Get Started: Pro Blogging Time Management

Most bloggers get stuck when they start on the time needed to get started. You can waste a few dozen hours just trying to find a new idea. It doesn't need to be this way. I hope to help people get started over the next few weeks.

1. Where do you find the time?

There are tricks you learn along the way. I’ll help you get started. All you need to know is a few of the tricks. The most important one is to be organized. You need to have a schedule, and you need to be able to do two things at once.


I watch my PPP dashboard and let Firefox refresh it every 5 seconds so I can see when new jobs come up. Then, I just continue with my work and wait for a job to come up. You also need to know when the jobs come ‘up.’ PPP’s blogs come online about 10AM Eastern, most days. Smorty comes online at 2 – 3AM Eastern. This is the best time to watch the dashboards for opportunities.

You also need to know how to get indexed. For example, I have google site maps, but I don’t have them on my blogs. This is difficult. Instead I go to my Google account and use my RSS feed to make the site map. This forces Google to index my site. I’ll do this once every few weeks. It updates my blog even if the robots haven’t visited often.

Getting inbound links is important. I’ve written several articles on this topic. The most important thing you need to remember is that Google only gives ‘full’ points to 1 link per website. That means that you can create all the article submissions at DIGG you want, but only 1 gets the link. It is much better to have 100 different sites where you upload links.

There are several places to do this: squidoo, bebo, gather, myspace, blogsvines, etc. All the social networking sites are good. You don’t want to get into the directories that sell links. Google will ban your blog forever if you appear to be buying links from directories.
This is one way to save time. Instead of putting dozens of articles on blogsvines, upload a couple a month, and then go somewhere else.

Another way to get links is to write articles on the topic and upload them to the free content sites.

Writing Original Content and Free Articles

I do use some free content, but for the most part I write my own. Even if I use free content, the first 100 words are mind. The important thing to remember is that it is not important what IS on the page – it is what the Search Engines see – and they rarely read more than 100 words on a blog post.

I don’t always have more than 100 words to say on a topic. That is where free content comes in handy. I find that readers would rather stay and read a longer article, even if part is not your writing, than read a bunch of short blog posts that offer very little information.

I also include news. I will Google a topic and then click NEWS. I’ll report on news topics. This makes it easy.

Ideas and Content

The hardest part of maintaining a professional blog is continually coming up with new ideas. Sometimes I will go surfing for ideas. I’ll look in news, reports, book excerpts, etc. I will even go to Yahoo Answers looking for ideas for new topics to discuss.