Welcome back to Self Employed Mum. Thanks for visiting!
In corresponding with Chloe of Son Time Now – A Boys Toys Blog, who has a number of questions about blogging and how it became full time, I realised that I’ve been getting a lot of questions recently and will attempt to answer them. First up, I explain what I do in a typical week as a full time blogger. Now I should premise this by saying that everyone’s activities vary depending on what you’re writing about and more importantly, whether you’re doing it for fun or as a business.
Researching posts
I am always on the lookout for items to feature so between emails from designers, stores, and prs asking to be featured, to email newsletters that I subscribe to, reading relevant blogs and magazines, checking my favourite stores, to flicking through mags in the docs office, I’m always on the sniff.
How do I keep track of all this? Primarily with my favourite Paperchase notebook, Delicious bookmarking, Stumbleupon (more on this in a moment), plus I have a couple of spreadsheets which I track hot brands on which I can refer to for inspiration.
Writing posts
This covers writing my own and checking any contributions. This probably takes up one working day a week. I try to be organised and do it in bulk which is more productive. I use a desktop blog editing software, Ecto (for Mac as it’s useless for pc’s) which I’m heavily reliant on. This lets you publish to a whole host of blogging systems without having to go online and fanny around with what can sometimes be unpredictable web based systems.
Emails (includes comment reading)
One of my sites gets an average of about 150 comments a day and I read all of them! I read and respond to emails in bulk and this is because aside from being on a reduced schedule for maternity leave, email can be a bloody annoying distraction! I deal with ad, marketing-y and pr queries as well.
Techie stuff
This varies from week to week. Involves making sure things like plugins are working as they’re supposed to, throwing a wobbler when something goes awry and then calming down and more often than not resolving the issue myself. I’m currently upgrading and redesigning all sites on the quiet…
Checking out products
I don’t run review sites but I do look at samples or try out some products. I try to keep this to a minimum as it’s time consuming.
Admin
I am always shocked that I spend more time thinking about invoicing than I actually spend doing them… Also involves checking ads
Social networking
Twitter is the primary one, plus a little Facebook. I stumble sites in Stumbleupon which very productive as when I stumble some of my own, I get a large amount of traffic. I don’t do any particular link building activity.
Book/ebook writing and coaching
These are specific to my business though so probably not in many people’s typical week!
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{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Hi Natalie
Thanks ever so much for taking the time to answer my question! Your analysis is certainly very helpful as when you’re starting out you never know whether you’re “doing it right”, ie, are you wasting your time on Twitter or whatever.
I’ve just compared what you’ve said with my weekly timetable that I now try to stick to after previously getting to the end of a week and wondering what on earth I’ve done. I think I’m on the right track although I had given up a bit on social networking as it didn’t seem to do anything for me. Perhaps if you get time(!) you could expand on what exactly works for you, especially with your product related sites. I also had been spending some time on link building but now wonder whether that may be a waste of time. Did you do this in the past and find it unnecessary or do you just find everything else works so you don’t need to bother?
Thanks again, Chloe
Hi Chloe – no problem and happy to help. Given us plenty of fodder for posts. I think it’s about getting a balance of time and also finding where your readers are and spending your energies there. If you don’t spend too much time and also ensure that you’re productive with what little time that you do, the results will look good on balance. Some things are good for SEO but there don’t necessarily yield lots of traffic. You kind of have to weigh it up. Re link building, I’ve never chased links per se as I always found it a bit weird when people would send me an email saying ‘please link to my blog’. I do a bit of work on optimising my site, plus combined with what little social networking I do, it brings traffic. People read and recommend and that’s the most valuable to me – loyal, quality readers. I will definitely give it some more thought though and write about it.