12 Tips to Increase your Earning & Blogging Productivity

When blogging, productivity whilst still producing quality content is very important. There’s no point churning out 3 posts per day if they’re mostly rubbish & recycled content. I’d rather put out 1 solid post every two days that’s linkable & provides value.

One of the biggest problems I face whilst blogging is trying to stay productive. Whilst holding down a pretty intense day job then working on Affiliate Marketing & my other ventures in the evening I can still just manage to get the content out & keep it very profitable.

So here’s a few tips to keep things running smoothly:

I know that I’d not be nearly as productive if I wasn’t working full time. It means that I have a much smaller window in the evenings to get what I need done & I just do it. This doesn’t work for everyone but I’ve found this to be very effective for me rather than to spend all day working on my projects.

I tend to (as much as I can) blog in advance. This means sitting down & writing 5 or more posts then using the Wordpress timestamp feature to sequence them out over a week or two. This gives readers the perception that I’m updating continually when I’m actually working on something else.

I use Wordpress Drafts to put down ideas for posts. I’ve got HEAPS of draft posts sitting there that I’ve not finished. Quite often when I’m lacking in ideas I’ll finish off or combine a few of these ideas to create a new post. If you think of an idea always write it down, you never know when it’ll tie in with something you’re writing about.

Outsource your menial tasks. If something is profitable for you then this is a really good way to keep it ticking over without wasting your own resources on it. There’s load of good ways to outsource blogging & coding:

• Post on Craigslist or Digitalpoint asking for writers or coders.
• Look further afield to India & Malaysia for really dirt cheap outsourcing (think $300 / month for a full time employee)
• Ask your readers to “contribute” content to your projects. If it’s good then strike up an arrangement with them to post regularly.

Spend time targeting & building relationships with bloggers in your niche. Not doing this is unproductive imo. Often this can result in joint ventures, backlinks from authority sites & even knowledge sharing.

Have a good feed reader. Netvibes is awesome for this. It allows you to stay on top of what’s happening within a particular industry or niche all within one page. I swear by this feed reader.

Always research new keywords & themes to expand your websites into. With sites you will usually reach a peak in the amount of traffic you can capitalise upon. When you reach this point you should always think about breaking into new keyword markets & focus more of your energy on this, instead of the older keyword focus that you’ve monopolised already.

Don’t spend time looking at your stats all day, this does nothing. Have a set time to check your stats once per day then forget about them (I do this at 10am every day), this includes checking adsense etc. Spend your time building & working, not contemplating.

Don’t leave your email client on Auto Update, just close it. If you’re getting emails every 5 minutes the natural thing is to reply right away. Simply set a time each day to check & reply (or not reply) to all your emails. Also use Filtering to send all your emails to the appropiate folders rather than spending time sorting through them.

Use multiple profiles or even Dual Boot your machine. One platform for work & a platform for play. This way you’re not distracted by things like friends on msn, pointless rss feeds & other clutter when you’re working.

Get two monitors. Blogging & research is much easier when you can split tasks across two monitors. This saves time switching between the wrong windows & also increases multitasking productivity.

Write posts first then format them later on. Don’t waste time making sure everything looks nice & neat until you’ve got the work done.