Blogging Productivity 101: Where Should Your Time Be Spent?

Updated

October 15, 2019

Advanced or Experienced Bloggers: Here’s how you should be spending your time:

If you have more than 100 total pieces of content published–you automatically fall under this category.

If you have less than 100 total pieces of content but feel you’re ready–use your best judgment.

creation = 20%
marketing = 75%
admin = 5%

If this time split sounds stupid or unreasonable, here’s my rationale.

If you’ve been blogging a while have a body of work built up–there is oftentimes NO reason to publish new content.

Every blog post you write has the POTENTIAL to be evergreen. Updated, revamped, and republished.

Experienced bloggers have the option to revamp and repurpose old, existing content.

In fact, not only do they have that option, but it is Pete’s personal opinion that they SHOULD make this “repurposing” cycle a larger and larger part of their content strategy.

Robert at The College Investor (who has hundreds of old posts) publishes 5x a week.

M, W, and Fri = new content
Tu and Thurs = old content, revamped.

Brennan Dunn has a year-long email funnel that walks new subscribers through all of his best content.

So–if you have loads of content already–you can easily update and revamp it–and re-release! This takes a fraction of the time as opposed to starting from scratch.

Experienced Blogger Admin & Marketing

There’s another benefit to NOT being a newbie–you’ve likely already started to solidify a marketing strategy.

you’ve found your tribe (at least a little)
you’ve nailed down your social channels
you’ve built some relationships

Once you have a body of content–my semi-pro opinion would be to focus more on marketing.

continue guest posting
(for media features & backlinks)
double-down on preferred channels
build more partnerships and collaborations

What about 5% of the time spent on admin? Like, wtf?

This is a tough one…

It’d be easy to say “At this point, you should hire your first virtual assistant!” or something–but I don’t think that’s entirely doable for many bloggers.

Experienced bloggers CAN start to systemize and create scalable processes for engaging with and managing their community (email, FB groups, etc).

Rather than respond to every single question–write a post about it (example: this post), or do a Facebook live. Then you can simply reference the post anytime you get the question again.

That, and you’ll hopefully start to get better at creating your own systems to save time in email, responding to comments, working on back-end website stuff.

This stuff takes a TON of time as a newer blogger just starting to get traction.

Beginner Bloggers: Here’s how to spend your time for max productivity and ROI:

First–there’s no magic number to go from “beginner” to “experienced” blogger. It’s different for everybody.

However…

If you don’t have a ton of “passive” traffic–your traffic tends to die off a few days after each new post, etc–or you don’t have a lot of old content to work with (less than 50 posts)–you qualify for the following recommendations.

Here’s my recommend time split for newer bloggers:

creation = 75%
marketing = 15%
admin = 10%

Why it’s vital for new bloggers to spend MOST of their time on the creation process.

Two huge reasons…

to get better and more efficient at it
with no following, your content IS YOUR BEST MARKETING.

When you first start–it takes a super long time to develop your “content muscles.”

There’s a reason I can sit down and record a decent podcast episode in one take, and publish it 10 minutes later–I’ve done it a lot (and I’m lazy).

The more time you can spend focusing on the creation process–the quicker you’ll find your voice, and the more efficient you’ll get at creating.

And the marketing time?

When you have massive organic traffic, 30,000 email subscribers, etc–you can hit publish, email your list–and watch the traffic roll in.

Not so for newbies.

new blog traffic — anddddddd…no traffic.

You can spend all the time in the WORLD on various marketing strategies only to see small ROI.

The biggest marketing ROI for new bloggers? Really, really, really remarkable and useful content.

Let’s talk about things that matter–and stuff that doesn’t.

a pixel-perfect website
300 more twitter followers
learning advanced technical SEO
rock-solid branding across every pixel of your blog

There are tons of bloggers who have this stuff–and as a new blogger, you’re competing with all of them! (for attention btw).

Until you have a body of work–spend your time obsessing over producing quality content consistently.

Quality content consistently.

Also, it’s never too early in your blogging career to utilize tools to save time…

Even in month zero–there are definitely “must-have” tools. The trick is learning when enough is enough–for now.

A new blogger shouldn’t spend hours on hours learning 15+ WordPress plugins.

If you’d like a run-down on my tried-and-tested blogging tools, read this guide.

Conclusion:

New blogger?

I believe with all my heart that you should spend a LARGE majority of your time on the creation process.

brainstorming remarkable content ideas
writing writing writing
learning how to produce images and graphics that engage
learning about headlines and intros
making engaging and interest posts that people talk about.

This will grow your following more than tricks or tactics for more Pinterest followers or nit-picky SEO optimization. You’ll get better at that stuff in time.

However…

If you have a nice body of work built up, and have a decent flow or passive/organic traffic–it’s time to explore more advanced marketing tactics.

Go deep on technical SEO. Use a paid tool to track your posts across the first few pages of Google–then update, revamp, and re-release.
Go back through your Pinterest boards and clean up crappy or outdated content.
Focus on influencer outreach and use your time finding strategic ways to grow your blog and business.

You can afford to spend less time creating original content–until you just want to again 😉