How to Become a Productive Blogger in 5 Easy Steps

Productivity is essential for bloggers – at least if they ever hope to be successful. There’s so much involved with blogging that goes well beyond you sitting down at your desk (wherever that is for you) and writing blog posts. How do you become a productive blogger when there’s the writing, proofreading, photos, promotion, email list, and beyond? It’s a lot of work. And this is all before you take into account the pressures outside of building our blogging business.

You need to figure out how you can focus and get more work done – and these 5 steps will help you become a productive blogger who works efficiently with a clear head.

 

How to become a more productive blogger – some awesome hacks!

You probably have a lot of the same struggles I’ve had (and maybe even more if you’ve got kids around). I started my blogging career as a sort of side gig. I worked on my blog for a few hours each night when I got home from my full time job.

Is any of this sounding like you and where you’re at?

The good news is that I found ways to increase productivity and I have some solutions for you. If you can implement even a few of these productivity hacks, you’re going to see big results.

 

1. Determine and Set Goals

There will always be a list of things you could be doing, should be doing… but what’s the goal? For example, if you want to grow your email list, you might work on creating opt ins and getting X amount of subscribers each month.

Setting some short term and long term goals will help you better plan what you should be doing so that you can focus on smaller tasks that add up to big growth. Your short term goals will make you feel like you’re making progress – which in turn will make you feel like you’re actually getting somewhere and fuel your excitement to continue being productive.

 

2. Make a Plan

I’m betting you have what feels like a million things to do and it’s all jumbled up in your head. You can’t think clearly and you don’t know which task to start with. And the more you think about it, the more overwhelmed you feel.

This is where planning comes in handy. Some call it mind mapping, and others (like myself!) just like to write out a big to-do list of everything that I need to do in regards to a project. Then I rearrange them into an order that makes better sense (such as “Well, I need to write this email sequence where I talk about this blog post, but obviously I need to write the blog post first so that it actually exists”).

 

3. Create a Schedule

If you’re like me and you get overwhelmed when you sit down to work and you don’t have a plan (no judgement… it’s super common!), then you need to put forth the effort to create a schedule for yourself.

Being a blogger requires discipline – the kind many people aren’t accustomed to needing to have. If you’re used to having a manager who makes out your schedule and tells you when you’re going to work and what you’re going to do, you might struggle with the concept of needing to do this for yourself. But I promise, having a schedule set will help deter you from distractions. Knowing at all times what your plans are, what the next step is, what you need to get done… will help you do it!

At first, you might be unsure of how much work you can handle per day. Just give yourself a task to work on each day. Here’s an example:

• Monday: Batch write a few blog posts
• Tuesday: Take images for blog posts
• Wednesday: Edit blog post images
• Thursday: Finalize blog posts
• Friday: Social Media Scheduling

 

Write it out in a planner

Some people love the satisfaction of writing out to-do lists and checking things off once a task has been completed. If that’s you, then you’ll probably prefer creating a weekly list in a physical planner.

 

Schedule your work digitally

If you feel like you need a way to map out your schedule digitally, check out Taskade – It’s a excellent for digital planning. You can create daily tasks, arrange them, leave yourself notes – whatever you need.

While there are other systems like it on the market (think Trello or Asana), I prefer this one. It feels cleaner to me and I like the pre-made templates for various projects.

 

4. Manage Your Time

Especially if blogging is your side-gig for now, you probably don’t have a lot of hours to devote to all of this work. You’ll need to manage your time and spend it wisely.

If you use all of the productivity hacks I’ve talked about so far, it’s going to help you a lot in this department. But there’s other things you can do as well.

 

Batch Your Work

Batching is a great way to get a lot done quickly. By hyper-focusing on one type of task (such as writing a blog post – no formatting, images, SEO, etc), you can accomplish a lot of work quickly.

 

Set a Timer

Are you as distracted by Facebook and checking your email as I am? Set a timer for 30 minutes, work until the timer chimes, and then reward yourself with 5-10 minutes of checking Facebook, Instagram, email, whatever you find is otherwise a work distraction.

 

5. Make Blogging part of your routine

It doesn’t take long to establish something as a habit, and blogging should become apart of your routine. If it’s part of what you do on certain days each week, you’ll be able to focus and get the work done – without distraction of other potential activities.

Treat it like a business. Make it a priority.