6 Ways to blog effectively and maintain quality and usefulness

How to blog effectively when you have too much to take care of?

Blogging is not just about writing and publishing blog posts. And you probably know that by now.

So you are overwhelmed. There’s so much on your plate. There’s way too much in your mouth than you can chew.

You have content creation on one had – and too many other things on the other hand.

This makes blogging very complicated to you.

You ask yourself if you can really handle it all by yourself.

This makes you think if blogging is really for you. And then, you start to doubt your skills and your ability to blog.

At the back of your mind, you think if you should quit because blogging is just too complicated.

Well, I’ll say you have made it complicated, because as far as I know, blogging isn’t complicated. But it is possible to make it complicated.

Some bloggers even think that blogging should be complicated if it has to be useful to their readers.

They think that they should work really hard to make their blog/business useful to their customers.

Well, it doesn’t have to be. You can always keep it simple and manageable and yet useful to your potential customers.

Let me discuss how you can do so!

#1 Have clarity and plan accordingly

If you have been reading my blog regularly, you know I’m harping a lot on this topic. Blogging without clarity is tough and so very complicated.

Without clarity you don’t know where to put your nice efforts. Of course, you could be working really hard all day and even some nights.

But since you don’t clearly know your destination you won’t be able to work on things that matter.

Rather, you could be wasting time on things that don’t really matter.

This leads to complication obviously. This can also lead to frustration because you won’t get the results for the amount of work you do.

And in turn this forces you to quit quite early. Which is why you need to have clarity first before you start blogging – let me say that again – BEFORE you start blogging. This way you can simplify things a lot and save a lot of time.

#2 Use the right tools

Most of the time, bloggers complicate things by either using the wrong tools or too many tools for a particular task.

You don’t have to use all the tools that you come across every day.

You might be doing well with one SEO tool (for me it’s SEMRush) that you use on a regular basis.

And then you might encounter lots of other SEO tools (the shiny ones) that might promise you to solve your SEO challenges – you can see such shiny things pop up everyday.

But you don’t have to use that tool too, if you are already happy with what you are using.

I am not against trying out new tools.

In fact, I do that all the time, because without trying out new tools you won’t know if some particular tool will give those sneaky features that you want (and that your current tool doesn’t have).

At the same time, you shouldn’t complicate stuff just because there’s so much shiny stuff out there.

For one, you could end up spending a lot of money on unwanted stuff.

Second, you will complicate your working schedule a lot if you have too many tools – you will have to open multiple tools to get one job done, and you will have your data scattered all over the place.

For me this is insane and I found myself struggling to connect the dots with whatever I was doing.

Obviously, this is complication, isn’t?

#3 Know what your readers want

This is quite close to having clarity. But somewhat different too.

If you don’t know what your readers want you are going to complicate blogging. That’s for sure!

Even if you have clarity with what you are going to do with your blog, if you don’t know what your potential customers want, you will beat around the bush a lot.

You might be publishing content that is of no interest or usefulness to your end reader. So think about this.

How much time and effort do you put in creating such content? And if it turns out to be a waste, you are really complicating your business.

[clickToTweet tweet=”If you don’t know what your audience want, blogging will be complicated for you” quote=”If you don’t know what your audience want, blogging will be complicated for you” theme=”style4″]

Keep it simple – know what your readers want and only put your time, effort and investment in creating something (content or a product or a service) that vents your readers wants or solves their problems.

This way you will keep your business simple – just create what your audience need/want the most and make money off it.

And when you do it this way, you can be sure that you are devoting your best efforts towards something that is most sought after by your readers – so you can simplify what you do, yet reap great benefits.

By the way, don’t forget to grab my course – How to create great content for your business all the time?

#4 Batch process tasks

Be it writing blog posts or replying to emails, batch processing makes things a lot easier. There are two important benefits with batch processing.

For one, it is totally against multi-tasking. And I hope you know multi-tasking is quite a bad thing.

I’ve been believing all the time that I was being extremely productive when I was multi-tasking.

But I came to know I was wrong. And that I was putting myself through tough situations when it comes to doing “work”.

When I switch back and forth between different tasks, it generates a lot of heat in my brain.

I get tired and exhausted very soon when I am multi-tasking, because when I switch between different tasks I switch modes.

That is not an easy thing! It takes a lot of energy off your brain and exhausts it quite soon.

The second thing with batch processing is, I don’t have to break the flow of what I’m doing.

If I’m in the mood of writing, then I should make optimal use of that energy of mine.

I should write copy – whatever copy that will directly benefit my business.

It could be blog posts, email newsletters, sales copy – whatever!

I should not be trying to strictly write a few number of words and then stop because my “slot” is over!

And then switch to Twitter or Facebook to do social media marketing.

But you don’t always get the “mood” to do something, which is why you need to “schedule” your batch processing time.

Schedule a big chunk of time for writing one week’s blog posts (once or two times a week).

Then schedule a chunk of time for social media marketing (could be everyday or every other day depending upon how much you need it for your business).

#5 Have an editorial calendar

I recently talked about the importance of having an editorial calendar.

And also the challenges associated with sticking to an editorial calendar in this post > On sticking to (or accepting) your editorial calendar.

An editorial calendar saves you a lot of time and simplifies your blogging work. It is because, most of the time, you might be stuck with content creation.

You simply might feel overwhelmed with other tasks at hand and unable to find the time to write.

Or sometimes you could experience writer’s block where even if you get the time you don’t know what to write about.

Having an editorial calendar makes your job easy – it help you to stick to a schedule and you know upfront what you should be writing in the coming weeks. This takes guess work out of the equation.

In order to have an effective editorial calendar, make sure you have a means to capture blog post ideas.

I use Evernote to capture blog post ideas whenever they occur to me (and they occur to me at strange times!).

And I use Scrivener to write blog posts in the order they would appear in my editorial calendar (I make folders for each week inside the current year project).

#6 Don’t try to do everything yourself

Bloggers are usually solopreneurs.

They start off that way and prefer to stay that way! May be because they want to save money, or because they want to keep everything in their control.

But over the time, when your blog grows, your task list grows as well.

You get to deal with lots of administrative issues, financial maintenance, increased content creation, dealing with enormous number of emails and so on.

At some point, you have to understand and accept the fact that you don’t have to do everything by yourself.

You can either get help from your peers or just find a way to outsource tasks that you don’t absolutely need to do by yourself.

[clickToTweet tweet=”Get comfortable with outsourcing to simplify blogging” quote=”Get comfortable with outsourcing to simplify blogging” theme=”style4″]

For me, I am not comfortable with outsourcing content creation, managing finance and email management.

I don’t want others to know about my income/expenditure, and I don’t want to give away my email password to someone else.

But I can outsource website maintenance.

And that too, I have an in-house manager (in a paid position) to help me with administrative and technical aspects, and this person is a member of the extended family which is why I’m comfortable outsourcing certain tasks to him.

Your case could be different. So just find a way to deal with those mind numbing tasks.

If you can free up some time by delegating certain tasks, you could focus more on tasks that you love to do, or tasks that absolutely need your attention.

How to blog effectively?

As I said already you can really keep it simple when it comes to blogging. You don’t have to keep it complicated in order to maintain the standards.

In fact you will be able to serve your readers well if you are not overwhelmed by the complications involved in blogging.

If you are overwhelmed with blogging, you will burn out and might start to think about quitting. That is not what you want, right?

If you apply my suggestions in this post I am sure you can make blogging simple, because these worked for me!