In the 21st century, blogging has become a profession and career to
many people. Gone are the days where formal employment was considered to
be the only credible and secure source of income. Top bloggers today
amass millions of dollars annually from their blogs and guest blogging.
It is a passion that many people have turned into a lucrative venture.
However, many shortcomings come with it. It requires a lot of time and
patience to succeed at it.
In order to be a productive blogger and improve productivity, you will have to manage different elements of blogging.
But how do you manage to create engaging content, guest blogging,
interacting with your followers and find time for other activities in
life? Well, it’s not easy and you will have to do more than just being
good at creating content. Here are few pointers to be productive or to
increase productivity as a blogger.
Ways to Increase your Productivity as a Blogger
Time saving
There are never enough hours in a day, especially for busy people
like bloggers. Every minute spent can never be recovered and every
minute saved is equally productive for a blogger. But how to you save
time as a blogger with busy schedules all week round? The answer lies in
utilizing timer saving tools like;
- Trello: It allows you to organize your tasks well to avoid mix-ups and forgetting to carry out other tasks.
- Evernote: It is
considered to be one of the best notes taking tool. It enables a blogger
to make short notes –that can be used later on in the content thus
saving time for research.
- Squirly:
Bloggers are always tasked with producing SEO articles and contents
that can rank highly in the search engine. But how to do it without
investing more time? Squirly is a tool dedicated to helping bloggers
create new contents and posts that are SEO friendly thus saving
formatting time. You can also use Yoast wp plugin for this task which is
also recommended by experts.
These are number of tools that can be utilized by bloggers to save
time while creating new posts. However, you should be on the lookout as a
blogger for new and trending tools that can be utilized to save time as
well.
Blog management
Blogger should be effective in managing all aspects of his/her blog.
These include marketing and outreaching. Thanks to technology
advancement, new innovative tools pop up each and every time that can
help bloggers exhaustively manage their blogs with ease. These tools
have been integrated to merge all the outreach and marketing needs of a
blogger.
One such tool is
MozBar
which is a page management tool that presents the site owner all the
useful metrics such as Domain authority, page authority, backlinks and
spam score, within an arms length. It is compatible with both Firefox
and Chrome which is an added advantage to users. The other useful tools
include
Google Docs,
Buzz Stream and
InkyBee among others.
Writing
This is the core element that quantifies a blogger. A good blogger
will be determined by his/her content. The content should be engaging,
stimulate emotions, capture the reader’s attention and even persuade the
reader to take action.
To achieve this, you will have to do away with the traditional pen
and paper writing and adopt the more advanced means and tools of
creating content. In some cases, a blogger will require help on the
specific niche which he/she is not so familiar with. The tools to be
utilized include;
- Grammarly:
This is one of my essential blogging tools, it helps to write an
errors-free article. Grammarly underlines every misspelled word, or
wrong used words as well as enhance vocabulary. It also has the ability
to check plagiarism with upto 8 billion web pages. Available for both
free and premium users, so you should try it.
- ProWriting Aid: This tool highlights the mistakes, both grammar and spelling, found in a post. The writer will then have an opportunity to edit them before publishing on the blog.
What’s more, this tool not only highlights possible mistakes in a post
but also advises the blogger on how to improve the content.
- A-Writer:
As said earlier, it is of utter important for a blogger to outsource
content for niches he/she is not familiar with. A-Writer is a platform
with professionals who deal with niche specific orders and deliver
customized writing that fits the requester. It is an excellent tool that
should be utilized by all bloggers to get quality content at the
shortest period of time at a low cost.
Brainstorming
More often, bloggers get stuck when writing a post. This is a
devastating experience. But what do you do to brainstorm and continue
being productive? The best thing is to sit back and ask yourself what
the readers want. A blogger can accomplish this by doing a thorough
keyword research using an array of modern tools such as
HubSpot key word tool and
Google AdWords Keyword
tool. Both are free and user friendly to use and require little
knowledge. With these tools at hand, blog writers can easily brainstorm
the keywords and utilize them in content creation to satisfy the
reader’s needs.
Social management
Blogging has everything to do with social media for getting more
visitors and sales too. Modern marketing strategies target social media
platforms for customers. The same way, social networks are the biggest
resource of readers when it comes to blogging. It is, therefore,
paramount to keep in touch with these platforms more often in order to
get inspiration and at the same time get ideas of what the readers want.
This can easily be done by use to tools that have been designed for
social media posts and blogging in general. One such tool is
DrumUp, which gives suggestions and recommendations for social media posts on the virtue of what is trending. The
Buffer is another one for managing and scheduling social media publishing of your blog posts as well as others too.
Visual management
The blogging industry is highly competitive. It, therefore, requires
the blogger to improve visually his/her blog to have a cutting edge over
the competitors and remain productive. Numerous tools on the internet
today are created to serve this purpose.
One of the oldest yet highly effective is
Photogrid. This is a tool that users can use to create appealing graphics more quickly and share them on social media. The other one is
Canva, which allows the blogger to customize and personalize images for the readers liking.
