Are you productive as a blogger? It takes a lot to start a blog, let alone keep one going. You have to spend time on everything from researching content ideas, engaging your readers, updating your social media, to marketing your content. So it’s vital that you get more done with less time if you want to grow your career/ design firm, have enough time to work on projects and put in enough time into your online marketing. Here are some tips that can help you become a more productive design blogger in 2017.
Tip #1: Use the Right Technology
Look for technology that can make your life easier and help you accomplish tasks faster. A good example of technology that can help you is a social media management application. With this application, you can create a post to all your social media accounts from one platform and manage your conversations/messages with ease. Another example, is post scheduling. You can schedule your blog posts ahead of time so that you don’t have to manually login to your blog to make a post every single time you want to share content.
Tip #2: Outsourcing Tasks
Just because you can doesn’t mean you should. If you’re serious about making a name for yourself in this industry, you need to make sure that you’re spending time on activities that are contributing to the growth of your business. That’s why it’s important to have a dependable professional you can outsource tasks to. Instead of spending three hours researching a topic you have no knowledge of, you can hire a researcher and have the researcher hand you detailed notes with website links and resources in a couple of hours.
Tip #3: Stay Organized
It’s easy to create clutter on both your desk and your computer, but you need to regularly put in effort to stay organized. By staying organized, you can quickly respond to challenges and focus on your tasks without facing distractions that can derail your productivity. There are many things you can do to organize your professional life. Set up folders to allocate your business files. Have strict filters for your email accounts. Set up a schedule to tackle your emails and text messages. Manage business documents with cabinets and folders. The more organized you are, the better.
Tip #4: Use To-Do Lists and Plan Ahead
You should be creating a to-do list every single day. Think about what you need to do every night before you sleep and every morning when you wake up. It only takes a few minutes to plan for your day. Once you list your tasks, schedule it in to your day and focus on one task at a time until you tackle your list. Anything that’s uncompleted can be carried over to the next day’s to-do list. By staying on top of your tasks and planning ahead, you’ll increase your productivity immensely.
Tip #5: Prioritize
You’ll quickly realize that certain tasks are more important than others. This idea will set off alarm bells when you realize you have deadlines for projects and you haven’t put in enough time into completing the projects. Prioritizing your tasks is important because you only have so many hours in the day.
You need to make sure you’re investing into important tasks first before tackling other tasks. It’s not just about focusing on important tasks first. It’s about realizing that you can’t handle everything on your plate and making decisions on what to delegate to others so that you make progress in moving your business forward.
Tip #6: Set Aside Time for Ideas
If you want to start a blog or have already spend a lot of time building one, then you know how important it is to post frequently. You want to keep your audience engaged and to do that, you need to produce quality content on a regular basis. To pull that off, you need to constantly be coming up with ideas for your blog posts.
Sadly, many bloggers don’t set aside time to come up with ideas for their blog. You need to allocate time every week to come up with content ideas and reserve content ideas. Reserve content ideas will hold you over in case you find some your initial good ideas turn out to be not so good or if you use quickly use up your initial ideas.
Tip #7: Create a Content Strategy
If you don’t have a strategy for your blog, then all you’re doing is wishing for success. Create a content strategy so that you have a clear vision of what you’re looking to achieve and a clear directions for where you want to go. Start by establishing clear goals whether you want to create a brand, generate more leads/clients, achieve your SEO goals, etc.
Create different stages for your strategy from idea creation, research to content production and editing. Then, move on to creating a content calendar and developing your marketing strategy. Then execute your strategy and use analytics to figure out what’s working and not working so that you can iterate your content strategy.
Tip #8: Sharpen the Saw
In the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Stephen Covey talks about the importance of sharpening the saw. This expression basically means that you need to focus on you as you’re the main instrument for getting the job done. Focus on improving your physical, emotional, mental and spiritual health if you want to be more productive. The expression can also be applied to your core tasks. For example, by putting conscious effort into becoming a better designer or blogger, you’ll eventually learn to do the job more efficiently and effectively.
By following these eight tips, you’ll quickly be on your way to becoming a more productive designer and design blogger. In the end, it’s all about being strategic and integrating these strategies into your professional life over time. If you put in the effort, you’ll quickly surprise yourself with how productive you’ve become in such a short amount of time.
