Productive Blogging: 8 Tips To Become More Efficient
Posted by Charles on November 24th, 2008
Image by thingermejig
It’s been 5 months now since the summer’s day back in late June when I purchased PiggyBankPie. During that time I’ve had to become a lot more time-efficient as staying up-to-date with all the developments in internet marketing, running a couple of other sites, blogging, and holding down a permanent job during the week does take time… too much time when you’re not completely organized.
I’ve made quite a few changes to how I work over the past few months, with the aim being to become more productive, so I thought the time had come to share them here.
Here are 8 ways in which I’ve become more productive:
1) iGoogle - for anyone who doesn’t use iGoogle it’s effectively a Google homepage which you can customize, allowing you to add links to all the websites which you use most frequently. There’s also a blog feeds facility where you can track all your favorite blogs, although I don’t use this feature.
2) Google Reader - subscribe to all your favorite RSS feeds through Google Reader. It helps save a huge amount of time as you no longer have to visit individual blogs to see whether there are any new posts. Similarly, if contributing blog comments is a central promotional strategy of yours consider adding all the blogs to Google Reader. See our list of DoFollow blogs.
3) Dedicated Blog Folder - I’ve set aside an individual folder on my desktop for each of the sites I’m involved in. That way I can quickly access all the relevant documents and photos without wasting unnecessary time or becoming distracted.
4) Task Lists - I find that task lists are essential to cut down on the aimless browsing of sites. Write a task list each day so you know exactly what you have to do. Task lists really do help at times when you complete one task as you know exactly what needs to be done next.
5) Set Time Limits - try writing a time limit next to each task, whether it’s checking emails or writing a new blog post. This helps to concentrate the mind by giving you a target to focus on. It is surprising how much more productive you can become when working to time constraints.
6) Specific Days For Certain Tasks - if possible, set aside certain days for certain tasks. Email is the biggest time-waster so if you have a number of email accounts avoid checking the non-essential ones every day. Similarly, set aside certain days on which you’ll write blog posts or promote your blog, rather than trying to do little bits of everything every day.
7) Limit Distractions When Writing - cut down on outside distractions, such as having the TV or MSN on in the background. Also, when writing consider using a basic text editor to help you resist the temptation of editing your post and inserting links when it’s unfinished. We’ve recently reviewed the text editor ‘Dark Room’.
8 ) Include Rest Days - I’ve found that this is particularly important when it comes to blogging. Often a rest is needed to keep your enthusiasm and freshness when blogging. Without rest days you can end up with tunnel vision, never seeing past the next post that must be planned and written.
How do you work more productively? Feel free to share any other ideas in the comments below…
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