Last Updated on January 10, 2018 by gregor
How do you manage and grow your blog and your social media with a full-time job? In most cases this is the first question I get asked when I have a conversation about Blogging and Social Media. Below are my Top 6 Tips
I work in a global IT company as an European Marketing Leader. Besides being quite stressful with a lot of meetings and Conference Calls I do enjoy my work, the responsibility and working in a great team of inspiring passionate people all over the globe. As the IT industry is transforming rapidly also the Marketing and Communication is changing fast to Digital and Social Media. During the last years in my current job and my private life I have met amazing Bloggers many of them have started building a successful blog and have a full-time job. Here is a summary what they said and my personal blogging experiences and tips.
PLANNING and STRATEGY
This is probably the toughest part at the beginning. Most part time bloggers, including me, jumped into Social Media and Blogging and did not have a clear plan or concept about what they want to achieve. Will blogging be just for fun or is the ultimate goal to develop a professional blog with future monetization possibilities. My advice would be to ask yourself a couple of key questions:
- What is my ultimate goal of the Blog?
- About what will I write about in my blog?
- What am I prepared to invest in “time” and “money”?
- What is the timeline and can I define my key milestones?
- What is the target audience/who are the primary readers of my blog?
- What value can I provide to my readers?
- What are the success factors of my blog?
FREE UP TIME
One of the constraints having a full time job is your time. Building a successful blog and managing your Social Media is time consuming so you need to allocate at least 1 to 2 hours minimum a day. In most cases successful part time Bloggers stay up very early in the morning and start working on their blog, after work and in the evening they return to their Notebook and continue blogging and working on developing their Social Channels. Most Bloggers completely stopped watching TV and start being creative and produce valuable online content for their users instead.
Super Productive
In many cases successful bloggers create a habit of being super productive. They know exactly what is their personal best time of being creative and very productive. Like a ‘production-line’ they have their processes and routines in place to ship a “product” aka blogpost in a given quality and at a certain time ready. Best advice is to schedule your blog time in your calendar. So it is clear that this is the time to crank out the blog. Don’t let yourself distracted by other things like blinking mobile phones, and beeps of incoming messages from your notebook.
AUTOMATE
This ties into scheduling. Blogging and Social Media is about being creative and provide inspirational content to your audience. Focus on those strength. As you are busy doing that there are a number of tools which let you automate routine work. Most bloggers use Hootsuite or Buffer to schedule some of the content for the Social Media Platforms and schedule their blog posts in WordPress.
BUILD YOUR Network
Don’t be too locked on your notebook being disconnected to the outside world. Most successful bloggers develop a huge network of other passionate bloggers and Social Media Influencers. This is key growing your blog. Look for local or international Blogger communities and meetups which you can interact online and offline too; If you search on Facebook “blogger” you find several blogger groups/communities which you can join. In additional seek for a bunch of cool bloggers in your city you can regularly meet and share ideas, best practices and seek for valuable feedback and recommendations about your blog and Social Media presence.
FUN and SPORTS
Last but not least to sustain the extra mile of work for a long time don’t forget to have fun about what you are doing. No matter what you are blogging about like fashion, food, sports or travel when starting and growing a successful blog the subject has to fit in your personal lifestyle. So you can live and breathe it from early mornings to late evenings. Another important topic is to keep up your physical fitness. Without regular exercising you will not sustain the additional workload. Physical fitness provides your body with the necessary energy level to be creative, get inspirations and prevents you from potential burnout. Allocate enough time in your calendar for regular sport activities like jogging or workout at the gym. Last but not least take digital and social timeouts. Shutdown your notebook and mobile phone for a couple of hours or even one or two days.
What are your tips for building a successful blog with a full time job? Any additional recommendations very welcomed. Thank you!
PS: If you are looking for photography and blogging essentials tips have a look at one of my recent blog post.
