Running a successful blog is tough business. There is so much to do on a daily and weekly basis. You have to monitor and approve blog comments. There are new posts to write, you were supposed to hunt down images and evidence videos, treated with social media and manage a dozen other tasks. Then tomorrow … you get to start all over again. Yeah! Sounds like so much fin!
If you feel like a slave to your blog, there is good news. There are plenty of blogging activities that it is possible to set on autopilot so you can focus on more important parts of controlling your business. Automate the following 4 blogging duties and not only will you have more free time, but your blog won’t go down the drain while you get burned out and end up throwing in the towel!
1- Schedule your posts for auto-publishing
The majority of blogs these days are run on the WordPress platform. Even if yours is not, it probably has the ability to schedule writing your posts ahead of time. Eventually when you have written a number of posts, you can easily use this schduling function to publish the content at some date in the future. This saves you the time required to log into your blog and manually post content at the crack of dawn or in the wee hours.
2- Automate social media involvement
HootSuite and Buffer are just a couple social media blogging automation tools you can use. They schedule out your tweets, Facebook posts and other social media interactions. When you think about the amount of period you spend on social media trying to attract attention to your blog, you can see how these social media blogging tools can be invaluable.
3- Use Akismet for comment moderation
Reading, approving and replying to your comments takes time. This is one of the tasks many bloggers know is necessary, but can quickly become bothersome and frustrating. Let the WordPress plugin Akismet to do much of the works for you and filter out all the spam comments that get left. It has filters and settings you put in place to take care of the majority of approving vs. trashing comment left for you.
4- Stop doing everything yourself
You can hire a virtual assistant in the Philippines and other countries for $200 to $300 a month. Those are full-time figures. On a part-time rate, you could expend clue $50 to $100 each month and have a virtual assistant handle much of your time-consuming, recurring blog duties. Websites like Guru, Toptal, Elance and Upwork are the place to find talented virtual aides that will make it possible to put your work on your blog so you can free up your value time.
What time saving tips can you share in the comments below? Do you do something that others can do as well? Leave a comment below and let us know!
I have considered having a VA but not sure what they can do for me since I am the one writing the content and as you say, you can automate many things nowadays. Is there something that I am missing for not hiring a VA? Thanks in advance for your reply!
LOL – don’t feel like you have to hire a VA, Amaia! If you don’t think you need one, chances are good at this point that you are good without one. Now, when the day comes and you run out of day before your to-do list runs out, THEN you might want to consider getting some assistance like a VA. Make sense?
Useful information for bloggers starved of time!Thank you!
Glad I could help, Subha! How busy are you? Did any of these help?
Being a new blogger can be pretty overwhelming and take up a lot of your time. Any tools that can help save time make for less worry.
Thanks for sharing these, Paul.
Hi Jane – as I mentioned in another reply, scheduling the posts can be the most helpful thing for you and something just about everyone can do!
Blogging is very time consuming but not producing any revenue so hiring someone for $200 a month isn’t happening. Still, this was interesting and, at some point, I might go for the automatic uploads.
Thanks for the info, Alice. Keep in mind that you don’t have to hire anyone… yet. You can still automate tasks such as scheduling your posts to be published. A lot of people will write their blog posts on, say Saturday. Then, they schedule one a day for the week!
Such great tips, thanks so much for sharing with us.
Which ones are you using, Jennifer?
This is great info thx Paul
Thanks. Meryl!