7 Ways To Save Time Writing Your Blog Posts

OMG, how could the past 7 days have flown by so fast?! I wanted to get this blog post finished and published days ago. But just like you, sometimes my life can get messy and things get in the way of best intentions. It’s time for me to save time writing blog posts and become more time efficient!

Creating and publishing content for a blog (or any recurring content creation task for your business) is time consuming. You get one week’s content written and BOOM!, it’s time to do it all over again before you know it. You might begin to resent the time needed to keep that fresh content coming for your readers. And then you begin to procrastinate which leads to less content and that whole downward spiral starts and ends with you giving up on the writing altogether.

Don’t let that happen. There IS a better way. With some focus and discipline, you can get a whole lot done in a short amount of time. Put into practice the following 7 tips, techniques and strategies, and you’ll save valuable time working on your blog posts–time that can be used elsewhere in your life.

1 – Hire a virtual assistant to handle any menial, recurring tasks for you. You might think you can’t afford that ‘luxury’. But look at it from a different perspective. If you use the time saved to see more paying clients, it becomes clear that it’s costing you a very high price to do those time-suck menial tasks by yourself.

2 – Schedule your blogging activities for just 1 or 2 days each week. This forces you to be productive with your blogging time, keeps you from getting burned out working every day on your blog, and leaves plenty of time in your life for non-blog living. Treat that scheduled time like a client’s appointment.

You could divide it up with a set amount of time to research, write a first draft, create a featured image using Canva.com to brand it on Day 1. Then edit the blog on Day 2, publish it, schedule your sharing on social media or create your campaigns in Missinglettr.com. It then becomes 2 days out of the week that is invested in your blog writing, instead of the whole week!

3– Put a timer on all your blogging tasks. It is easy to get caught up responding to comments, writing a new post or interacting on social media. Break up each of the activities above, set a timer for each task, and when it goes off, move to the next task.

You’ll get a better idea of just how much time each task takes once you’ve been paying attention to each individual task instead of the ‘project’ of writing a blog post as a whole entity.

4 – Develop a schedule for your posts to publish, and stick to it. This saves time by automating your tasks, and keeping you on point. So always publish your posts on the same days of the week and at roughly the same time. The routine will be good for keeping you on task and your readers will come to know your schedule and look forward to seeing your posts on set days.

5 – Work smarter, not harder to get that content completed. Instead of straining your brain, spending hours to create a blog post, interview someone in your field. You end up spending 15 to 30 minutes interviewing, rather than several hours researching and writing. Check out some of the new nearly instantaneous voice to transcription apps, like Otter.ai or Trint.com.

While we’re on the subject of working smarter, not harder–start with PLR for your content creation. You can more easily batch create multiple posts on similar topics. Be sure to add some personal stories, certainly change up the intro and last paragraph and voilà, you’ve got a bunch of posts done in a short amount of time!

6 – Ask your audience to write for you. Ask your readers to send in real-life scenarios relative to your blog’s topics. Or feature a testimonial occasionally. This makes readers feel important, it drives engagement, and gives you plenty of content for a blog post.

7 – Use the auto-schedule feature for publishing your posts in the future. You could set aside a certain amount of time each week or each month, batch create multiple blog posts and use the auto-schedule function to get the posts published on your schedule. Some people are actually doing this once a year and creating all of their blog posts at once for the entire year. More power to them for being that disciplined and being able to unplug and hole up somewhere to get it all done. I don’t think that strategy would work for me for an entire year’s worth of work at once, though!

So there you have it. 7 ways to save yourself some time (and sanity) and get your blog posts written and published. Which one is your favorite? And how soon are you going to implement using it? Let me know in the comments!