posts. I now read them all, and start to finish. For a while there, I was only skimming or (gasp!) skipping outright your short content.

    Thanks, you have my attention with pleasure.
  • Wayan, nice to have you back in full force. :)
  • Thanks for the tips. Im trying to become a pro at posting all types of content. I'm kinda new to open blogging (been behind a firewall for years) so I need to get my groove for quality postings while still having time to converse with the audience.

    So...what is the deal with yahoo & bing. Google gives me the top spot but they seem clueless. Any tips or helpful links for that?
  • Steven, thanks for the comment. Your question about Yahoo and Bing SEO is off-topic for this post, but I'll point you here: http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/seo-tools.html. Your situation may just be one of crawl frequency for the different search engines.
  • I'm not a business owner, but I've been working on starting my own blog and I can vouch for the point on using an editorial calendar. When I look around the internet or in my own experiences with the purpose of finding an idea to write about, making a list of those topics and some quick ideas for each one helps me get excited about writing the post. The more I think about it ahead of time, the easier (and quicker) it is to sit down and write it. I haven't reached the point where I schedule out my ideas, but I can see how that would be useful. Thanks!
  • Scott, thanks for commenting. I didn't mean to seem like I was excluding anyone besides business owners, but I think they feel this pain a little more sharply than non-business owners. :) The beauty part about doing this is the "thinking ahead" part, because it absolutely helps you write better posts. Setting a topic in advance puts your subconscious mind to work on it before you begin writing.
  • To add a bit of QuietSpacing(tm) implementation to Michael's editorial calendar suggestion, I use Outlook's Tasks to capture the ideas/topics I want to write about and to serve up the reminders I need to prompt me into actually doing the work. (Note you can use similar programs to achieve the same result.)

    To accomplish this, simply open a new Task, complete the subject line with something descriptive, like "Blog Posts - Idea Vault," then set the Recurrence feature for, say, twice a week - Tuesday and Thursday. Every Tuesday and Thursday, the Task will appear in your Reminders Window prompting you to at least look at it before marking it complete. (Note, do NOT Dismiss Tasks from the Reminders Window as it only turns off the Reminder. Always, mark them complete by right clicking on the Task and selecting Mark Complete.)

    There are two advantages to this method. First, I have one single place to store all the ideas I have which is better than bouncing around in my head or floating around my office on a scrap of paper. Two, the reminder pops up twice a week reminding me of my commitment, so I have to at least think about it before choosing to ignore it!

    This isn't the formal method the phrase "editorial calendar" suggests, but it gets the job done on the fly with little upfront thought and by using existing technology tools.
  • Paul, thanks for the suggestion!
  • Hi Michael - This is something we all need to think about. It's almost impossible to keep up when you try to post every day.

    A blog editorial calendar sounds like a smart idea and something I might consider. I also like the open mic's that Liz does. Barbara Swafford did some a while back and she also had a huge response.
  • Cath, thanks for commenting! An editorial calendar will make a HUGE difference if you give it a try! I'm glad Barbara had such great success with her open mic night style posts. :)
  • You're right, it's not about churning out content for the sake of content. A blog needs quality posts. Of course, someone starting out might struggle to build an audience with just one post per week but clearly there's a trend amongst a lot of top bloggers to post fewer but better quality posts.

    Twitter (and the rest of the noise social media requires) is clearly affecting people's posting habits.

    An Editorial Calendar is almost a prerequisite for a successful business blog.
  • Jon, thanks for bringing up social media and how that fits in. I advise new bloggers to spend 2/3 of their time networking, not blogging, and to have prewritten posts in the can set to automatically publish so they can spend time networking to build up their new blog. Thanks for your comment!
  • I find the same conundrum with my work as a time management trainer and coach. That is, "I'd love to work with you Paul, but I just don't have time!"

    Your suggestion of an action plan - what you described above - is exactly what it takes to make these efforts successful. All business development efforts take...well...effort! And "effort" occurs in "time." Thus, no matter what your chosen method for acquiring business is, they all take time and effort.

    My advice is always to (a) do what you really WANT to do, versus what everyone else says you should do and (b) find small, incremental ways to get started to see how it will work best for you. Some people like writing. Others like talking. Others still like being actively involved. All are good ways to develop business.

    Blogging, as well as the myriad other business development tools, isn't for everyone. Try it. If you're not enjoying the process, re-direct your time and effort to other activities that you will prioritize!

    Great post. Hope to see more.
  • Paul, great points, thanks for commenting! It's true that blogging isn't necessarily for everyone, but you can't run a successful business without marketing, and if you're not online, you're missing a lot of money. So, some sort of online marketing is needed.

    At least when people tell you they have no time, you can say, "That's precisely why you need me." :)
  • Great tips. I especially took to heart your point about activities being "critically unbalanced and unsustainable. You need to steady things out." It's too easy to spend time being social on Twitter and Facebook and then wonder where time went. We are in control of our time, and discipline is required.

    I took a couple months off from blogging with the "excuse" that my energies were spent elsewhere on client work. Well, that is partially true, and we all go through seasons in life; however, one of my mistakes has been "being too available" and not blocking time to blog and market and develop. I've been rebranding and working on some new offerings. However, none of it can be done without time dedicated putting pen to paper & fingers to keyboard!

    Thanks for reminding us of the importance of planning, batch processing and scheduling down time to blog.

    Glad you're spending more time with your granddaughter! You won't look back and think, "I wish I would have written one more blog post!"
  • Dana, thanks for sharing your own experiences. I know you're not alone, I'm sure many reading your comment are nodding their heads. And you're right, I'm not going to sweat "one more blog post" when I can be with the light of my life for a few extra moments. :)
  • Excellent post, Michael. For awhile, I was having time management issues with my blog. I'm now using a spreadsheet with chunks of time marked off for what I need to complete each day. It's definitely not batching, but it works. We all have to find our own groove, don't we?

    It's nice though having people like you give us bloggers different options. And I totally agree, the need to write 5 to 7 posts per week is not necessary. I figured that out from a different angle. I visited and commented on other people's blogs who authored a post every day. I was thinking to myself, "Geez, I wish they wouldn't post so much. I want to read their blog but every day is killing me" LOL.

    I figured if I thought that way, I bet others do. I typically post 1 to 2 articles a week and like you said, there's nothing wrong with my subscriptions - though I suppose I can't really compare results.

    Also, I noticed you've worked on your theme a little since I last visited (outside a feed reader). The top banners are gone and your theme looks a little lighter. Did I miss a post on why? Just curious as if it was a statistical finding.
  • John, welcome back! I've been dying to redesign Remarkablogger on Thesis, but posting every day plus client work plus a day job meant it kept getting put on the back burner. There's still lots more to do, too (I have my mind map open in another window right now).

    I feel that microblogging on Twitter has replaced for me any need to offer short, frequent posts. What I'm doing now here is much more natural to me: longer, more instructive post.
  • Love love love this blog post. It's funny I do have an editorial calendar but have not been following it. I need to get back on track. Thanks for the friendly nudge :)
  • Dorothy, you're welcome. Editorial calendars are difficult to stick with (I know, been there, done that). :)
  • Awesome article. I have been going over these time issues a lot lately and even wrote about it last night (late last night, while I was making up for lost time no less).

    I agree with what you said, if blogging is important - make time for it.
  • Mike, thanks for commenting. I've had plenty of late night and early morning "scramble" sessions, myself!
  • I think your final point is the real answer. We all take the time to do what it is we want to do. If what you say you value isn't supported by your actions, it tends to be a cause of frustration for those around you, and can lead to self-recrimination, which only makes things worse. The key is to quit lying to yourself. What you say is important should be important for you, not for others. Don't do stuff just because someone else told you it was a good idea. Make a decision based on what's best for YOU, and then put it into practice. Great post, Michael.
  • Jason, thanks, I'm glad that part really spoke to you. You are absolutely right: we shouldn't beat ourselves up over things. Work to eliminate the gap between words and deeds. I think for some folks, family or hobbies or relationships really are not important to them, but they're made to feel guilty about how they spend their time. Problem is, after you have a family is not the time to decide for yourself family is less important than career.
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