Time Management Efficiency is Crucial for Running a Blog

Sometimes proof reading guest posts can take an enormous amount of time, time that could be spent creating more content or in my case testing products and doing more product reviews and video editing. If I had the budget I would definitely consider having professional editing online done by a service or company like Essayseek to free up my time more. As they say, time is money and using your time efficiently is critical to bringing in revenue and this is especially true if you are an entrepreneur and working for yourself where you cannot afford to have idle time or wasted time.

As a part time technology blogger I can tell you that my part time does not cover all the things that I need to do to keep my site running efficiently, DragonBlogger.com is unfortunately not a commercial property that brings in any stable revenue and is more of a platform to share product reviews, tech news, video game content and anything we fancy in the tech and entertainment space.  But as brands vie to get their products reviewed, often this means keeping products as compensation in most cases but not in all cases.  This often does not mean any cash compensation comes with showcasing brand products or doing reviews, so really our writers and staff are doing all the work on their spare time which when you think about it may be 2-6 hours of time to invest testing a product so that they could maybe keep a $50 headset or External Battery?  Nope, this certainly isn’t a way to make any sort of living, it is a labor of passion and love rather than one for profit.

So this is especially true for me where I have to not only produce my own content and video content, but as owner I have to manage the mailing list and most of the social media conversations as the page.  I also do all the marketing, online promotions, and negotiate and put together all the giveaways we host here.  This is in addition to handling responses to comments on my produced content and editing my authors articles as well as my guests articles to make sure their content is of sufficient quality and matches the content area of the site.

All of this with a full time job that has nothing to do with blogging or social media and I find myself strapped, but I leverage some very handy tools to increase my efficiency and make it appear I am more active than I am.  Often you may think I am posting something new or monitoring my account 18 hours a day but scheduling tricks and such give the illusion that I am more active than I am.

IFTTT

Yep, If This Then That, is one of the most efficient tools for curating your content and spreading it on your social media.  I post something to Instagram, and IFTTT reshares it to Pinterest, Facebook, Twitter and more.  The same with my blog posts and other types of content, this allows me to post on one social network and most of my social networks get the same information so I don’t have to cut/paste the same info and have so many tabs open at the same time to share info across social platforms.

Hootsuite

Absolutely crucial for my ability to see and respond to all my streams from one location.  With Hootsuite I can monitor my Twitter, Facebook Fanpage, YouTube and Tumblr all from the same site.  It has limited support for Instagram which you have to use your phone to validate and approve posts but it helps somewhat to draft posts to login to your phone and publish later on Instagram.  It is a good way to get images from your desktop to Instagram.  This is also an excellent tool where you can build a CSV file of posts and just upload and have weeks worth of scheduled posts available.

JustRetweet

Another tool to help bolster support from Twitter sharing, this tool is a good way to list some of my important posts or giveaways and give some incentive for others to spread the word and get the news out.  I will say that it is particularly geared toward those in the blogging, SEO and social media market, but it works fair enough for the technology sites as well, at least in my case.

Gremln

Yep I still use Gremln for specific scheduled blasts that I want to go out over social media accounts in a repeating fashion, like an alert or reminder that goes off every X days for a giveaway for example.  This works better than Hootsuite at sending repeated scheduled posts where you want the same message repeating on a specific interval.

Dlvr.it

This is the tool which sends Blog Feeds to social media and I use this for all my blogs, I even use this to find feeds from other sites and share them across my other non-dragonblogger related social media channels.

Bit.ly

Yep the best tool to shrink and shorten links so you can fit them into the 140 character limit of Twitter, but also to make links more reasonable and not as long.  I prefer Bit.ly because you simply can plus + at the end of the URL and get full tracking analytics for that link.

Copyscape

A tool to help scan to see if some of my guest authors are trying to send me duplicate content that doesn’t pass as original content.  I always scan all submitted content unless it is a press release which in that case it is a syndicated content piece and I don’t care if it is duplicated.  If there is a plugin that will automatically scan all posts “submitted for review” against copyscape or similar service this would save me time, so I need to look into this.

HemmingwayApp and Grammarly

Both of these are extremely useful tools for finding grammar errors in articles as well as determining the readability and writing score of the article.  So many pitched articles have very poorly written English and rather than having the time to read multiple 700+ word articles sent to my site for review per day often I can just copy/paste the text into one of these apps and instantly see if it is a quality article based on the number of problems this tool finds with it.

There can be no substitute for actually interacting with users live on social media, but I do also spend a lot of my time with automation because I simply don’t have 60 hours a week to devote to my blogs and have to do the most I can with about 20 hours per week.  What are some of your automation tips?