How to Blog and Work Full Time
In my third installment of blogging tips, we're going to do some planning and outsourcing. View part one , two and four of the series, too!
Create an ongoing Google Doc
I absolutely live by this! I create Google docs that I can edit at any time. Since they live on the web, it's easy to update on your phone or on your computer so you can continuously work on them. I have pages like short and long term goals, blog re-design ideas, random post ideas--basically anything that comes to mind.
The old faithful editorial calendar
I work so hard to use an editorial calendar. It's something that I've never been good at. I like to plan my posts in advance, but I never really you finish. An editorial calendar is basically an idea we took from magazines. They will share a calendar of what each month's issue will contain. So you know that May will be dedicated to Spring beauty, and February is all about Valentine's day. We can do this on a much smaller scale, as bloggers. You can lay out your calendar with themes, specific posts, or whatever else you can think of.
Guest contributors
Here's an easy one! Basically you're getting people to write content for your blog so that you don't have to. If your goal is to have fresh content for your blog five days a week, see if you can have a guest post once every couple of weeks. It's also a good idea because you get the perspective of someone else. That reader might bring their own audience, too! Take the pressure off yourself!
Automate like crazy
Set up as much as you can ahead of time so that you don't have to do it in your current moment. Once you finish your blog post, schedule it in HootSuite to go to Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. That way, if it goes out at 11 AM you don't actually have to do it--Hootsuite does it for you. If you knock out all the automation ahead of time then it's much easier for you to not think about it later.
Don’t beat yourself up
If you don't get content up on time or everybody's upset that you're changing, It's okay. My goal is to post every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. It almost never happens. And ya know what? Everything will be fine. Life will go on and you can always start again.