Birdbrain(ed) Book Blog

Not this kind of "feed."

Tip #6: Keep your feedreader under control.

When I was a newbie blogger I subscribed to basically every other book blog I could find– mainly so I could see what other people were reading/blogging about, and so I could make friends (see Tip #2)! You can’t make friends if you don’t read other blogs, so having a feedreader and making good use of it is important. My feedreader quickly grew out of control; I think by the time I’d been blogging for one year I was subscribed to over 300 blogs. I wasn’t able to keep up with that many blogs every day, especially when most of them updated at least once a day, sometimes more. I started marking whole chunks of blogs as “read” without actually reading them, and even when I re-organized my subscriptions into something I thought was more manageable¹ I still wasn’t reading very many posts. Continue reading »

Previous tips:
Tip #1: Don’t try to do everything all at once.
Tip #2: Don’t be afraid to make friends.
Tip #3: Interact with other bloggers (outside of your blog).

Tip #4: Scheduling is your friend.

This doesn’t work for everyone, as some people prefer just writing posts the day they mean to post them, but if you can schedule in advance even one post a week it’ll be a big benefit to you and your blog. Scheduling, for those who don’t know, is when you write a post before the date you mean for it to go live. So, for instance, if I wanted to schedule this post in advance, I’d write in on Friday and set the post date for today, Monday. To set the date as something different from the day you’re writing it, check in the “publish” options on whatever blog platform you use. WordPress, for instance, has a thing that says “Publish immediately Edit”; if you click “edit” you can change that to any date you want! Yay!

So, why should you schedule posts? Sometimes writing a blog post a day, or even every few days, can get really tiring. It’s hard to keep up momentum over a long period of time, and eventually you’ll want to take a vacation from blogging. The easiest way to take that vacation without making your blog go silent for a week (or whenever) is to schedule posts!

For instance: In December I scheduled about two week’s worth of posts in advance. I did this because I knew I’d be tired from packing for my move– too tired to write a blog post every day like I usually do. So what I did instead was: I dedicated about two days a week to writing as many blog posts as I could! I wrote reviews, discussion posts, and prepped my meme posts so I could fill in the details later. Once I did that, I didn’t have to write anything for days at a time (except for filling in the memes). That meant I could then spend my time relaxing, talking on Twitter, and reading books.

Do you like scheduling posts in advance? Or do you prefer to write posts on the day they go live?

Originally this was going to be one huge post, but then I thought “why not break it up?” And so I did! So this is the first post in a series of posts I’m calling “Some tips for newbie bloggers.”

Photo by Walt Stoneburner

Tip #1: Don’t try to do everything all at once.

One of the most important things about blogging is, I think, doing things in moderation. Sometimes you can get sucked into doing fifty different things at once, get overwhelmed, and then those fifty things you were doing end up mediocre instead of amazing. What I’d recommend doing is focusing first on blogging: write posts, keep up with comments, visit other bloggers and leave comments on their blogs, and work on making great content for your blog posts. And read books, of course! Then, when you’ve got that down, head over to Twitter, Ning, Facebook, etc. Meet people, start projects (but not too many at once), and join in on memes, challenges, and so on.

Social media in particular is fun, but if you don’t pay attention it can suck up all your time and energy– time and energy that could be going into reading more books or writing more blog posts. I’m speaking from experience, here! It’s way too easy to get overwhelmed with all the different things bloggers have access to nowadays, and if you don’t watch yourself all your time could get sucked into refreshing your Tumblr dashboard “just one more time,” which is a shame.

Eventually, though, you’ll work out how much time is necessary to spend on each thing to get the maximum benefits. Then you can multi-task to your heart’s content! Just be sure to also pay attention to what’s happening in the real world. Sometimes you just can’t do a thing online when you’ve got a super important thing happening offline– or not without help, at least! But that’s another tip for a different day.

Have you ever spread yourself too thin? How do you keep from getting ensnared in time-wasting activities? How do you balance real life with blogging life?