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Blogging can take a lot of time. Time that’s hard to carve out of from all your responsibilities. Day job, family, writing–well, life. Here I’ll give you some tips on how to be a more productive blogger. More blog posts in less time.

1. Keep an idea file on your desktop so it’s one click away from adding an idea. Jot down ideas and titles for blog posts.
2. When you’re reading other blog posts, or your RSS feed reader, skim the posts for ideas for your blog. Use the above mentioned file to quickly jot down an idea.
3. Disconnect. Turn off the phone, email, twitter, IM. Sit down and write.
4. This goes against our writer personality, but don’t obsess over every comma, typo and word choice in your posts. If you are spending tons of time polishing up every word, you’re spending too much time on your blog posts, and not enough on your life.
5. Write extra posts when you’re feeling creative, these will come in handy when you’re too busy to blog, go out of town, or just need a bit of time off to refill the well. Store them up in your drafts in Wordpress or a folder on your computer.
6. Write one extra post a week and save it. These will quickly add up to a good stash of extra posts for when you need them.
7. You know that notebook you keep with you at all times for ideas for your book? Snippets of conversation? The random idea? Use the notebook for capturing ideas for your blog too.
8. Sketch out your post, then flesh it out. Maybe you’re a novel writer who needs to polish and perfect every word before you move on to the next sentence. Not a very productive way to blog. Try to list off your main points, then flesh out the post.
9. Not quite ready to jump into your novel writing when you sit down to write? Write a blog post first to get your fingers and mind working. This may, or may not, work for you. It might interfere with your fiction writing mindset. It works for me, but your mileage my vary.
10. Do you use photos on your blog? Adding photos to a blog can be very time consuming.Batch process photos all in one sitting. Get them cleaned up and sized for your blog. Save them for future posts. I save them in a file on my computer named, aptly enough, PicsforFuturePosts. If you use a lot of photos on your blog, know what sizes work best, so you can save your photos in that size. What size for two across. What size to fill the whole column. What is the largest size you can add without breaking your page.
11. Themes: have a theme of the week, and break a longer post into parts spread over a week. Or have a day of the week theme. Wordless Wednesday-where you just post an excellent photo. Weekend Round Up with links to interesting sites & blogs you’ve found every weekend. I do a Life in Focus on Wine on the Keyboard on the weekend with a photo and quote.
12. Have someone do a guest post on your blog. Not only will it attract their readers over to your blog, but it will give you a break from a day of writing a post.

Remember, blogging is supposed to be fun. If you’re not enjoying it, maybe it’s not for you. If you do love it, like Suzanne and I do, then these tips should help make you a more productive blogger. Do you have any tips or techniques that you use with your blogging to cut down on the time it takes you to blog?

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Tags: How to Blog //