There are people who approach blogging as a hobby. It is a therapeutic activity that allows them to sit back, relax, and put as much thought as needed into their writing.
These bloggers have the luxury of time in their hands - no deadlines to catch and no goals to meet anytime soon. As long as they can put out new content at their own convenience, everything is good.
The same can't be said about business bloggers who chase goals like a puppy chases its tail. They are always swamped with insurmountable objectives to nail on a consistent basis, putting even more pressure to their job of writing compelling pieces of content that their readers will love.
If you're one of these bloggers who struggle on meeting their goals, the problem may stem from your process. Maybe you're distracted or have a bad habit of procrastinating below doing the tasks at hand with hours left before the deadline.
If this is the case, take these productivity tips to increase your speed of getting your blogging job done and meeting your goal in the process.
Use time-tracking tools
Tracking the time you spend on your blogging tasks will give you a better idea on which tasks take you the most time to finish and which ones take you the least. You can begin by using these free time tracking tools to gauge your performance.
Once you have tracked your time within a given period of time, you can begin predicting how long or short it will take for you to finish each tasks by assigning them with specific time limits. You can even segment the blogging tasks (given the limit assigned to each ) to fit your working hours.
For example, if you happen to spend six hours on writing a post, you can just aim to write one post a day and perform smaller tasks to fill up the remaining time left to complete your work.
By approaching writing, publishing, and promoting your posts in a more deliberate manner, you are able to maximize your productivity and get more things done.
White-screen writing tools
If you feel that you're spending too much time writing your post, consider the distractions you have around you. Whether it's reading up on articles on you favorite sites or viewing cat videos on Youtube, you may need to find a way to keep you from veering your attention away from work.
Consider using these distraction-free writing tools to keep your focus at the writing task at hand. Also, use these grammar writing tools to ensure that your blog posts contain no syntax errors and use the appropriate tone and voice for your target audience.
Use IFTTT for social media
IFTTT is a web service that lets you create "recipes" that connect third-party sites to perform a specific action. You can use IFTTT to help promote your latest posts on social media by taking your blog's RSS feed and connect it to your Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn accounts.
IFTTT is also a productivity tool that lets you save content from your favorite sites using your RSS reader of choice such as Feedly or Pocket. By doing this, you can receive the posts straight to your device so you can read them later when you're done working. Check out these other IFTTT recipes for blogging to help you get your blogging job done faster.
Content analytics
Analyzing how you content has performed on your blog can help you create better blog posts in the future. Using Google Analytics to track visitor activity (most viewed pages, bounce rate, average length of time spent on page), you can gather insights on how you can make your blog perform much better.
A quick, actionable tip - for pages that gather the most traffic in your blog, you can boost ROI by assigning a clear call to action or add more links pointing to other pages in your blog.
You an also use the Content Analytics feature of SumoMe to see how much visitors you have retained until the end of your post. This is a great metric to refer to when writing your content - expect more people to read your entire post if it is compelling and interesting.
A/B testing
If you are running a lead generation campaign using a landing page from your blog or site, a skill you ought to learn is A/B testing. This lets you measure the results of two pages you have created with the same offer and see which one gathers the most leads.
By tracking which page performs better, you can use that page to appear all the time on your blog. However, don't get complacent with your blog content even if it's getting the job done. Always find a way to test different versions of the same thing, whether it's an opt-in form or call to action button.
Final thoughts: By following the productivity tips above, you will learn how to manage your tasks more efficiently and create a better approach to hitting your blogging goals. If you have other advice on how to get your blogging job done much quicker, share them by commenting below.