In all of the years I’ve been helping bloggers create successful blogs, there is one thing that has always stood out.
The successful bloggers are consistent at doing the right things over and over and over again.
You see, the idea of starting a blog and working from home is a dream that a lot of people have, but let me tell you, working from home is hard.
What?
I sound like a jackass saying that.
I don’t mean physically it’s hard.
I mean mentally it’s hard to get work done because you’re home. There are so many distractions and it’s easy to think you can always get back to work in a couple of minutes.
Your best bet if you want to be a successful blogger at home is to have a blogging routine.
A blogging routine leads to consistency with your blog business which in turn will lead to success.
Now, I don’t want you to think that a blogging routine means you stick to a specific schedule. It doesn’t have to be that way, especially since everybody has different lives.
A blogging routine is simply a set of tasks that you’ve laid out that you can repeat over and over and over again.
So what are those tasks?
I’m glad you asked.
Let me tell you.
Developing a Blogging Routine
When developing a blogging routine it’s important to take a 50,000 ft view of your blog and what is needed for success. There aren’t many things that you need to do for your blog over and over again.
For example, you don’t need to spend every week working on the design of your blog.
Once it is set, it is set.
However, if you want to continue to bring people to your blog you should work on promotion.
If you want to continue to expand your audience then you should work on creating new content.
If you want to keep that audience around then you should work on emails to send them.
These are some of the things that you need to continue to do repeatedly to create and maintain a successful blog.
It can be a lot to keep track of and that’s why it’s important to develop a routine.
So here are things that you need to add to your blogging schedule.
1. Finding Content
You don’t need to do this all of the time. In fact, you can do it in batches.
You might spend a day once every couple of months finding content ideas and then you spend time working on all of those ideas.
Once you’ve created content for all of your ideas you spend another day finding content ideas.
The last thing you want to do though is look for new ideas every time you finish a piece of content.
Currently, I have 193 content ideas for this site that I haven’t touched yet.
When I finish one piece of content I can look at my list, choose another, and get started right away.
There is no delay and that is important.
2. Creating Content
Probably the most important aspect of blogging and the one that will take up the most time.
It’s important that you develop a specific routine around creating content.
Unfortunately, most bloggers take the approach of creating content whenever they can find the time.
You have to make the time for content creation and that means planning out what time each day you’re going to work on this.
If you don’t do that you’ll find that it’s very easy to fill up empty time slots with things that aren’t related to your blog.
While you’re creating content you might find that sometimes you think of a new content idea as you move along. Be sure to add that to your list.
When it’s related to the current content that you’re creating I call this the Jungle Vine Method of content creation.
You’re swinging from vine to vine as you move along.
When does this happen?
Well it could happen in this post. While I’m giving you a broad overview of a blogging routine, I might have a post that goes into more detail on how to find content for your blog. Because that post itself works well on its own, I’ll create it separately
With almost any piece of content that you create, you’ll find a topic that you can dive deeper into but you might not want to do it at this moment.
3. Promoting Content
I’m amazed at how much time people spend promoting their content. Some gurus will tell you that the ratio of time for creating content and promoting content should be 50/50 with some even saying 20/80.
This seems crazy to me because there are so many tools out there that automate things.
For example, I have my content moving 24/7 through Pinterest, but I don’t spend more than an hour a week. on the site.
It doesn’t make sense to spend time doing things where the amount of time invested completely outweighs the return you get.
It’s different if I decide to spend time in an online community that caters specifically to my audience. That will allow me to establish myself as an authority and possibly pick up customers along the way.
When it comes time to promote content, never be scared of using tools to help automate things.
So what’s the routine for this?
Make sure your tools are always working and always have content ready to go.
4. Emailing Your Audience
This should be one of your top priorities.
I can’t tell you how many people I’ve talked to who tell me they haven’t emailed their audience in MONTHS.
That’s crazy.
If you really want to make good money with your blog, then you’ll quickly discover that the money is in the list but only if you stay engaged with that list.
Does this mean you need to think of emails all of the time?
Nope.
In fact, you can write a whole series of emails in a couple of days, load them up in your email service provider, and then kick back and relax for a bit as the emails go out.
If you want to be extreme with it then you can set up a year’s worth of emails to go out.
I’m not joking.
If you check the bottom of this post, you’ll find a
And not just pointless emails.
That means I have a bit of time before I need to add another batch of emails.
There is nothing wrong with front-loading your work.
The 4 Actions
As you can see there really are just four actions that you need to do consistently with your blog to give yourself the best chance of success.
The problem that some people have is that they throw the ratio of these actions out of whack.
For example, they may spend all of their time creating content and not doing any promotion or emailing their audience.
You have to find the right balance for yourself. I’m not going to tell you to spend 25% of your time on each because I don’t even know what that means.
Instead, what will happen is that over time you’ll begin to get an understanding of where you need to devote your time on your blog.
A Specific Blogging Routine
If you wish to get more specific with a blogging routine then I’ll try to break down how I go about tackling things with my blogs.
- Create a list of content ideas. I do as many as I can. I might even devote a whole day to this just so I don’t have to come back to it for a very long time.
- Choose a silo of content and tackle that. What does that mean? Let’s say I have a travel blog and I have some content ideas around cruises. Instead of just attacking one of those ideas and bouncing to a different topic (maybe Disney), I’ll do a chunk (or all) of those cruise ideas. This becomes my Topic Cluster.
- Create the content.
- Create pins for the content and load pins up into Tailwind. Also, break the content down into small bits that fit on social media.
- See if I want to add any of the new pieces of content to my email sequence.
- Repeat the steps.
I don’t want to make blogging seem complicated. When you take a step back and look at the steps for successful blogging there aren’t that many. People just tend to get lost in the details and focus on the wrong things so they get tripped up.
What’s most important is that you create a blogging routine that you can stick with and consistently do.
If you can’t then you don’t have a routine at all.
You just have a random set of actions that you choose to do from time to time.
