5 Time-Managed Tasks For Successful Blogging
May 16th, 2007 by CourtFun fact: Popular, A-list bloggers like Steve Pavlina make over $40,000 per month while spending less than 15 hours per week writing.
Sad fact: 99% of bloggers don’t earn enough on their blogs to live comfortably without another job.
What is the difference between the 99% and Steve Pavlina? What does he do so right that so many others do so wrong? Why can he accomplish more in 15 hours than most can accomplish in 60? Please consider the following quote:
Henry David Thoreau
It’s not enough to be busy, so are the ants. The question is, what are we busy about?
What are the most crucial tasks that are worthy of your blogging time?
Imagine your life as a successful business owner. Visualize having more time to spend with your family. Can you see yourself having more time for fun? Building a successful blogging business will require much more than hard work, it will require smart choices and proper time management.
These 5 tasks are quite necessary if you want to create a high traffic blog. I will show you here how much time you should dedicate to each.
Critical Tasks Ordered
- Write compelling articles. If you only have one hour each week to spend, spend 55 minutes writing an article, and five minutes submitting it to blog carnivals (see #2). This method alone can help you to build a successful blog from scratch. If you write articles that are worth reading, you will make it eventually. As you create more income you can dedicate more time to your blog. No matter how much time you work, spend 50-70% of it writing.
- Submit to blog carnivals. I submit my best articles to about 10 blog carnivals. I usually get into them all, so that means I will get at least 10 links to that article. I often get 15+ links because I get the original 10 plus 5+ more from people that read my article that they found at the carnival. It wouldn’t work if I didn’t budget enough time to #1. Links from blog carnivals are highly valuable, especially if you have keywords in the titles of your articles. They usually use your article titles for the words they make the link out of. I would submit to more blog carnivals if there were more that were on topic. Numbers 1 and 2 are absolutely vital and if you don’t have time for those each week, I would consider another business type.
Fortunately you can submit to carnivals very quickly, it will take less than 1% of your weekly time. You should still make sure you do it every week. - Be a blogging socialite. Your social efforts will be a lot more effective if you socialize within your niche, so use Technorati to find blogs that are similar to yours. Leave constructive, intelligent comments after reading what they have to say. Many of my loyal readers found me through comments that I left on their sites. It won’t do you any good whatsoever to write cheap, fast, or uneducated comments. Spend 10-20%% of your time socializing.
- Guest blog. This one would probably appear as #2 if it wasn’t more difficult than numbers 2 and 3. Submitting your articles to popular sites can help you to instantly reach a much larger audience than would otherwise be possible. Find the top 3-5 sites in your niche, and submit an article to each of them. Doing this regularly will get you some instant, free publicity. If you disregard this, you won’t ever reach your full potential. I know that some of you will be afraid of writing for someone else’s site. I know because I’m with you. Even though I was invited by Wendy of eMomsatHome to guest post (That’s a totally different topic but I left a comment on her blog and she responded by saying that it sounded like a great idea for a guest-post, if I was interested.), I was still afraid to do it for almost 2 weeks. I finally took the time to write it. Even though I had taken a lot of time to create a post that I thought was really good, I still feared rejection and almost couldn’t get myself to send it to her. I finally loaded it into an email and nervously clicked send. Do you know what happened? About 10 minutes later she sent this back, “Court – this is AWESOME!!! I’m SO impressed! Yes, please send me the html – and THANKS!!! I think my readers will love this!!!” There just wasn’t any reason to be afraid and I’m really glad that I overcame the fear. Spend 10-20% of your time developing content to use for guest posts on other blogs.
- Read your competitors work. You will probably never be better than your competitors if you don’t read their work. This task slid to #5 because I believe that you can make it without this step if you are good enough at #1, which is the step that makes all of these other tasks work. Never let your pride get in the way of learning from your competition. They got to where they’re at for a reason! Spend 10-30% of your time learning about your niche by reading other sites, blogs, and books.
These 5 tasks are obvisouly not an all inclusive list of what you can work on to better your blog. They are, however, high leverage ways to get better. Hopefully you have found a new perspective on what you should spend your time on, I know I have.
Save to del.icio.us
Digg This!
Post to Facebook
StumbleItRelated Posts:
10 Things Everyone Ought To Know About Blogging
...
Make Money Business Opportunities
...
6 Major Blogging Mistakes We All Make
...
7 Bullet-Proof Ways To Waste Your Internet Marketing Time
...
Learning From Your Statistics Part Three (Adjusting According To Your Stats)
...
Plan Out Goals Using GoalEnforcer - Thumbs Up
...
May 16th, 2007 at 7:12 am
One question, how do you know that Steve spends only 15 hours per week on his blog? Did he mentioned that himself, somewhere in his blog?
May 16th, 2007 at 11:09 am
That’s a great question! Steve wrote in his latest post that he spends 10-15 hours writing each week. I’m sure he spends some time doing interviews and some other stuff.
May 16th, 2007 at 7:52 am
Court - this is a good list of tips. A lot of these are things I have already learned but they didn’t “click” until you said them. However I did learn almost immediately that being a blogging socialite is valuable (or it that invaluable?) - it definitely pays off to make friends with other bloggers. For me, 1) It helps me to learn more about blogging, 2) It brings me visitors from those bloggers and some of their readers, 3) My blogger friends offer me advice and critiques. So things are good all around. Out off all the points you offer, it all begins with writing good articles. Nothing can substitute for plain ‘ol good content!! That’s possibly the most difficult hurdle to overcome as a blogger. Agreed?
May 16th, 2007 at 11:12 am
Absolutely! That’s how Steve made it to where he is. I haven’t seen Steve do much marketing at all, unless you count interviews that are requested by other people. He is just a great writer and inspires people. Content brings people back.
May 16th, 2007 at 8:26 am
Hey Court - I’m glad you hit send, too!
I don’t know if you saw my post today or not - no matter what level you are at, that fear can creep up on you every now and then. So just get used to it, make friends with it, and keep doing what you’re doing. We’ll be calling you Courtney Pavlina in no time. 
May 16th, 2007 at 11:13 am
I wish! I’m just going to help as many people as I can and see how far that takes me. Thanks for your kind words!
May 16th, 2007 at 8:33 am
Court,
I agree about time management. It is often scary to do new things. I am going to try to submit my posts to blog carnivals. Sometimes what stops us is the start I guess.
May 16th, 2007 at 1:14 pm
I remember being afraid to submit to blog carnivals too! Once you do it once, the fear goes away though!
May 16th, 2007 at 10:05 am
Court,
Great list of high priorities when it comes to blogging. As Steve indicated in his post, the cornerstone of his success is the content, as you agreed with by making it #1 on your list.
Personally, as many things as I need to get done everyday in my quest to make my personal development site even more popular than Steve’s (no competition, Steve, I just want $50K p/month, not $40K! LOL) writing the posts is the single highest priority thing that I do, so I do that first.
That way, even if I get NOTHING else done that day,I have done the one thing that is absolutely mission critical. Also, submitting those posts to blog carnivals is a GREAT way to leverage your time, so I totally agree that it is high up there on the priority scale. I even went so far as to host my own carnival, just to cover all the bases.
p.s. - Marcus, in his post, Steve indicated how much time he spent actually writing. He did not get into the details of how much of his time is spent doing other related activities.
- Aaron
May 16th, 2007 at 1:13 pm
It looks like you’re off to a great start! Your Alexa score is already pretty good and I’m sure it’s climbing.
May 16th, 2007 at 12:54 pm
I’m working on #4 right now. Trying to submit and line up a guest post. Wish me luck.
May 16th, 2007 at 1:15 pm
You’ll do great! You have a really easy to like writing style. I’m sure that sites would love to publish your work!
May 16th, 2007 at 8:17 pm
Thanks Court, for submitting your blog post to my carnival.
Now that’s what I need as a newbie in the blogosphere. I just simply spent too much time reading feeds, writing and rewriting and finally giving up because of impatience.
I think blogging looks much easier and less time consuming now.
Thank you.
May 17th, 2007 at 10:45 am
Thanks for hosting the carnival! I love blog carnivals because I get to find other articles and sites that people write. I think I’m kind of an information freak!
May 17th, 2007 at 10:22 am
Hey Court!
I just wanted to say great list - and also wanted to comment that I’m being a bit of a socialite blogger at the moment after reading your article at Wendy’s blog and also having seen you over at YGG.
Hope to get to know you a little better - but great blog from what I’ve seen.
Yeah BlogCarnivals really seem to be good for building initial traffic and readership, I know they definitely helped me in my early blogging days.
May 17th, 2007 at 10:48 am
Your site is great! I thought the post about being banned and then unbanned from Adsense was really interesting.
Your article on monetization methods was also really interesting. I’ve seen quite a few bloggers that offer some type of consulting/coaching, including eMom!
May 17th, 2007 at 12:03 pm
I knew about all of these except for the blog carnival. I will really have to check that out later!
Thank you for the tip!
May 17th, 2007 at 5:35 pm
The most fantastic part about a post like this is that it provides at least one piece of information that I just didn’t think about. Like Link Directories, I figured blog carnivals were a marginal use of time, but now I am about to definitely go for submitting my work to many more.
Thanks court.
May 19th, 2007 at 6:08 pm
Blog carnivals are great! I really like to look through the other articles on the carnivals. I learn a ton and am able to get some exposure.
May 19th, 2007 at 4:07 pm
Court
Your post is up on my carnival. You doing good work. Why don’t you Pimp Your Blog?
http://www.successpart2.com/category/pimp-your-blog/
May 19th, 2007 at 6:08 pm
Thanks!! I’ll have to check it out!
May 20th, 2007 at 4:50 am
Blog Carnival: Building Traffic From Scratch 21 May 2007
[..]Courtney Tuttle of Making Money Online Free with Court wrote an article about 5 Time-Managed Tasks for Successful Blogging. In the post, he mentioned a few tips on how to spend less time to increase your traffic more effectively.[..]
May 30th, 2007 at 10:20 pm
Greatly enjoyed this article. Up until recently, I was devoting 100% of my time to writing, not getting any fruits from my labor (hits, I’m not blogging for cash, I just want to be read). Now, I’m still taking plenty of time to write, but spending time promoting my blog through various channels is bringing results, and I’m not getting burnt out as bad. I’ll be bookmarking this article as a guide.
October 6th, 2009 at 10:06 am
Hey Court,
great tips thanks - i see that I have not been socializing enough because as a newbie you get stuck in so many other things that you forget about this. Your list here has again highlighted the importance of the task required to get to the top ranks.
Thanks for the tips