Sound familiar? Blogs are deceptive little beasts – looking innocently like a great hobby or side project – only to swallow you up whole with maintenance, tech issues, writing, sharing, commenting, designing, etc. A lot of bloggers I know are sideswiped by the sheer amount of work it is to maintain a blog.
So what do you do if you find yourself in this position? A lot of people do the following:
- Abandon their blogs completely
- Simply write post after post and ignore all the tech/design issues related to their site
- Only write once every month or less
- Spend all their time researching latest plugins, design, affiliates, etc. so there’s no time to write and every post that goes out is short and crappy
- Clutter their site and never check their archives for accuracy
- Join a million Facebook blogging groups and get swallowed up in the sharing/commenting black hole
Let’s not do any of that okay? There is so much content on the Internet, you don’t want to contribute to the noise. A blog should bring meaning, humor, entertainment, or usefulness to a reader. Just like run-down buildings bring a neighborhood’s value down, so do bad blogs that take up newsfeeds. If your blog has any of hope of getting a solid readership or making you money, recognize that all the big money making blogs are not doing the aforementioned solutions.
I’m going to attempt to cut through the crowded blogging lingo and help you focus on what you should be doing if you’ve started a blog and now find yourself without time to maintain it. It’s important to note that this plan is for people who really want to continue investing in the long-term health of their blog, but just don’t know how to prioritize.
Make a plan
If you don’t, every little distraction and new idea/problem will derail you. There are lots of non-writing tasks associated with blogging that will need your attention at some point:
- Design
- Commenting
- Plugins
- Security
- Social Media
- Writing
- Monetization
- Networking
Scale back
Your content is what will stand the test of time. This means you can scale back on design, blog hops, linkups, commenting, affiliate programs, etc. until you have time to devote to them. Have you looked at Neil Patel’s blog recently? It’s so plain. A few things on a sidebar and his content. Contrast this with the typical mom blog that has ads, blog badges, and all sorts of other stuff that very few people pay attention to.
When you scale back and focus on what matters, your sense of pride will replace the overwhelmed feeling and you’ll find yourself motivated! Step six will take you the most time and it centers on your content.
Step One: Simplify your theme
- Can’t maintain your sidebar so it’s current? Get rid of it. A lot of people don’t even see the sidebar when they read from their phones.
- Reduce the number of categories and tags. In fact, most of the time they aren’t helpful to your reader unless you’re diligent about organizing your content with them. Remove them from the design of your site as well.
- Set your reading settings {Under Settings > Reading} so the reader only sees one or two of your latest posts if you know your archives are a mess.
- Make your blog subscription service automatic and stop trying to make cute newsletters.
- Use the WordPress default theme if your current theme isn’t mobile ready. I’m serious! It’s clean and effective and looks great on mobile.
- Remove the date so people don’t see how infrequently you are posting.
The goal is to make your content stand out and not have to compete with anything else.
Step Two: Turn off comments
I realize this is a controversial one, and for some bloggers, it may not work at all. I respect that. But if you can’t ever attend to your comments or your spam is out of control, turning them off is better than never acknowledging the people who take time to read. Commenting can take a ton of time, and while it is an important aspect of blogging, if you have to choose something to spend what little time you have, it should be on content curation that will get indexed by Google.
Another idea would be to turn off the native commenting system, and using a Facebook commenting plugin instead. This way you eliminate the spam issue {for the most part} and for some reason, using FB – which you’re always signed into and displays notifications – will make it faster to reply or at least like the comment.
Step Three: Get rid of all but the most necessary plugins
Not only will your site be more secure automatically, but you’ll reduce the load on your server, speeding up your website! Speed is an important issue for SEO and reader experience, so better to have a fast simple site than a bunch of plugins that slow everything down.
Step Four: Outsource security issues
There are lots of ways to do this. You can ask your host what services they have, or you can buy a premium service like Sucuri, which monitors your site 24/7. The only caveat is that none of these services actually log into your blog and update your plugins for you. I offer a blog maintenance plan that specifically focuses on keeping your WordPress software and plugins updated. It’s reasonably priced at $75.00 a year so consider it if you want one less headache.
Step Five: Spend one hour a week scheduling social media
You’ll need an account with Buffer or Hootsuite, but both will allow you to schedule Facebook page posts, Google + page posts, Tweets, and for pins – I recommend Tailwind. You can get an app on Hootsuite that allows you to schedule pins on the dashboard.
Since you’re on the “I don’t have time” plan, I suggest that most of your social media scheduling include content that is not yours, but it still in your niche. First, it’ll take the pressure off of you to produce content constantly. Second, it’ll spread all that good karma with fellow bloggers {and help you feel better about turning off comments if you took my suggestion}. Third, if you’re sharing great content on your social streams, people will start following you.
Here’s how you do it in minutes {once it’s set up properly}:
- Open a Feedly account.
- Pick ten to twenty blogs that you love {and are good}.
- Add them to your Feedly.
- During the one hour once a week, go on Feedly and read through the articles.
- Schedule right from the Feedly interface.
As an alternative, you can also add RSS feeds right into Hootsuite so you can share directly from there as well.
This is a good place to mention that you should remove your social media connect buttons on your blog if you’re not active on every platform. It’s better to focus on one or two than to send people to all your profiles if they aren’t maintained.
That said, you can schedule to share your archives too, if you’re sure the archives are in good shape. My last post talks about how to clean up your content when you can’t write constantly. When you schedule an archived post, simply schedule it once a month until the end of the year.
Step Six: Work like a manufacturer
**This is where you’ll spend the bulk of what time you do have.
To be very practical, when you have to constantly switch tasks, your brain tires. It’s the end of July right now, so this means there are five months left of the year {approximately 20 weeks}. So you should try to write 20 more posts this year at a minimum. It might sound impossible if you’re short on time, but it’s not.
Sit down and come up with twenty post titles and topics. Try these two posts if you are stumped about how to do this:
Then the next time you have a minute, create the featured images for these posts.
I hear you screaming WHHAAATT? at me. Have you read my post about how to make memorable featured images in minutes? It’s all about the template. The images I use on Fabulous Blogging take me AT MOST 10 minutes…usually it’s more like 3 minutes.
Make 20 drafts in your WordPress dashboard.
Type in the title and put in the featured image. Then save it. There’s another benefit to this that you can do if you’re really good under pressure. If you’re using Jetpack, there’s a shortlinks module that allows you to grab the link of the post while it’s in draft form. Then you can pre-schedule your post in Hootsuite. Just make sure you actually publish the post or you’ll be sending out a dead link!
Do the SEO for each post in bulk.
Write a Google friendly title and meta description.
Now all you have to do is populate the post.
Once a week. You can do this. Go back to your school roots with the five paragraph essay. Write an introduction and a conclusion. In fact, if you come up with a good introduction, copy and paste it in each draft – changing it up so it works with the topic at hand. Then you need at least three meaty paragraphs…but in the blog world, they don’t even have to be paragraphs! They can be lists too.
Step Seven: Monetization…really?
It’s not important unless you are getting significant traffic. And if you’re barely writing because you’re overwhelmed, chances are the traffic isn’t enough to make you a lot of money anyway. That said, I realize there’s always that chance that you’ll write something that will go viral.
The easiest way to start monetizing your blog is with ads. They are easy to set up, and don’t require anything of you. Affiliates and sponsored posts are much more labor intensive. So sign up for Google AdSense or some other network and leave it at that for now.
Step Eight: Networking
If you took my advice about sharing other’s people content rather than your own, use those same twenty blogs and focus on those bloggers. In addition to sharing their stuff, read their posts and leave comments. Better to have 20 people who see your face on their site regularly, then to join a million groups and spray your links everywhere.
Impossible
If you’re reading this and saying it’s impossible to do any of it, then if you care about the health and longevity of your blog, the best thing to do is get some guest bloggers and hire out the work. If you need someone to help you get connected with people who can care for your blog while you’re on hiatus, reach out to me and I’ll help you with the tech end and get you in touch with some bloggers that would be willing to write posts. It’ll cost you money, but again, this is a solution for people who are wanting to see their blog still alive and thriving two, three, and four years down the road.
Coming soon
Finally, I’ll be writing a post soon about the benefits of micro-blogging. This may be a solution for you if your blog is too much of a time suck. Micro-blogging is done on a social platform, automatically eliminating all the issues with design, tech, etc. The content is much shorter and faster to get done. Stay tuned!
