TechTalk – How to find time to blog
No doubt blogging requires time and energy. It is important to plan what you want to blog about in order to properly organize your thoughts and write a good blog post. This is because a good blog content is the main component that drives traffic to your blog. The fact is that It is extremely difficult to find time to blog if blogging is not your full time job. It is also a struggle to keep momentum up on maintaining a specific number of blog posts per week. So here are a few tips that I would like to share.
1. Set a realistic goal
If you are busy with your work, then it is a good to set a more realistic goal for your blog post frequency. Unreasonable goal will lead to bad blog post and stress. In order to avoid that, you may start with the goal of posting at least once a week.
2. Allocate a small portion of your time
I know it is hard to blog when you don’t have the time to do it. Try allocating a small portion of your time for blogging. A good idea is to wake up half and hour earlier for blogging. You may also think of ideas to blog when you are commuting to work.
3. Write down your ideas
At anytime of the day, you may find fresh ideas to blog through something while you are working on or reading. It is best to record it down on a small notebook or a piece of blank paper. You may come across ideas for good headlines, or items to blog. A good blog post is usually written based on collected ideas and headlines.
4. Prepare your blog post in advance
Whenever you are free, it is good to contribute a small portion of your time to prepare blog post in advance. Sit down and write as often as possible and save it all down as drafts. While completed blog posts can be used for future postings. With the feature of time-stamping in WordPress, you can prepare all your blog posts in advance and set it to be published in designated time.
5. Say no to procrastination
As the saying goes, “Procrastination is the thief of time”. Sometimes bloggers tend to waste their time on stuff that are not really important to them. In order to be consistent with blogging (in fact in anything that you do in life), you should able to identify time that is considered to be wasteful and utilize your time efficiently.
So how do you find time to blog?. Let us know in the comment.
For more tips, you may refer to ZenHabits’s article : “How I Work 2 Jobs, Blog and Still Find Time for My Wife and 6 Kids”
This is a Friday weekly column contributed by Kuan Hoong. He is a blogger that is currently based in Japan. You can read more about him and his regular technology blog updates @ www.kuanhoong.com.
For me, I don’t mind to sacrifice my sleeping time and write blog post because it’s an investment. it’s better to sacrifice 2 to 3 years building my online empires, rather than working my whole life to climb the corporate ladder, eh?
And I personally use some of these tips to make sure I have something to publish on my blogs.
Nice post.
Agree with Chee Kui. It’s worth to sacrifice. But make sure to take care of your body. I sure you don’t want to get a incurable illness after your empires is up, do you?
i blogged about this once looooooooooooooong ago.
Kuanhoong,
I agree with you on all especially 1 and 4.
Good one, always thank you for your kindness to contribute such meaty post.
Chee Kui,
Yes, it takes time to build an empire. To me time is relative. Some is 6-9mths, some is 2-3 years. I think it all depends on individual vision, and then plan accordingly.
For eg. if a person has a job of US$30-$40k/yr, he might want to set the goal to 2-3yrs to achieve it.
Another person might already command, say US$100k+/yr kind of salary (eg. a doc or a dentist) but building an online biz is part of their diversify plan in building wealth. But because they don’t have a lot of times , they decided to build it in a slower scale say 5-10yrs time frame.
I think as long as we have a goal , that is the main thing and like Ken said we have to balance and not scarify to a point we are sick.
If a person has a stroke, a heart attack , a tumor in his head, even if there is 100 million in front of them, they most they could use on that money is for medication.
I love Kuankoong outline of this theme.
The other important thing I want to emphasis is balance.
BALANCE, BALANCE, BALANCE !
Same with Jamy, 1 & 4 are applicable to me. With a fulltime job & a 1-year old boy, sleep is so important to me, I will only blog when I have problem falling asleep, or at some weekends where I have less errant to run. Sometimes I’ll use office hour to blog if I need to get away from my job for a while, because I work from home so there’s no colleages here where I can just walk across to have some chat.
Bee,
:).
:).
Thank you for leaving your inputs.
I know exactly what you mean.
Your son is younger than me. When JJ was in your son age, it was much harder for me because he needs o much attention than now.
Now he is a lot independent. It is so interesting to watch them grow , from a ever needy infant to a small helping hand
Now when we go home, I would ask him to go switch off the light, make sure the door is locked etc. He would do it. When he was a baby or toddler, getting him into the car seat , strollers already demand a lot of energy and times.
The little hand carry car seat looks so nice and small but it was very heavy for me, a lady without much hand strength
Jamy