Blog Smarter Not Harder
Tips For Productive Blogging
Are you looking for ways to blog smarter so you can be a more productive blogger?
If you feel like there aren’t enough hours in the day for the 3 million blogging tasks you need to complete, you can probably use some tips on how to blog smarter.
Three million blogging tasks might sound like an exaggeration but when you’re a new blogger it can definitely feel like that!
To help you avoid the overwhelm, I’ve compiled a short list of things you can do to blog smarter, increase your productivity and make more money blogging!
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How to Blog Smarter
There are a few things you can do to blog smarter and make you a more productive blogger.
Let’s have a look.
1. Have a Plan
With anything in life, you tend to be more productive if you have a plan.
When you start a blog it really helps to plan all the details of your blog. Or if you’ve been blogging for a while but you don’t feel like you’re making any progress, you might have to rethink your plan and see where you can improve it.
A blog plan not only clarifies what you’re trying to achieve, it also shows you all the steps you need to take to get there.
Important things to plan are:
- What is your blog niche
- Who is your target market
- What problems will you solve for them
- What (affiliate) products or services can you sell to your audience
- What other ways can you monetise your blog
- How will you promote your blog
- Who are your competitors
- How do stand out from your competition
When you have a plan for your blog, you are less likely to waste time on futile tasks and more likely to create content that has purpose.
If you’d like some help planning your blog, grab my free Ultimate Blog Planner Workbook below.
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Ultimate Blog Planner Workbook
2. Increase productivity with Task Batching
A great way to save time as a blogger is to do your blogging tasks in batches. There are several blogging tasks you could do in batches, like brainstorming blog post ideas, designing Pinterest pins, and social media scheduling. Let’s have a look at how you can blog smarter with task batching.
Brainstorm Blog Post Ideas
Do you ever sit down to write a blog post but you can’t decide on a topic? A good way to prevent this is by treating post writing and brainstorming blog post ideas as a separate task. I usually brainstorm ideas when inspirations strikes and write down as many ideas as I can come up with.
A good way to do this is by picking a problem you want to solve for your reader and creating a topic cluster.
Here’s how you do this:
You pick one main topic/problem and come up with 6 or more blog post ideas about this topic. One of these posts will be the main “pillar” post, this posts is usually the longest (at least 2000 words) and it solves the main problem in detail.
The other 5 posts will be related to (or sub topics of) the pillar post. Here’s an example of post ideas in a topic cluster.
Once you’ve written several cluster posts, you need to interlink them.
Linking related blog post to each other is good for:
- Your readers – you make it easy for them to find related content.
- Google – interlinking helps search engines crawl your site and if readers stay on your blog longer it reduces your bounce rate.
Creating topic clusters is good for solidifying your niche and showing Google that you’re an expert on this topic. Using topic clusters and batching your blog post ideas is great for planning your content in advance and it will also speed up your writing process.
Batching Pin Design
Pinterest is a great platform for driving traffic to your blog, but since Pinterest favours fresh content these days, a lot of bloggers are struggling to keep up.
Designing Pinterest pins can be a time consuming task, especially if designing is not your strongest skill.
So how do you save time on designing pins?
You create them in batches.
If you create your pins in Canva, you could use pin templates to speed this up. Design your own pin templates that you can reuse again and again or buy templates to save even more time.
If you’re looking for high performing pin templates, check out my Viral Video Pin Templates here.
An even quicker way to create your pins in batches is with RelayThat. This design tool is similar to Canva with the difference that it actually designs the pins for you! That’s right, you don’t need any design skills to use RelayThat. You simply add your pin headlines, colours and images and RelayThat turns your ingredients into stunning Pinterest pins (or other social media graphics).
I’ve been using RelayThat and it’s saving me so much time! You can literally create between 60 and 100 graphics in one hour. Talk about being productive!
See how I create Pinterest pins super fast with this awesome tool in my RelayThat review.
Batch Scheduling
Once you’ve designed a whole batch of pins, you need to upload them to Pinterest. Uploading all your pins to Pinterest manually would be very time consuming because it only allows you to upload your pin to one board at the time.
To give your pins a higher chance to get noticed, it helps to schedule them to all your relevant boards. You can do this with just a few clicks in Tailwind.
Tailwind is a Pinterest approved scheduler that lets you schedule a pin to 10 boards in one go and you can create board lists to make this even more productive.
Since using Tailwind, my pinning has become much more consistent, and my blog traffic has increased dramatically.
I highly recommend trying it out and using it consistently for 3 months to see the full benefits.
Try Tailwind for free with this link and get a bonus free month!
3. Use SEO
Optimising your blog content for search engines is another good way to blog smarter.
Promoting your blog is one of the most time consuming blogging tasks. In fact, for every 20% of content your create, you should spend 80% of your time promoting it.
That is a lot of time spent on promoting.
How can you do this smarter?
By writing long informative SEO optimised blog posts that rank in search engines like Google, Bing etc.
Using Search Engine Optimisation is like a passive way to promote your blog. You optimise your blog posts once and when your post ranks in the SERPs you get ongoing traffic without further effort.
A bonus from search engine traffic is that it’s highly targeted traffic. These readers are looking for something specific and are more willing to buy than any other audience. So if you want to make more money blogging, you need your blog posts to show up in Google.
If you’re new to optimising your blog with SEO, read my beginners guide here:
SEO For Bloggers – The Essential Guide
To get your blog to rank in Google, you need to:
- Write long informative posts
- Research your keywords (for high search volume and low competition)
- Optimise your posts with on-page SEO
- Create backlinks to your site
To learn more about SEO, I highly recommend you check out the following ebooks by Debbie Gartner:
Or you can sign up for her free SEO course here.
4. Repurpose content
One more thing you can do to blog smarter is repurposing content.
As a blogger you constantly have to create content, but there really is no need to reinvent the wheel every time. It is ok to reuse content.
You can repurpose your content by turning (part of) a blog post into a:
- Youtube video
- Facebook live
- Optin freebie
- Email newsletter
- Podcast
- Ebook
Don’t think that you are cheating when re-using content. And no, your audience is not likely to notice either. In fact, a lot of your content will slip through the cracks and even your biggest fans will have missed that epic 3500-word post you wrote.
So would it be smart to only put your best content out there once?
Not really…
Another reason that repurposing content is a great technique to blog smarter, is that you’re likely to reach a new audience. Not everyone likes reading blog posts. Some people prefer watching a video or listening to a podcast. By repurposing your content in a different format, you will reach new people and grow your audience.
These are my 4 ways to blog smarter
I hope this post has given you some ideas to blog smarter. Please share this post, and if you have any additional tips, leave them in the comments below.
Are you struggling to grow you blog traffic with Pinterest?
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