As a wrap up to our 31-Days to Kick Your Bog in the Butt and as promised, I thought I would give you a look at my normal day of blogging. What you need to keep in mind is the fact my business is blogging, G2WebMedia and Headway Themes. So unlike some or most of you, I spend my entire day online doing what I do. And, as long as I have my MacBook Pro and I have access to good wifi, I can work from anywhere.
For those of you who blog as a way to market and promote your business, you can take what I do and compress it down to fit your day. However, what and how I do my day can certainly work for you too.
Today’s Lesson
No matter what my daily schedule looks like. No matter how much time I am able to spend on blogging and social networking. You have to decide for yourself realistically how much time you can spend on these type of activities. You also need to determine if you have the resources or people who can do some of this. And you need to decide what you expect to get out of blogging and social networking.
You also need to develop a plan and I would suggest you do this for the coming month. Don’t delay, start tomorrow. I would suggest you break your planning and your plan into time periods, i.e. daily, weekly and monthly. The following is just an example.
- 3 post a week
- Each post could have its own theme or even style
- Daily admin type task, moderating comments, replying to comments
- Each day you post, promote the post on social networking sites such as twitter
- Review your stats for the week on Saturday
- First day of each month, plan out the coming month
Your own plan is going to vary based on what you are blogging about and what the purpose of your blogging is. I would encourage you to give this a try for at least 2 months before you decide it will not work for you. If you tie together with this all of those activities we have discussed this month, it will work. Keep in mind your “filing system” for keeping track of post ideas. Also, this is a great way to use an editorial calendar too.
As you can see, there has been a method to my madness over the last 30 days. And I hope you are seeing why we talked about all those things we have been talking about.
I also want to once again caution you. Don’t be so regimented in your process you miss the big picture. Be flexible in your planning as you will from time to time need to go with the flow.
You also need to determine where to spend your time, based on where your potential readers may be gathering. If you see a pattern to where your potential readers are, go there and spend some time there. Your use of your time will be more efficient if you do this one step.
In addition to figuring out where your readers might be. I would also spend my time where I am comfortable. If for example you are not comfortable with Facebook, but you are with LinkedIn, spend your time on LinkedIn. I for one do not want to waste my time on MySpace. So, I don’t. I also spend much more time on twitter than I do on Facebook. I use both, but twitter gets more of my time throughout the day.
My daily blogging and social networking schedule
My day starts early. Since I work from my wonderful home office, my commute takes me a total of just about 30 seconds to get to my office. My office is in my basement where we run all of our businesses from. I usually get to the office by 7:30 a.m..
What I do first
The first thing I do when I get to my desk is check email. One tool which is a must have is Gmail. In fact, I forward all of my email accounts through Gmail so I can take advantage of its powerful spam filter. And I take advantage of Gmail’s built in filters and labels to organize my emails. Client emails go into their own folder and I check these first thing. I want to get to any questions or concerns clients have before I do anything else.
After I have dealt with my inbox, I then tackle the task of moderating all of my comments I get on my blogs. Yes, I moderate all comments. In fact, no comment goes live until I say so. I do this as I feel I have an obligation to our readers to make sure no spam or flaming comments get through. I also take the time to respond to as many comments as I can. If I am going to ask for interaction and a conversation on my blogs, I firmly believe the blogger must participate in this conversation too.
Continuing on with more email work, I get to my Google Alerts now too. They are also filtered and put in their own folder so they don’t clog up my inbox. I monitor our company news and also any mention of Blog For Profit. Since that is the central theme of what we talk about, I want to know what the buzz is for the day. I also use Alerts to look for any blog post fodder I might want to use either for the day or in the future.
Finally, as far as email goes, I check the folder labeled “Newsletters” last. This is where I filter all of the newsletters I subscribe to and read the ones I get for the day. I only subscribe to a select few, but I try to read them the day they come in. I also subscribe to a hand full of blogs via their email subscription too. This is where I send them too.
Stats Checking
I do check my stats. Not so much for the numbers, but to see how people arrived at Blog For Profit. I like to check the search strings to see if I am showing up high on the first page of Google for those search terms or not. If I am not and if I think the topic is important to our readers, I will do a post or two on the subject. I may not do it “today”. But I will make a note of the post idea in one of my tools I have mentioned before in this series.
I also like to take this time to see what sites may have referred traffic our way. If they linked to us, I go check to see what the link was and I always look at any and all post who link to us. If I feel I can add to the conversation, I will leave a comment on those post which link to us too.
I don’t want you to think I do all of the above without at least looking at twitter. The first thing I do once I have taken care of client matters in the inbox is to view any @ messages and DM’s I may have on twitter. I do this first thing in the morning to see what may have come in during the night. I like to answer all DM’s as soon as I can. And if an @ messages needs a reply, they are taken care of too. I also will check to see if there were any retweets (RT’s) of my post from the previous day too. Since I feed all of my blog post to twitter with EasyTweets, I like to see who is RT’ing them as often as I can. If I happen to not be following them, I usually do.
Because I am a heavy user of twitter, I use a desktop client called Seesmic. It is great and I keep it open on my extra 22 inch flat panel. I also organize my followers into list and groups. I will cover my twitter use in a future post. My point is I use twitter all day long to promote my own stuff and the stuff of those I follow. I also will tweet and retweet things I am reading, which I feel my followers will benefit from. I consider this a key activity in my daily blogging.
Posting to Blog
If I have not already put in my pipeline post to go live for the day, I try to write new post either first thing in the morning or in the evening. I find those two times best for me to write. Unless of course something just comes over me, I may write a post any time during the day. Because I keep post ideas in a number of places, I usually don’t have an issue with not having something to write about. And this is key if you are going to try to keep up with posting on a regular and consistent basis.
While I would love to post to Blog For Profit daily, I don’t always get this accomplished. However, I plan to at least post 5 times a week until the end of the year. We are also bringing on board a couple of contributing editors to help with the posting schedule. And this will also give our readers more then just me to read and listen to. Why do I say listen to? Well, we are getting geared up to do at least a weekly video post here at Blog For Profit. Not sure if this will start before November or not. But it will be coming. How will this work into my schedule of postings? I plan to do the videos for a Friday posting.
Reading other post and connecting with other bloggers
I use a RSS reader and I use twitter now more and more as my RSS feed source. I tend to take breaks throughout the day to catch up on reading those post and bloggers I don’t want to miss. While I would love to say I read all of the bloggers I follow, I don’t. In fact, there are just a certain number of bloggers which I read each and every time they post something to their blogs.
Part of my reading other post also includes commenting on those post. I do this only if I feel I can add something to the original post. And I do this when I may want to engage the blogger and ask questions too. You will find if you have made reading and commenting a regular practice, you will become better informed in your particular niche. You will also start to build relationships with these other bloggers. I also tend to take these relationships to twitter and, god forbid, I even talk to other bloggers on the phone.
Don’t forget to do take the conversations to a different level. Pick up the phone, Skype or whatever audio tool you use. And don’t forget to email. Send emails to these other bloggers as we discussed in a previous post in this series.
Final Thoughts
I know many of you are sitting there thinking I am crazy again. And if I was in your shoes, I would be saying the same thing. I know perfectly well my daily routine is not possible for many of you. Let’s face it, you have businesses to run and your blogging and social networking is only a part of it. What you have to do is decide when during the day you are going to set aside some time to do your marketing. And that is what blogging and social networking can be for your business or firm. If you are at all serious about taking your marketing efforts to the next level, you simply have to schedule blogging and social networking into your day.
In the next few days I will be posting and sending out a summary list of the post in this series. And, there will be a list of the outstanding guest post we had during the last 31 days too.
But, now is the time to ask those burning questions you have. As many of you have already done, please get me those questions you would like to see answered in the very near future. Also, because we are getting some great questions and comments from you via email, we just might take those questions and add them to what’s coming here at Blog For Profit. Be watching for details soon.
