One of my biggest goals this year is ensuring that I live my life a lot more instead of spending time in front of the screen. Any display, computer or otherwise (ahem, hello phone). Ways to save time blogging is imperative. I’m not looking to abandon the thing I love, but it’s extremely time-consuming.
I’m blogging to have the flexibility and time to enjoy life! I’m hell bent on striking a pleasant work-life balance.
One of my biggest pet peeves is this notion of this perpetual grinding #girlboss. Like, girls, guys, let’s stop for a second. I think wanting to succeed is natural. You SHOULD want to achieve a lot, and you have to put in the work to get there. But to place constant grinding on a pedestal and to build your life around the concept of said non-stop grinding just reminds me of a modern day gulag.
The point is, life is short, so make it a priority to be a good human being rather than an automaton trying to raise numbers consistently.
Now, since I’m on the subject of robots, time to talk about automating your blogging and letting real machines and systems perform the tasks that you might be doing right now.
Top Ways To Save Time Blogging
1. Use a scheduling tool, like CoSchedule, to automate your social media posts.
I’ve talked extensively about CoSchedule before. I’m baffled at many people not automating their tweets, pins, and Facebook posts. And when they do, I’m then confused by the amount of people using 20 different apps to do it. Get one thing and let it do all your social media scheduling.
2. Plan out all your Instagram posts weeks or months in advance.
2. Plan out all your Instagram posts weeks or months in advance.There’s no shame in reusing old photos. You don’t need to live in the moment. Instagram is a place of inspiration so let your inspiring photos shine. According to my feed, I’ve been in Italy for about a month now. No shame in it. I intersperse it with some current photos here and there, but I have a LOT of photos from Italy that I want to share, so I’m sharing! Use a tool like Later to schedule it all out, or hey look, CoSchedule does it too.
3. I’ve said this before: Tailwind.
You can schedule all your Pinterest pins with CoSchedule, but to queue up repins from others, Tailwind is your best bet. You can click here to read more about my Pinterest process.
4. Outsource the small, repetitive tasks.
You can get someone on a freelance site to do most of your small, menial tasks for $3-$4/hr. For $20, that’s 5-6 hours a week that you’ve just saved! You can outsource everything from final editing and scheduling of your post drafts to creating Pinterest-friendly images to go along with your posts.
5. Do all similar tasks at the same time.
Make it a habit of scheduling out your week, where you do all your blog posts on one day, your social media planning the next day, comments/engagement building following day. You get the idea. You’ll save time by doing this batching process.
Save Time Blogging by Implementing The Processes
1. Write down ALL tasks you do related to your blog. Stick to things that you do on a daily, weekly and monthly basis.
2. Go down the list and place an O, A, or B next to each task that can either be outsourced, automated or batched into one block of time. Things may overlap. Don’t focus on time and cost right now, just categorize each task.
3. Organize the tasks per category and put together the functions that can be batched together. This is the beginning of your time-saving schedule. Consider which tasks you can now afford to outsource and whether those can be batched for someone to save time and money.
This should set you well on the way to an extremely organized blogging schedule that saves you a ton of time! It takes time to make time, though, so make sure to invest a little bit up front to get the savings.
