Managing a Full time Job and Building a Blogging Business

Nearly all new bloggers start out part-time. Although it makes the day very full and sacrifices in leisure time have to be made to create the writing time needed, it can be done. You have to take it seriously after all it is a business, that will earn money, not a spare-time hobby. Here are my own observations, on the things that helped.

Making sure that your effort in writing the blog is focussed and ALL goes towards increasing traffic and earning revenue, is doubly important when your time is split between a JOB and your blog.

In 2021 we all dabble in so many things every day. Social Media, messaging, emailing, TV and the internet. To build a business part-time is going to be very tough, most people don’t make it.

A typical 24 hours consists of

  • 8 hours sleep 
  • 8 hours working a JOB
  • 8 hours free time

And in that 8 hours free period, you need to move your business forward. That’s where every hour counts. To compete with the Full-time guys, you are going to have to work on something that moves the needle, ie. Getting you more traffic, which should result in more income. That is your ONLY goal for the first period within your available  8 hours. As it says in my pre-war edition of Fieldhouse’s Students Book Keeping “ Procrastination is the thief of time “!

Although we can multi-task, it’s not going to be as effective as working on one thing only, the time taken to “Get in the Zone” is sometimes quite long, so not switching from one task to another all the time will avoid so much wasted time. Turn off your phone, avoid the temptation to message your friends and browse whatever social media you are on, leave opening the bills,  just concentrate on that blog post or research, that will really count for you.

Prioritize What to do First

Do your creative writing First, don’t answer your emails or watch the news then think about a post, do it first. Do not make ‘pretty’ changes to your blog thinking that will move the needle, it won’t, do the blog post first.

An understanding Partner or Family

Locking yourself away for a writing session is fine if there is only yourself to consider. If you have a partner – wife or husband, have a conversation and explain what you’re trying to do. Plan out how long you think it will take to get to the point where you can relax a little. In the beginning, many bloggers report better results if in the first three months they managed to make posts at an accelerated rate, to become ‘established’. This is where you will need to isolate to just get the writing done and possible misunderstandings can arise. If you have a boss at work that likes to contact you outside office hours, you might need to try to curb that too.

Basic Content Production Targets

100 posts of around 2000 words, in the first year. All or mostly written by you.

There is now a good number of bloggers sharing information online**. The figures here are taken from those blogs, videos, and reports plus from my own group of bloggers. Having these to aim at will give you a much better idea of the amount of work necessary to succeed.

If you plan on two sizeable posts a week, that will get you to the magic one hundred post level in a year.  So if you can squeeze out one extra a week, or even a fortnight, in the first three months, you will do better than average and get results faster than average. Whether Google actually has a sandbox for new blogs or not nobody knows, but it always seems to be about six to eight months before there are signs that your traffic is starting up. At that point, I imagine the sandbox is opened up and a layer of trust between your blog and Google exists. From there, things should look up and you can expect more rapid traffic growth.

The number of posts on the site in months one to three though is the most important, students following all sorts of plans, courses, and tuition report more or less similar experiences. If they produced more at the beginning, it was a shorter period before they received a traffic hike.

What to expect in earnings

Assuming you take the easiest route and put Ads on your site, which for most new bloggers is Google Adsense, takes no time at all to organize. Experienced bloggers, starting new projects now, in 2021 can predict roughly the time to the 10,000 and 30,000 page views per month levels of traffic, following the best methods. The 10k / 30k figures are quoted frequently as the point where you can be earning around 1000$ / month from Ads on the site. Obviously, there is a huge variation, dependent on the niche and audience. Where the visitors are from the USA and the niche is a high-earning one, much more can be earned per month.

Organise your Time

Have a list or some other form of organizational tool to use as your “To Do” list. In this way you’re not wondering what to write, you’re just sitting down and writing.

My own preferred way is my Planning-Site-Map, a site map of the future blog which has all the posts I need to write in a visual display, which also helps me see any possible internal linking possibilities.

Your Editing Software

I write my posts first on Word documents and keep all the first drafts of my posts in folders on my computer for that particular website. Useful if you later come up with additional material for a post and of course if you have a major disaster online wiping out your content – but of course you have a backup don’t you. 

I often find that in the week following writing a new post, I think of a couple more ideas, which I will then add. So for me anyway, I like to delay publishing new work for a few days, then check and re-edit if necessary.

I suggest you do the same – use Word, Google Docs, or 365 Office docs, If you edit online, in the WP editor, it can be slow if the line speed is variable, which is very annoying, but mainly because more Saves in WP can result in a bloated database with loads of redundant records. If you follow my method, it will cut this down to a minimum. Have a look in your own database from Cpanel – PHP my Admin and Wp_xxx ( your dBase name ) you will see lots of posts almost the same.

Where do you write?

I advise somewhere with as little distraction as possible, no TV, no viewing window, no music. Although you may get ideas anywhere, make notes for later. Fleshing them out into good content for your blog requires total concentration. If you were to compare output written in a cafe and output written in a quiet place with no distraction, you would see a huge difference in quality and the time taken to complete.

Writing and Research:

This will depend on your niche and whether it is something that you are already an expert on. If it’s familiar, you will be able to write it straight off. If not, you will have to research the topic, then write your article. Do you Write and Research together?  It depends on your preference and how easily you move between the two. Some people have difficulty getting into the flow of writing, so it would be better to do all the research first, then write in one session, from their notes. Others may prefer to go one sub-topic at a time researching as they go.

Some take this a stage further, citing that different parts of the brain are used to do the creative part of the writing and the editing stage, so they advise to write in one session, edit in another, that way the ideas are flowing out onto the page uninterrupted by editing, spelling, grammar, and format.

Once you have been writing a while, you’ll know which to use. Since I introduced the Write the Article First principle above, it has become routine, has made big changes to my output and how I feel about blogging, it is no longer a thing I dread each day. After the work is done, I feel great that I have another post on the site, in fact, the amount of time taken per post is now dramatically reduced. Some days I’m able to complete two posts!

Low Hanging Fruit

Write the easiest articles first. Seems obvious, but when starting a new blog, working part-time, you need content as fast as possible. If your goal is 100 posts in a year, then write the easiest 30 of those in the first months.  If possible the topics with the least competition. The site is then more established, with perhaps some ranking posts in google’s index and you can spend the rest of the year tackling more difficult topics, those where perhaps there is a low level of competition and more research may be needed

Post Images:

I like to get the writing done first and then think about what images to use. Images should illustrate a point better than text alone. They do keep readers on the site longer than posts without images but, they do have to be relevant. Also, they break up the article into sections, which might otherwise be long paragraphs of text. You don’t want the reader to get bogged down and skip to the end.

There is a school of thought that will leave the images out, as they do take a big chunk of time to find and organise, until they know – some time down the line, that the article topic is successful, using Google analytics to find the visitor levels for each post – then find and insert images to only the best posts. This is a bit extreme, I would advise adding at the very least a main post image and any images that are totally relevant to illustrate the point being discussed.

Consider well the loading time of your images. Page speed is a big deal today especially with mobiles, so do optimise the image ‘weight’ before uploading, or have a plug-in like “ ShortPixel” or “EWWW “WordPress plugins that automatically reduce image density on uploading.

Conclusion:

So there are a just few things that will help you make a big difference to the time it takes to have a high-traffic, successful blog, especially important when you only have a limited amount of time in each day to work on it.

References **

  • Greg Kononenko – Cafeinated Blogger
  • Income School
  • Authority Hacker podcasts
  • Content Distribution – Utube

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