Tag: work from home

How To Blog – Routine

After writing my first ‘How to blog’ article about starting a blog, I received a lot of enthusiasm from other bloggers. I love reading other people’s tips on blogging and have continued on my journey now, learning so much along the way. Working full time as well as balancing a developing blog has been tricky. But if you love blogging as much as a I do, then you will make it work. I definitely feel like I have a good balance now. This post is all about how to establish a positive blog routine.

Time is one of those things that we have a limited amount of. When I first started blogging I was staying up late trying to work out how to increase site speed, reply to comments, research SEO and update previous posts. This was incredibly draining so I had to quickly find other ways to become more efficient. If not, I would have started losing my mind, for sure.

Here are three things I do to maintain my blogging routine

1) Do regular bite-size bits

Rather than spending hours of continuous time blogging, I have learned to do regular instalments. My friends and family were saying that I was getting carried away and soon losing many hours to blogging and researching. It is true that I can easily lose track of time when I get deeply engrossed in my blog writing and editing. The trouble is, it started making me behind in other areas of my life.

My solution has been to look carefully at certain elements of blogging and factor these in daily. Things that I can divide up into small sections of time are:

– Starting #writerslift threads on Twitter and contributing to those started by others

– Checking out other blogs and commenting (I love seeing what others write about and have learned so much from reading a wide range of blogs, ranging from lifestyle to travel, health tips to money saving advice)

– Sharing recent posts on either Pinterest or Facebook groups

– Tagging and refreshing SEO on past blog posts

– Piecing together paragraphs for future blog articles (sometimes I am inspired with one idea – for example a reading habit or hack, and I write it down, ready to add more suggestions to later, when compiling a full post)

– Taking pictures of books ready for blog posts and bookstagram. This will save time later on. People love to know what you are reading so these will be handy.

– Researching blogging tips, either by watching short YouTube videos or reading useful articles (this can be done during my breaks at work and I find it so helpful generally)

When I wake up I spend ten minutes doing one of these activities. I then spend fifteen minutes at lunchtime, half an hour when I arrive home after work and about half an hour after dinner, before watching TV and catching up on ironing etc.

2) Put aside allocated blog writing time

When I said I work full time, I actually work four and a half days for my main job and have a couple of side hustles. Blogging can be done during my Wednesday free half day (although I guess blogging has now become a side hustle in itself). I spend one and a half hours writing blogs and getting up to date with everything blog related then. At the weekend I also allocate one and a half hours on Saturday and the same on Sunday, specifically for writing content and making sure I am up-to-date.

If I have a busy Saturday then I make up for the lack of blogging time with extra half hour inserts throughout the week. This way I still spend the same amount of time, without feeling I have got behind or not contributed as much blog content as usual. After all, blogging is my favourite pastime these days.

3) Enjoy the routine

I have found that, after some experimentation. my blogging routine has ended up suiting me. You may find that you attempt to stick to something like the above but soon realise that it doesn’t quite fit with your lifestyle. Fine. Adapt it and change it until you feel more comfortable with it. It needs to work for you!

Maybe you feel able to spend half an hour blogging every day just after the kids have gone to bed, writing parts of blog posts or refining SEO skills. Perhaps you work part time and can afford two afternoons a week to really go for it and produce lots of lovely content.

The important thing is that blogging needs to be enjoyable and the moment it ceases to be that, you need to think about mixing it up a bit. Don’t let it become a monotonous task that you do out of habit, rather than love. It isn’t worth the stress. Bend and twist your schedule until you find something that works particularly well for you.

I really hope that you found my ideas useful. As my blog has developed I have made lots of mistakes and am learning about the process every day. The biggest lesson that I have learned is to manage time well, otherwise blogging can take over all of your free time and leave you feeling burned out. For more articles about blogging, entertainment and the environment, perhaps consider following my growing blog.

5 Ways To Stay On Time

One of the things that I find most difficult about getting up in the morning is dragging myself out of the house ready for work. The reason I always manage it is because there is nothing I dislike more than being late. For me, being on time and keeping to time is always really important. If you become good at time management, everything else becomes efficient, at least regarding work, and you will then be able to have plenty of free time rather than time spent trying to catch up.

Being timely is good for you and everybody that you work with. After all, being late causes all sorts of awkwardness and inconvenience. So if you want to stay on time and prevent yourself from missing out on stuff and getting behind, here are my five tips for keeping to time.

1) Have more than one alarm.

I find it helps to have an alarm on either side of the bed. If there are two of you, you both have to turn them off and if you are alone you will have to keep reaching across until it begins to irritate you. With the snooze option and recurring sounds, you should eventually be awake enough to drag yourself out of bed.

Also having one alarm beyond arm’s reach is a good idea as you then have to get out of bed to turn that off. I suggest making this one the last resort alarm, set at the latest time you can possibly get up and still get to work without being late.

2) Change time

When I talk about changing time I mean altering the times that you note down meetings or appointments so that they appear to begin fifteen minutes earlier.

If I know a start time and allow extra time then I may end up cutting into that factored in time because I know the real start time. If I fool myself into thinking the event starts slightly earlier then I will subconsciously focus on this, making being on time much more realistic.

3) Don’t get distracted.

Taking that non-urgent phone call can slow things down.

Sometimes you have good intentions and start to make progress towards getting to an event on time and then something gets in the way.

For instance, just as you are about to walk to your next meeting, the phone rings and you pick up, while deep down knowing that this call may not be brief. Or someone stops you for a quick gossip which turns out to be a drawn out conversation that again makes you late.

4) Don’t be too polite.

Polite people are lovely but often not good at keeping to time. Being afraid to stop a meeting from overrunning because somebody is in full flow or going off on tangents is a popular cause of lateness.

Even on a zoom meeting, going off topic or not following strict timings can result in those meetings taking too long and have the knock on effect of pushing other meetings back too.

5) Be organised

If you do keep to a schedule as much as possible and set reminders and alarms to keep everything going, then your work will be more efficient. Good time management is a real skill to embrace and makes things work more fluently. Even at home, having chores organised with time allocations stops backlogs of things to do and makes family life better as well.

I hope that these ideas were useful. They are just straight forward suggestions to help everyone stay on time for work, hobbies and family events. For another article about things that make me laugh, click here here.

If you enjoyed my blog, please consider following it and check out my posts about entertainment, books and the environment.

How to Blog – Content

Having recently written an article about starting a blog and another about blog maintenance, I got great feedback. This made me think that it would be useful to share my thoughts about blog content creation. I am still relatively new to blogging but have learned so much in my six months of creating posts.

Feel free to share your own suggestions about how to create blog articles below. I really love the blogging community and the way everyone is willing to share ideas and make connections. Here is a previous post about what to do when starting out in the blogging world.

Five Things About Blog Content

1) Make sure you enjoy it

One of the biggest lessons I have learned since establishing a blog earlier this year is that writing content that I don’t honestly care much about is really draining. I almost became a sellout and started writing articles selling irrelevant stuff because I thought that was the right thing to do. Thankfully I realised that I can only sell things that I am interested in myself and I find blogging much more fun when it is organic rather than forced.

I have written a few promotional articles about products that I have actually used and relate to my lifestyle. I was tempted to write about activities that I would not do myself, such as using matched gambling websites, and realised that this just didn’t feel right for me. I am more than happy to promote goods but they have to mean something to me, relating to the things I like writing about (books, movies, the environment, Prosecco – I just have a thing for it, in moderation).

2) Genuine Interest Beats Niche

Although a niche is important to many bloggers and to sponsors, I sometimes feel as though an issue is worth writing about which might not fit my into usual subjects. I have felt happy to write about news issues in the past which do not relate to the environment, yet were really interesting to me.

My own niche is basically three things – books, climate change and general entertainment (theatre, TV, movies). From day one I wrote articles about reading and writing as well as global warming. Now I love to share my top TV watches and a few movie reviews as well.

3) Reading Other Blogs

I get a lot of inspiration from other blogs. I don’t copy them but I do believe that reading their content helps me to feel motivated and enables me to see how successful bloggers work their magic.

Some notable favourites are:

Confidently Kayleigh

Smelly Socks and Garden Peas

NotSoModernGirl

The Grumpy Olive

Smorgasbord

There are so many more but these I read almost daily.

4) Sometimes You Need A Break

I would say that blogging can take over your free time. There is no getting away from this, but if you are passionate enough about it, you will find ways to cope. One of the most useful tips I found somewhere was to have a few articles on evergreen content ready to go, just in case you get too busy or life takes over.

Evergreen content is that which is not only relevant on a particular date. Some topics work well at any time of year and can be dropped onto a blog any day. These are good to have as back up for those days when you lose motivation or need a chance to rest.

5) Not Everything Is Complex

Some bloggers spend hours and hours researching key words and trending topics but I find my most successful blog posts have been off-the-cuff ones which stemmed from fleeting thoughts or random conversations.

Don’t overthink it. When writing comes from the heart, it is always more readable. Not only that, but it makes your blog feel more natural and genuine. Forcing writing around certain trends is actually quite off-putting.

So, there we have it. If you are getting into blogging, there are plenty of articles to read about getting the best out of it. This is just my take on things but I hope that you enjoyed reading it.