Here’s a question for a little discussion over the weekend:
“What Do You Spend Most Time Doing on Your Blog?”
Running a blog calls for all kinds of skills and activities. Writing content is probably the most obvious of these – but as I talk to different bloggers I often find that they each have their own activity that they tend to be drawn to spend more time than others. In addition to writing content – these activities might include:
- Blog Design
- Search Engine Optimization
- Guest Posting on Other Blogs
- Editing Guest Posts on Your Own Blogs
- Moderating Comments and Interacting with Readers
- Networking and Promotion to Other Bloggers
- Social Media Marketing
- Monetization
- Reading Other Blogs in your Niche
- Reading about Blogging
- Watching Statistics/Metrics
I’m sure there are more – but that list should get you started.
What do you find yourself focusing upon in your blogging at the moment? I find that I go through stages where different activities get more focus than others. For me at the moment I’ve just moved out of a phase of redesigning one of my blogs and am focusing more upon generating content (writing it myself but also editing posts of others).
Interested to hear what you’ve been focusing upon.
Too many times, I let sloppy mistakes slip thru. Like misspellings and bad punctuation. As I result, I send (It think) too much time proof-reading. If a post takes me an hour, half of that time is allotted to proofing.
Usually it consists of SEO, SMM, Content Writing and replying to comments.
However it does change throughout the week, so I can fit everything in to the scenario.
Will.
As we have a newer blog – we find our time spent
1. Developing good content
2. Creating a buzz, driving traffic to our site.
I am lazy in producing content. I spend most of the time marketing
M mainly warry about the content and look about my posts. Then m bit concern about making traffic also
I spend the fast majority of time writing–high quality content is the key.
I am learning to spend a little time on things that help get the word out, such as Entrecard, advertising, etc.
I’ll take turns. For three weeks I’ll focus more on writing content and 1 week i’ll tinker with the design and other stuff to make the website more user friendly.
Reading other blogs is my big things. I have 222 blogs on my RSS reader and many of them are in my niche (baby boomers, midlife) and many of them are sources of interesting content to link to or just personal interest (paranormal, for instance).
I spend most of my time learning the new tools. Right now I am learning how to capture my screen for doing tutorials.
I think posting and writing quality content, moderating comments and interacting with readers, commenting on other blogs is what takes the most of the time.
I don’t spend that much time checking stats but I find when I do check them I’m thinking about how to improve them for another hour which takes me completely away from the task at hand which is to develop useful information for my readers and present it to them.
So in answer to the question I’d have to say I spend a disproportionate amount of time thinking of how to improve my stats.
Hi:
Thanks for this post. I am fairly new at this. I wonder do I have a natural copyright with blog posts or must each post be registered and copyrighted via Washington, D.C.?
Lynn
I feel like I spend way too much of my time searching for new ways to drive traffic when I should be writing more content. I’m still fairly new to blogging and it seems like a giant balancing act to me.
Like some other commenters here, I spend far too much obsessively checking my stats. Some days I get excited by a spike in organic traffic only to see it decline the next day. Must use my time more productively………
I think I spend most of my time networking than spending on my blog.. It’s such an important part of the process. :)
I read a lot of other blogs and comment. I like photography blogs which are fun to look at.
Since mine is a niche site, I spend a lot doing content research and reaching out to sub-genre experts for interviews.
Recently, I’ve been making a concerted effort to attract sponsors. This has been a time-consuming effort that has yielded mixed results.
Currently for me is to post daily for 30 days, commenting on other related blogs, SEO, and social networkting. Thinking of guest blogging as well.
Law school gives me barely enough time to keep updating quality content and policing them comment sections. If I had more time I’d be trying to do a lot more networking and promotion.
Networking and Promotion to Other Bloggers and reading about blogging. I really should focus more on SEO.
Being relatively new to blogging as a profession, I do find myself reading other blogs when I’m not writing content for my own blog.
For those out there who use either Firefox or Flock, there is a great add-on called Morning Coffee which I use to load all my daily blogs in one shot. I turn it on every morning, make my breakfast, come back to find all the blogs I keep up with all ready to be read!
Wesley
The Geek Entrepreneur
Reading related blogs and blogs about blogging.
My new pastime appears to be moderating spam from my comments section.
Blog Design and SEO, most definitely
Megan,
Snag An Internship
Brilliant idea in making post. By the way I spend most of my time in writing articles and optimize my site with keywords. I also have relations and they do most of their time in designing their website.
most of the time I am looking for good blogs to comment on. Other times I am busy writing posts. Now I am going to start focusing on Video posts.
I’m currently working on a new design for my blog which is taking up most of my time, but I also find myself writing more articles when my brain can’t take it anymore from the coding of my blog’s publishing software.
Mostly do for researching and blogging for advertising and quick presentation,I love reading all the things about blogging,advertising,SEO and recently I spent my time blogging to get more friend that I can socialize with
At the moment my blog is very new so the main thing I concentrate on is establishing relationships. I spend time looking around my niche for fun stories to post and for links to add to my blogroll. I go on twitter to meet new people and comment on different blogs.
I spent many times to learn how to design blog, search engine optimization and reading other blogs in my niche.
I’m designing mostly, but working hard to bring ppl to my blog and investigating for ads.
Writing content is a m biggest time consumer. My second is Social Media Marketing and Networking.
I’ve recently cut who I follow on twitter to reduce clutter.
Writing always takes time but I spend a lot of time coming up with concepts that I think will make my blog different and hopefully more interesting to my readers. I also spend a lot of time on the photos- they are worth a million words right?
My blog is only four posts old, so right now I’m just trying to learn the ropes and I spend a lot of time on this site. My blog is a very personal blog, so I don’t do a whole lot of research or reading of other blogs. I guess I spend most of my time coming up with a topic and writing the post, and then a good chunk of time determining my next steps.
I unfortunately spend too much time tweaking my blog template…
A lot of time reading either my own stuff (proofreading) or other blogs.
Commenting/moderating and constantly tweaking & beautifying the site are two of my favorite activities.
I also spend about 10-15 minutes of SEO before I post though it has not yielded any major result so far :lol:
Most of the little time I spend on the blog is spent generating content that I feel will be of use to others.
Blog design takes so much time even to get minute things done. I think reading other blogs/content takes up a lot too.
Hi Darren, I just finished watching your adsense post, great stuff, https://problogger.com/my-adsense-tips-on-the-official-adsense-blog/
It is a toss-up over studying and learning new skills or writing articles. Lately I have been trying to participate more in other people blogs instead of spending all of my time working on my own.
Clients take the next largest block of time. Keeping up with the necessary skills takes time so back to number one.
I started my blog, MarijuanaReviews.com at the end of Nov, 2008. To give you an idea of the size, I get about 1000 hits/day right now and appx. 7-7500 page views. (Yesterday I had 2000 hits due to a great post).
I had no clue what to expect but like I heard someone say on this blog, “blogging will take up as much time as you let it.”
I write 3-5 posts daily. After that I spend most of my day doing just about everything you listed. Besides writing reviews, the next 2 biggest time consumers are moderating comments and social networking.
Checking stats is a whole other animal as I am a stats JUNKY!
Hope this helps.
–Chubbs
I spend lots of time right now publishing posts. I am trying to build my content and get out as many quality posts as possible. After that I spend time focusing on reading up on blogging tips and then trying to implement them right away into my blog, or i right them down on my blogging to-do list. As things pick up for me I hope to be working on the other stuff as well. Thanks for the post!!!
I spent a lot of time integrating my blog with other services like Tweeter, Google Reader, Picasa and YouTube… It was worth though… Now I can mirror into my blogger contents that i can easily publish in other services. For example, if I create a YouTube playlist it is automatically mirrored to by blog.
I am very lazy to publish my own posts… :(. but I have fun creating the layout and adding stuff like this integration that I commented here.
Hey Darren
This is a good topic actually and is something I have been reviewing my own time for lately…
As my blog is only a few months old I find most of my time is spent doing social media marketing, interacting in forums and on other blogs.
The last few weeks though I was dedicated to my blog redesign which apart from a few last tweaks is done.
I think it all depends on what you need to acheive at a certain time, I dont feel it is neccessary to always be focused on design.. Nor do I feel it should just be about doing just 1 of the above task you mention.
I think you need to set a plan, stick to it and work it
Thanks
Dean
Fixing bloody Error 500 messages
I spend a good amount of time writing. Since I’m fairly new as well I spend a good amount of time researching tools and plug ins looking for all the best products to support the blog. By far though, I spend most time writing.
If I don’t have compelling content I’m just wasting peoples time. So I really work hard on honing my ability to write good copy.
Writing mostly. I’m finding it really hard right now.
I think it is writing articles by a long shot. I spend a lot of time researching them, wording, rewriting them and correcting them. It is so hard to get the mistakes out. I read and reread and I seem to find mistakes every time. Mostly words left out. Even after I post I read on the web site and keep finding mistakes. There are probably still mistakes here but I can find any more.
Mostly writing and publishing posts or commenting on other peoples blogs.. :)
I think I’m the 100th comment! For me, the most time consuming thing is reading other blogs. I don’t comment often enough, but I should; same thing with guest posting. Once a month or so I try to take all of my starred posts (I use Google Reader) and incorporate them into “around the bloggosphere” and “long Island Legal News” posts, which take much more time to write than you would think by reading them.
I always tes and change my blog theme and add useful plugin…every month