Blogging Tips

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4 Power Tips To Make Your Blogging More Productive

Posted: 16 Jun 2008 01:09 PM CDT

Written on 6/16/2008 by Abhijeet Mukherjee, of Jeet Blog.

If you are a blogger whose blog is read by a lot of people, you'd agree that it's always a challenge to be productive and consistently maintain the blogging flow. Apart from writing posts, there are other tasks which a blogger needs to accomplish if he wants his blog to reach a wider audience.

Since I am a full time blogger too, I face such challenges everyday and I am always in search for ways to improve my blogging productivity. Today I decided to share some of these no nonsense tips which have helped me and which can help you too to make your blogging more productive. Instead of making it a redundant list of 8-10 tips, I have decided to collate those tips and group them under 4 major headings so that's it's simple and easy to understand.

1. Organize Your Information Sources
   The internet is a sea of information and there could be multiple sources to help you to get ideas for you to blog about. However, the key is to effectively manage these multiple sources of information so that you are never perturbed by information overload and you can easily fetch the required data.
   
   You should know how to manage RSS feeds, deal with loads of email, manage your various social networks and organize all these sources in a way that you can get the maximum out of them. You can group the various sources under 3 or 4 major groups and decide the time you will devote to them each day. For example you could consider social media as one information source group and devote 2-3 hours to it everyday. So whether you are digging, stumbling, twittering, plurking, sphinning or redditing, you should do it for certain number of hours and then check your activity and see what you have gained in terms of networking with friends, getting ideas, etc. Similarly you can deal with other such information groups.
   


2. Capture and manage ideas
   If you are able manage the information sources as I mentioned above, then you shouldn't have a problem obtaining ideas. But again, how you manage those ideas is more important. Moreover, ideas can strike us at any time, even when we are not in front of our computer. Here is an article which tells you how to capture and manage such ideas.
   
   Read Write Web writer and well known new-media consultant Marshall Kirkpatrick describes his days as a writer for TechCrunch and how he was able to break news through the effective use of tools to capture ideas. He was able to do it even though he lived far away from San Francisco Bay Area, the technology hub. Hence it;s all about how you organize your information sources, capture ideas and manage them effectively.


3. Manage Time-wasters
   All work and no play makes you a dull blogger. Hence you should engage yourself in activities which may not directly help you in your work, like playing games, twittering a lot, etc., but you should make sure that you are not addicted to them.
   
   In fact you should first identify the time-wasters in your daily life. A time waster for one person may be a productive tool for another. Hence once you identify where you are spending most of your time without gaining anything out of it, you can work towards managing that activity so that it doesn't hurt your productivity.
   


4. Write when there's no one around
   Writing, without a doubt is the most important part of blogging. No matter what you do, if you are not able to create compelling content, then you will lose readers in the long run. Organizing information, managing ideas, and managing time-wasters are all to make you more productive as a writer, so that you can churn out excellent posts for your readers.
   
   Hence make sure that when you write, there are no distractions. Turn off those IMs, twitters, plurks, etc. If you live with your family, tell them not to disturb you. Use writing tools, which help you stay focussed. Maki describes how Darkroom helped him write better content. You can also follow certain patterns, like Darren Rowse writes in batches and produces great content. It's all about how to find more time for writing quality content and it's about efficiency and writing more in less time.
   

I hope these tips help you to improve your productivity as a blogger. What tricks have you learned and how have they improved your performance?

-Abhijeet